A lazy day

It's Saturday morning and I'm feeling a bit knackered. After a couple of days concreting in posts and building the new sleeper deck at La Studio, the body is weary. The Responsible Adult has 3 days off work and I will join in the non work fun for a while. So after cooking her bacon and eggy bread for breakfast, it's down to a bit of kindle time and then we're off to the junk shops. Weeds may grow for another day - they are on my hit list and will not escape.

 

More on Non Weeding

A small load of rough mulch

My name's Prince and I use herbicide. It has been 4 days since I last sprayed. 
Some people around here consider that herbicide use is very, very bad. I do offer to stop using if they will come over and weed for me, but so far nobody has taken me up on that. Herbicides help me transform an area from weeds to garden with a view that eventually I won't be reliant on them. To help reduce my spraying I use mulch. Most afternoons, I prune around the house paddock and fill up the little trailer with cuttings. 

Rough mulch added to rainforest area

 These get dumped around rainforest trees. In a year or two, I will have a canopy to shade the ground and the vast bulk of weeds will stop coming through. The mulch will have rotted to improve the soil. The area will maintain itself with a minimal amount of hand weeding. 

Native Violets - great for keeping out weeds

Great if you're growing rainforest, but even small areas can be grown out to be weed free. The aim is to not garden on the basis of perpetual herbicide use, but to use herbicides sparingly as an aid to getting your paddock in order - then stop using.

If only it didn't taste so good with coke.

Non Weeding

6 years ago - similar to the area I'm working now. See what it looks like today at the end of this blog.

I'm still weeding. 'Bravo, my Prince -what commitment!' you say. Well, while there is no doubt that Paddock workers will never, ever finish weeding forever, there are ways to greatly reduce the numbers of weeds. Weeding should only happen in areas where you want something else to grow. Otherwise, mow, pave or build a chook house in that area.

Really Rough Mulch - weeds

The great gardener Peter Cundall was once asked if grass clippings were OK to mulch plants. His reply was that any mulch is better than no mulch. 

Rough Mulch - mainly Bougainvillea

Mulch protects against weed regrowth while breaking down and feeding the soil around the plants you want to grow.  

Weeding Tools

Here's my handy weeding tools. I call them Wills and Harry. Wills is a sturdy Hoe, good for chipping out shallow rooted weeds. Harry is some sort of home made blunt instrument, good for whacking things hard.

Weeding Again

Just to prove that I do actually weed down in the paddock, I thought I might do a before and after shot. When I first cleaned up the edge of the dam a couple of years ago, there was nothing but weeds, so the whole lot came out. Then the volunteer sedge grasses started turning up. But, they are easily smothered and killed by weeds. So a couple of times a year I go down and pull out the weeds. The grasses are now expanding nicely.

Weeding Tools

Well there you go. Weren't expecting an Ipod, were you. It's late winter and the Prince has been weeding roughly 4 hours a day for the last 20 days. About 10 more days and it'll be done. Believe it or not, hand weeding can become rather boring and it is easy to drift off to some more interesting task. Having someone tell me a story while in the paddock, I can become absorbed and just keep working.

A lot of content is free. I subscribe to a number of podcasts through the Itunes store. Itunes automatically gets these for me when I start it up - all at no cost. Our library also lends audio books which you can listen to on your trusty Ipod. 

I bought the leather case that clips onto my belt at a market in Bowen. 

For boring jobs like weeding, you can't go past this most useful tool.