I have been trying to remove the blurred stalk from this picture but have tried many things without any avail.

Could anyone help me learn.

Thanks

The clone tool would be useful for this. Choose a fuzzy brush, CTRL-click on the part of the image you want to use (somewhere close to the stalk is good) then paint carefully over the stalk.

I had a go at this but rushed it and made a mess but this should give you an idea of what could be achievable with care.

Nice job Eris.
You can also use the resynthsize script. I didn't put the wires back in though.

Thank you both for the replies.
Eris's result was better than the resynthesizer, though I tried duplicating using clone tool and could not do a better job, I guess it requires quite some skill.

However, I was thinking if there was a method which could use the fact that the stalk is blurred and the background is somewhat visible through. Could we use this information in reconstructing the image somehow?

Hi Symfar, Yes it does take some practice. In this case I duplicated the layer twice, made a jagged feathered selection in the top selection, cut out the selection and then moved the layer underneath so that I had a nice colour match. I then merged the top layers, select all and used the clone stamp at 50 % to hide where the selections merged. Even then there is often a marked difference in hue (especially in the sky). I overcome this by using the noise spread filter to spread the join (using the smudge tool often leaves flat areas which do not look nice). In this photo I repeated this procedure five times in different areas of the photo. For the power lines, I simply cloned them out. Then on transparent layers (new) I used the paths tool to draw the path which I then stroked with a brush at 50 % to join over the cloned sky.
All told , about 2 hours work to get a believable result. I have left the file at the same size for you to compare with your original. BTW it is usually easier to create new content if it fits in rather than recover what is partially hidden.

Excellent result Wbool.

Nice photo, used wireworm to remove the wires

Remember also that to get very close color matches for cut or copied selections you can use the Colors>Curves tool.

@alc59, I have wireworm downloaded and installed in my plug-in directory but I was reading the text in with the download and it doesn't look like it works with 64 bit. I am running Fedora-17 and it only names windows and Mac. Do you know if this will work in Fedora?

I clicked the permissions to allow it to be executable but it doesn't show up in my Gimp so maybe that is why because my Gimp is 64 and also my Linux.