Saturday, November 19, 2011

Death to Whipper Snippers!

Long Grass
Thanks Rickety for the photo.

Today, what should have been a half hour job turned into a epic battle between me and my new whipper snipper.

As you know, I do like to get out in the garden, but over the last couple of years, bits and pieces of my garden have gotten away from me. They are my 'weed gardens'.
I don't like that it's happened but I have a quarter acre block, too much to do, and not enough time to do it. Plus for the last couple of years I've been preoccupied.

But in our front yard (much of which is lovely with a big apple tree and berries galore), there are many of these weed gardens. One particularly bad patch is a bit near the road that has gone to grass.
And as it does, the grass grew. Quite tall actually.

It got to the point where I thought I'd better chop it down before it became a fire hazard/snake haven. So I got Anthony to go and buy a whipper snipper.
We went for electric this time, as our last petrol powered one met a grisly end. And it was noisy, and stinky and oily. I was happy with electric.

It's quite a nice little thing actually, but obviously not up to the massive task of thigh-high grass removal. I had barely managed 1 minute of snipping before it sucked the line into itself and stubbornly refused to work any more.

And there began our struggle. I patiently unscrewed the head, poked around for the line (which had somehow managed to tuck itself under other bits of line), rewound it and started again.

If you can imagine this process repeated 58 times, this was my afternoon.

Because I am stubborn (and extraordinarily patient, I think), I got the little weed garden chopped. It took a whole reel of line, but I did it. With a lovely accompaniment of words that I shall not repeat here.

It's sulking in the shed now. There are still more weed gardens that demand our attention, but they will have to wait. There's only so much a girl can take.

4 comments:

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  2. You are a saint! That sounds like a positively excruciating process. I assume Round-Up is out of the question?

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  3. It sounds like a 'character building' exercise to me! We decided a few years ago that we had enough 'character' so nowadays gardening for us means watering the potplants and mopping the tiles on the balcony. Best move we ever made. Sue E.

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  4. Oh Sue, but I love my garden! It's just the yukky weeding bits I don't love!
    And Lyn, Round-up is probably an option, but we do like to keep it organic...so many food plants.
    And hi Winda, welcome!

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