What more could a girl ask for?

The ideal start to wedded life...

The day after we got married, we (ie: I...) decided that we really needed to get up onto our plot to tidy up a little and carry out some weed maintenance. Due to going away for our honeymoon imminently and the poor wet weather we've been having recently, the plot would be left to it's own devices for longer than I cared for.

I was also very keen to try out our new petrol mower, with the biggest diameter cut I could get my hands on that wasn't a ride-on mower. To be honest, I'd been hanging my nose over ride-on mowers and little tractors for some months - but then I thought about my waistline and my doctors advice regarding exercise, and thought the extra exercise of walking behind a mower would be good for me. Never mind the £700-odd saving we would make on our new wee beastie.

It was good to see everything green, but the nettles had grown at an amazing pace. Gail was let loose with the Ryobi Expand-It with the hedge -trimmer attachment first to trim the Hawthorn hedge, while I got the McCulloch mower off the trailer and fired it up for the first time. The mower has a 3-in-1 feature which means it can be used with a large grass box, as a mulching mower or with the side-eject chute which I chose to use.
I was very conscious of losing all of the goodness contained in the green vegetable matter that I was mowing so I think the side-eject chute will be its normal mode of operation. With it on its highest setting, I was soon making short work of the grass and weeds. Gail converted the Ryobi to Brush-Cutter mode and started to attack the bigger stands of nettles while I moved onto the grass lane outside to mow our "patch" and mulch up the cuttings that Gail's hedge trimming activities had left behind. Everything started to look pretty tidy quite quickly. I met up with plot neighbours Charlie and Judy while chugging up and down the green lane, and they were far more interested in whether we had consummated the marriage yet rather than how well the day had gone...

A more serious task to be undertaken was another assault on the Japanese Knotweed that we had inherited with the plot. It has already cost us quite a few pounds in weedkillers, mainly Glyphosate-based types and the effect of these was slowly making itself apparent. However, we have heard on the grapevine that some people are taking an active interest in the Knotweed - surprisingly no one seemed bothered about it until we took the plot over... - so we are feeling the pressure to get rid of this alien monster before it has any chance of spreading. Not that we aren't working on the problem already, of course! As usual, I just wish folks would come and talk to us about what we are already doing and have done, rather than spreading gossip and panic about this Triffid-like invader of our shores.
It was time to start playing Dr. Death - or Dr. Kildare - take your pick... I'd bought some Ammonium Sulphate systemic weedkiller that targets the roots in a similar way to the Glyphosate-based products. We've used this stuff before and it is very effective, but you need to get it inside the plant to be really effective. I mixed up a very strong solution of the weedkiller, suitably protected with surgical gloves, and then loaded up the syringe.

As the stems of Knotweed are hollow, the theory is that you inject a strong solution of a systemic weedkiller directly into one of these stem chambers. The problem I quickly found was that the pressure build-up inside the chamber is quite considerable! To overcome this, I first pushed the needle all the way through the stem and then pulled it back halfway; the stream of air-bubbles followed by weedkiller emerging from the far side of the stem told me when the chamber was full - or there abouts. The larger diameter stems would quickly take all 20ml that the syringe would hold without any sign of being full. The downside to my Dr. Death machinations was the sheer number of stems. Within an hour I was longing for one of the mass-inoculation kits that vets and farmers use on livestock, or better still one of the high-tech versions as demonstrated on Star Trek...

While injecting away like it was going out of fashion, I came across a number of stems clearly affected by our previous treatments; the walls of the stems were very thin and soft, and the new leaf growth was much smaller, very distorted and sickly-looking. I hope that when we return from our short break there will be much greater evidence of this.

After two hours of injecting, I began to realise I should have brought a can of spray-paint with me to mark the stems treated. Its amazing how the stems all look alike. Once you've seen one...