optimistic
As of last night, between the two of us we managed to trim back a bunch of the growth and also clear a 1 meter space on the east side of the fence. That clearance on the vacant lot only goes as far as the tree beside the travel trailer because I ran out of steam last night. I'll try to get it the remaining 10-15 meters of fence-line cleared soon.
These bushes are actually moderately easy to pull up or uproot with a Hula-Ho cutter when they're green like this. When they dry up they get more troublesome because the thistles stiffen and get prickly.
Repeated from Saturday's post, here's what things looked like shortly after we got home and before we started cutting it back. That fence is our property line. There's a vacant lot to the east.
The next issue we face is what we are going to do with all of these pulled-up weeds. We filled up the trash bin with the some of what we pulled up (the bin being mostly empty on account of we started empty when we left two weeks ago and didn't have much new trash). What we've pulled since then will more than fill it many times over, and doesn't include clearing the rest of the east fence and the even more overgrown west fence. Still, we get one free trailer-load of garbage to dump per year, so maybe this is what we'll use it for, assuming we can get enough junk cleared. Alternatively, we'll just have to pile it up and fill the bin each Sunday night with whatever fits. The good news is that we think that in our desert (unlike Oregon), we should be able to clear the growth faster than it can regrow.