Some relief - Bamboo Armageddon !

Spent time gardening. The garden now looks like this huge pile of stress and mess but at least it is done. Very reliant on MrH throwing himself into the more heavy work of using a wrecking bar to move a huge clump of bamboo as my groundbreaking spade was only so good (operator lacked strength required).

The most frustrating part of bamboo has now been uprooted and moved and more of the awful rhizomes chased. It’s been a nightmare situation but we are certainly over the worst!

If you look very carefully you can see the start of my no dig bed in the very distance. I hope my wooden edging (oak) arrive tomorrow as promised and that I can lift them into position on my own. I’ve had to speak to the neighbours today as they are having building work and the builders have been blocking our single carriage way road for the best part of two weeks. I’ll need it clear tomorrow.

There are some bits of bamboo (thankfully only a little) going into a neighbours garden which we think we can poison and then pull up from our side.

The neighbour seemed ok with this plan and then (whilst we were on the subject) gave us some kind of lethal looking metal spike/ heavy duty blade that the previous owners of our house had apparently used to try and remove some of the bamboo they planted! There’s also some metal pipes they left to stop the bamboo spreading (how odd!!) The neighbour asked if we’d dispose of them for her. It sounds like they trained some of the bamboo along the pipes or something like that - it sounded crazy. We’ve lived here 14 years and some of this information is only coming to light now!

In other news a very grey day with occasional snow / light hail.

In other, other news my dad is struggling to get a COVID jab. He’s in his late mid 70s and resident in France but got turned away from his appoint as he has no card vitale.