Give me my Mad Max moment please

What I'm obsessing over this week

I am STILL working on this lichen problem- how to kill lichen in concrete, in an eco friendly way. I have had some great chats with Jade of Cahoots who has helped enormously. As a lovely friend pointed out, steam is probably our best bet- you can use steam wands to kill plants and there is no downside except for the fossil fuels in production of the burner and whatever fuel we have.

I have looked into Satusteam, which is basically an enormous thing shaped a bit like a vacuum cleaner with a long hose, on a trailer- you run the end over the things you want steamed, and it all comes out and kills whatever it touches. But it is enormous. It would be really cool to be able to take a wee thing to a property and do their paths, if we are to shell out about $40k to buy something which basically just kills weeds- without turning up looking like we are straight off the set of Mad Max- Fury Road.

Yes please and thank you actually that would be great.

So we want something smaller. We want something that literally looks like a vacuum cleaner, like this- it’s tiny!

From here. It’s also probably going to arrive broken and never do the job we need it to, but a gal can dream.

It also turns out that you have to study for four years to just begin to legally be allowed to build something which boils water with any sort of pressure. So right now we are looking into a water blaster which shoots hot water, but alter it so it fires it out at a slow velocity (hot water blasters are called Spit Water and used by wineries to clean out barrels, for example). Hummmmm watch this space.

If we get this right, we will be able to do substantial weed control without accessing a power point or using fossil fuels- the current feeling is that we use an ebike- so it would be an eco friendly form of weed control which can be used on a wide scale- amazing.

What staff learnt about this week Some photos from my trip to Queenstown

Full disclosure: I was on holiday this week. My staff had no extra chats, because they were all alone without me and that’s enough pressure! So here are some photos.

I wasn’t allowed to do too much plant nerd-ing, but I did teach my travel mates the classic rhyme-

Sedges have edges,
Rushes are round,
And grasses, like asses… have holes.

Because of this they learned that Carexes (the most common genus of native ‘grass’) are actually sedges. They did not know what Carexes were anyway. But any learning is good learning.

Milford Sound: because the plants are growing on a rock face, there is a tiny amount of dirt for them to cling to. They regularly get too heavy and cause a huge slip, then start over. So the darker green stripes are forest which haven’t slipped for a long time; the left hand bright green stripe would have slipped 10-20 years ago or so (absolute guesstimate), and the two more bare rock faces have slipped more recently (within the last 5-10 years, again a guesstimate)

My best guess is this is carex buchanii, but my friend Andrew will probably correct me when I ask- my friend is 6 foot 2 and some of these were taller than him.

An enormous great honking pittosporum, in Wellington these leaves are about a third of the size. It was so odd to see such enormity.

Some garden tasks for this week

Please relax! We are having some warmer weather, typically you don’t plant your summer veges until you would comfortably sit your bare bum on the ground- when it is warm!

The classic time to plant out your summer veg is Labour Weekend, and even after that you have another few months to put a lot of it in. Stagger the plantings and do whatever you feel is right.

Have a great week everyone, what beautiful weather we have been having.