It's one of the great gardening ironies that come spring, in order to get things growing, you have to kill so much.
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By any means possible usually, and with excessive malice preferably, once the huffing and puffing starts, which is almost immediately.
It's been like that in our garden this week with a winter's worth of weeds put to the spade. Hand to hand combat and nearly as big a hack as what happened at Optus.
Like many Optus customers, there have been times where I've felt over grown, overwhelmed and occasionally over it.
But if you learn anything with gardening, it's that it's never over, and that only consistent, persistent effort produces results.
It certainly got me off the couch to start with - the motivational chat as subtle as a Russian troop mobilisation and just as popular with the conscript. But to be fair, I am lazy and the garden had gotten away.
In terms of due diligence, we'd been as effective as a NSW casino keeping out the rogue elements. Pretty much every undesirable type of weed had flourished under our lack of watch. Now was the time for retribution.
A big distraction, of course, from the things that really matter this time of year, which are the footy finals.
And straight off the bat I felt as effective as the Swannies in last weekend's AFL decider.
Onion weed was my Geelong - hardened, well-organised and relentless. Standing tall above the lawn with its waxy leaves making a mockery of every attempt to establish monocultural dominance.
Impervious to nearly every poison known to Bunnings. A fact confirmed as I joined the spring stampede last Saturday to agent orange everything. I haven't seen such panic buying since filling up at Costco this week in the countdown to the fuel excise cut-off.
A frenzy, fuelled by the glyphosate scent of endeavour - to exterminate. The smell of victory.
Anything to take down those onion weed bulbs that shelter so deep, bunkered away from all but the most strenuous mattock blow. You're worst gardening nightmare, apart from actually gardening.
The more you try to kill them, the more you enable them. And once disrupted, they shatter like a cluster bomb, seeding the area you're trying to clear one hundred fold, like a mildly scented hydra. From a species/genus point of view, hats off. But not for too long lest you suffer sunstroke.
Another formidable opponent - clumping bamboo. It's choice of survival weapon - the sucker. Not you dummy! But it sure feels like it as you hack away psychotically at the never-ending root base. Mental note to self - must work out way to kill that rhizome before it kills me. Probably better to spray myself.
There's only so much dirt you can excavate before you no longer have a garden. More a trench, or a grave, and you're in it. Physically and psychologically.
But that's gardening for you. Talk about digging a hole. But as all green thumbs know, from annihilation eventually comes regeneration. Thumbs and fingers crossed.
