One of the downsides to taking over a large garden when the previous owner has just let things grow wild are the entrenched "pest" plants. Sure, in the wild, they are fine... but in the smaller confines of a suburban blog, they are a real irritant.

Now, in one of the front corners of the block, there was a huge net of passionfruit vines which didn't bear fruit, but were of the type with really interesting but alien looking flowers. However, they had gone quite out of hand and were choking quite a lot of the other plants with their vines and creepers... and I really mean that they were like a net dragging everything down!

So, one of our first clearing jobs was to take this all out... and it was hard work, but we did get most of it out... sadly, it is still a bit entrenched in the root networks... so, we are still seeing shoots of it coming up occasionally. I had tried Round-up herbicide on it... but it didn't really seem to work... so, I'm back to doing the tried and true physical work of tracing the roots and taking them out carefully and surely.

This particular strand, I was able trace back a few metres... taking care to always trace back with bare hands (to be able to feel the roots)... and gently loosening it out so that it doesn't snap and break.... resulting in a lost trace. I had done a similar thing with blackberry back in the Netherlands, so this is very similar... without out the thorns! It is quite time-consuming... but there is something satisfying about unearthing a local network of roots and getting them out!

Meanwhile, my father-in-law had dropped by to help with a few of the stumps in the future veggie garden area. One of them was host to new shoots of this really annoying plant. I had already destumped one at the front and found that the entire stalk was filled with thin and razer sharp spines/needles. It would just prick you straight through regular gardening gloves... So, he had some heavy duty ones to handle it.

However, when I was preparing to get them ready for the green waste transport... well, I didn't want to keep picking them up piece by piece. Sure, the gloves would stop the pricking your hands... but they would still get your through your sleeves, pants, and then house themselves in your shirts and jumpers to prick you later!

So, I ended up tying them up with a broken tie-down strap... and carrying the entire lot at arms length away from me into a waiting wheelbarrow... and offloading into the ute in a similar manner.

...fast foward to this week. A freezing cold week... and I'm back at the future veggie patch, levelling off and removing the earth so that we can make a start on the retaining walls. I do have to find places to put the earth, but given the size of our block, that isn't really a problem... it is more of a question of where it would be best used.

And I figured that the newly planted tulip and daffodil bulbs could use an extra couple of centimetres of soil above them, as I had dug the initial trenches a little shallower than I should have.

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