GANEIDA'S KNOT.

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Quaker by conviction, mother by default, Celticst through love, Christ follower because I once was lost but now am found...

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

In which my soul hungers after mulch.

In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn

I know this is true & am mourning the lack of the first because something is amiss when the pumpkin vine is not producing pumpkins. I have bees. The Basil is out of control & determined to produce flowers before dying. I am just as determined it should live & not flower so am constantly removing the buds from the swarms of bees hovering jealously over the scented heads. If I have bees & I have flowers I should have pumpkins but I do not. The thought of wading about doing the job myself does not appeal.

I have no pumkins & no mulch. Mulch is necessary on a garden.
England was the first place I saw hay rolled up in a cylinder. It has a
certain other worldly charm I found appealing. Ye olde worlde charm & all that. What I get when I order my mulch is the usual ugly oblongs that do nothing for my soul.
The only continent that is drier than ours is Antarctica. [It rarely even snows there. The wind just moves the existing snow around]. Therefore mulch is absolutely necessary on the garden. In summer it conserves water & keeps the soil cool. In winter it keeps the soil a little bit warmer. It helps keep the weeds at bay & my plants disease free. So I went to order my mulch to find the financial crisis has finally hit my little corner of the world. My $5.50 a bale bales are now $7.75! Or I could get 10 bales for $70~. I got 10 bales & I whinged about it. Daylight robbery, that's what it is!

It particularly stings because with all the rain the slasher is doing the rounds slashing the nearby paddocks. In years gone by my thrifty mulch hungry soul has followed the slasher round like a scavenger raking up the mown paddocks & dumping lovely piles of mulch the way mulch is meant to be, piled around the drip line till it almost touches the bottom leaves. Now I am forced to eek it out because the slasher has brought pestilence to the land in the form of a virulent pest called *sticky weed* & I am paying for my mulch. As its name suggests sticky weed sticks to everything. It is a rampaging vine & I loathe it. It leaves raised welts on anyone forced to handle it & it keeps invading my land. It is down the hill & through the ferns & even poison is not enough to rid me of it! What was it Henry II said? "Will no~one rid me of this meddlesome priest?' That's how I feel. That someone would murder it for me! A church and alter is not necessary & I don't care what method is used.

So sometime today I have 10 bales of mulch arriving to be spread along the southern side of the house in an effort to neaten it up & keep the weeds at bay. We don't want to do too much because all our plumbing is along there & our council keeps promising us sewerage ~ which will mean everything has to be dug up. I'm not holding my breath but I don't want to plant a perfectly good garden only to see it murdered by council workers who are not known for taking care of other people's property.

10 comments:

Molytail said...

I googled "sticky weed" and all these pot related sites came up ROFL *grin*

Whether I try to plant anything this summer depends on..well, whether I get much of a summer. Dunno yet!

Ganeida said...

lol. I can assure you that's NOT what *sticky weed* is. :) It's a sticky groundcover that is particularly difficult to eradicate & seeds at the drop of a hat. I'm allergic to it so having it growing all over the place is not my idea of fun.

Happy Elf Mom (Christine) said...

Never heard of stickyweed either. Do you mean "poison ivy?"

Ganeida said...

Nope! Not poison ivy & I don't know it's botanical name so I can't google for a picture.

kimba said...

Sis says its called vetch but there are lots of vetches and we cant say which vetch it is.

Sandra said...

We call the rolled bales round bales and the rectangles square bales. Since I live on a farm I am accustomed to these things. Sticky weed sounds horrible.

A. said...

Sex and death, how true. Perhaps I can repeat that line at my city's annual flower show and shock all the blue-haired ladies.

The HoJo's said...

Sounds like what we called bind weed in the UK, nasty stuff
xc

Anonymous said...

We have a grass mulcher that goes behind our lawn mower. Marvelous mulch and it helps tremendously with weeds.

Mrs. Darling said...

That sounds exactly like a weed we have here. When stuff like that grows in to fields here the farmers burn the fields. Fire is natures restorer but I dont suppose you could burn your lawn!