Noxious Weeds

Day 7 Sunday 15th August 2010

Nick came up to visit today and brought some handy things like a ladder and some paint brushes. My parents’ house in Auckland is surrounded on all sides by the world’s worst plant….the privet bush. This thing is a noxious weed but the worst thing about it is that it’s virtually indestructible. You could call in a full on airstrike with high explosive and napalm and this goddam plant will just laugh it off. Imagine my horror then when I discovered not one but two privet bushes along the side of the house. The larger of the two has just about consumed the clothes drying pole thingy.  Only one thing for it….full extraction. I started on the smaller one. I slashed it. I sawed it. I chopped it. And then I started digging and digging and digging. 1 hour and 30 litres of sweat later I had a hole you could bury a sumo wrestler in and that thing is still stuck to the ground.  Time for lunch. Off we go to the local town  to the south. It’s called Nose (pronounced “no – say”) but I like to call it nosetown. There’s a supermarket there called NOSEBOX. Cool!  Our gravel will be ready tomorrow so back we went to the house and laid out the plastic on the ground. And I finally won the battle of the lesser privet.

Poor mans weed mat

full extraction