Mike Victor

I had tree-of-heaven spreading along my fence line here in the Central Valley. Cutting it just made it send up suckers everywhere, way worse than before. What finally worked was girdling the big trunks in late summer and letting them die standing, then cutting the dead wood the following year. Still pulling seedlings, but the big ones never came back.

That line about holding onto plastic because it "might come in handy" is exactly where I get stuck too. What finally worked for me on the junk shelf was pulling everything out, making three piles (keep, give away, dump run), and giving the "might come in handy" pile a one-year deadline — if I hadn't used it, it went to the dump. I hauled a full truckload of cracked pots and brittle containers to the county transfer station last spring and it was honestly a relief. Now I keep one bin for usable pots, and once it's full, anything extra goes straight out the door. The garden centre take-back is a great find — I wish ours did that.

We cleared about an acre of overgrown brush behind our place in Tulare County last year, and sorting as we went was the single biggest money saver. Clean green loads cost us noticeably less at the county dump than mixed loads, so we kept a separate pile for anything with trash in it. One thing I'd add: cut brush into short lengths before loading the trailer. It packs in way tighter and we ended up making half the trips we planned for.