Sunday 28 May 2006

Bastard water restrictions are helping my weeds

One thing that I have done a lot of over the last 2 weeks is walk back and forth across the back lawn. Partly that's because the bike has been banished to the garage, so I have to trek out each morning shortly after sunup to collect it for the ride to work, and partly because a huge stack of shit has been boxed or crated up and stored in the garage. And guess who had to lug all that stuff out of the house and into the garage?

My many treks have allowed me to inspect the lawn - when I'm not trying to avoid braining myself on the Hills Hoist - and I have found that parts of it are about 80% broadleaf weeds. The rest is the kind of detritus that you have after a dog has lived in the yard for a few years. ie, large patches of very dead grass and garden beds that look like the aftermath of a B-52 strike. Bits of it look very much like a dump site for industrial waste.

Weed killing seemed like the easiest place to start, since it just involves spraying the little suckers with some chemical death. That's easier said than done in our current "drought". Water restrictions mean that you can't hose the lawn before 4pm, the penalty being something to do with being strung up by your thumbs and lashed with garden hoses. It gets dark not long after that, so by the time I work out that I can water the lawn without a $220 fine, the sun has gone down and I have to do it via braille or a guide dog.

I had half a jug of Weed'n'feed leftover from the old place, so I decided to give the lawn a squirt last Sunday. It's pretty easy stuff to use - you connect a hose to it, crank up the hose and then put your finger over a nozzle. That causes a drop in pressure and nasty chemicals are sucked up out of the bottle and sprayed all over the lawn. Nifty. Simple. Easy to use in daylight.

So I gave the whole lawn a spray, and waited a week for the weeds to drop dead so that I could mow the little suckers into oblivion. However, an inspection this weekend showed that rather than curling up and dying as required, the little bastards had vigorously expanded to cover 85% of the surface area of the backyard. Clearly, there was something wrong with my weeding technique.

I decided to chance my arm and do a bit of watering in daylight, and I quickly discovered that I had my finger nowhere near the correct nozzle for initiating chemical warfare. I had simply watered the weeds in the dark instead of exterminating them. Now I know when things are going right - you get that lovely chemical smell of glysophate wafting up into your nostrils when the finger is in the right place. On top of that, the chemical bottle gets lighter as it gets emptier. If I had been half awake last week, I would have noticed that the 4 litre bottle that I put back on the shelf weighed about the same as when I took it down. On the other hand, I could have been practicing homeopathic weed killing, where you dilute the chemicals about a million times and they become more effective.

Ha ha. If diluted weed killer won't kill weeds, how will diluted medicine cure people?

Anyway, I blame the stupid water company for their stupid water restrictions. Evaporation at the moment is not much of an issue - the mercury topped out at 19 degrees today, and it was a brave man that wore shorts. Restrictions like this might have made sense 2 months ago during summer, but now they are just a bloody nuisance.

Typical bloody beauracrats - they make a regulation, and then are too scared to change it when common sense says it should be changed. As Cold Chisel used to sing, "You go on and on and on and you don't make no sense".

To cap it off, I borrowed a pitchfork to clean up the industrial waste dump in the vain hope of planting a few herbs and things. I forked my way through about 3 metres of garden bed, and then one of the bloody tines snapped off the fork! It's not like I was jumping up and down on the handle or anything - it just busted off on a rock about the size of a tennis ball. I then noticed that the tines were made of very crappy mild steel - almost iron rather than steel. More fucking useless pissweak Chinese crap from Bunnings. Gees that store is beginning to shit me. The whole thing is stuffed from top to bottom with goods that have a shorter half life than a beer in a blackfellas camp. Now I have to go back there this weekend to buy a replacement. The bloody thing will probably only cost $9, but the biggest problem I have is in disposing of the busted one. The council gives us weeny little bins these days, and the flipping thing won't fit.

I might have to take it down to the harbour for a bit of "spear fishing" and leave it embedded in the mud.

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