was helping a friend clean up his property a couple weeks ago. ended up with a nasty case of what appeared to be poison ivy on my forearms and to a lesser extent my legs, despite never having ever had poison anything ever before in my life. Hadn't seen anything looking like poison ivy, but I did clear out a huge mess of various weeds from a hedgerow. (really, about half the plants were hedge and half were weed. It was a bit of a project, and we ended up running all the debris through my wood chipper just to get it compact enough to cart off. House was unoccupied for a while before he bought it, and I'm guessing the previous owners likely didn't keep up with weeding real well anyway.)
Fast forward to today. Did a minor amount of follow up weeding over the weekend, as it's still not 100% where it needs to be... lots of crap growing around the base of the hedges but at least not growing up, through, and taller than them. Was more alert this time, looking for poison ivy type plants. Still didn't see any. Washed arms w/ soap and cold water as soon as I came inside. Today have a few itchy spots on right forearm.
I've looked up pictures of poison oak and poison sumac online (where I grew up those pretty much didn't exist) and I didn't see anything that looked like either of those. However there is some kind of viney thing growing in among the shrubs that has that same reddish, oily look that poison ivy sometimes gets, but the leaves on that look more than anything like a regular oak tree leaf (nothing like the pics of "poison oak" that I look up) and I don't see mention of any other itch-causing plants on the east coast (although I do know at least one person who gets a reaction from mile-a-minute vine.)
I guess the next step is to just ASSume that something in there is nasty shit and just go scorched earth... rubber gloves, long sleeve shirt, long pants, weed completely in one (very hot and sweaty) shot and toss outer layer afterwards... sheesh. Or I'll make my friend do that.