Snow gone; spraying honeysuckles

I thought the snow would never leave and then over last weekend it dramatically disappeared! This gave us the opportunity we needed for spraying honeysuckle resprouts on the N-facing slope.

The photo above shows what the snow looked like on Friday, March 12. The area we needed to spray is on the left side of the picture. This had been an area with a substantial patch of large honeysuckles, which a contractor cleared about 5 years ago. We had burned it once after it was cleared, but then had to let it remain idle. Naturally, there was a honeysuckle seed bank and lots of new plants came up. We planned on dealing with these plants, but the deep winter snows had made it impossible to find the plants, which were relatively small.

This past winter was another deep snow year. We've been waiting over for two years to spray.

When we arrived to work on Monday, March 15, the snow had disappeared. What a surprise, as it had not been all that warm. But the relatively humidity was really low, and on Sunday the temperature was up in the 60s F. Whatever we had planned to do on Monday was dropped and we turned to spraying honeysuckles.

We used the basal bark technique with Garlon 4 dissolved in Bark Oil LT, to which we added an oil-soluble dye. In addition to honeysuckles, we sprayed any other woodies, as well as brambles (black raspberry, mainly). It took about 26 people-hours to spray the approximately 6 acres.

The brambles were a little maddening, since they kept tripping us up.
Why did the snow leave so fast? I think the low relative humidity had a lot to do with it. A dry polar air mass moved in from Canada, bringing the low RH.