Wacky Weeds

"Wait...you know I'm not eating these branches, right?"

Now that the goats have moved on, my yard is beautiful, but full of skeletons of bushes and tiny saplings - or big, big weeds, depending on your point of view. I just want them gone. It's mostly privet, and based on an article I read about privet, it's an invasive plant. You can't just cut off the goat-stripped stalks at ground level; they have to be pulled up. Otherwise, I'll just have a yard full of privet again very soon.

These trunks/stems are everywhere.

So I started investigating, and as it turns out, there are some serious issues among those who dwell in the world of weed removal, my friends. Let's just say this: if you ever get invited to a weed removal industry event, do not go.

I went online, and I found a tool called a Weed Wrench on a gardening forum. This thing apparently works miracles. It basically grabs the sapling/big weed by the neck and pries it right up out of the ground, using the Pyramid-tested power of leverage.



Awesome invention!

Problem solved! Let's get a Weed Wedge! Well, as it turns out, you can't get one of those babies for love nor money. The owner of the company has "opted out" of being in business because, as he puts it, "I am quitting in disgust and sadness that the criminal entity I am paying taxes to is demonstrably not a legitimate government. This is the one means I have of legally striking back, by eliminating my income." 

Okaaaaaaaaaaay.

I'm not linking to his site because I don't want it leaving a breadcrumb trail back to me, but feel free to check out the weedwrench.com site to learn more.  He invites us all to join him, so if you're going off the grid, you may want to chat him up.

But I'll give him credit - he's a humanitarian. He has a page that links to people and organizations in various states that will rent or lend their Weed Wrench to others. (Privet, like the government, apparently, is too intrusive to let run rampant, politics notwithstanding.) Here in Georgia, every last one of them is a non-profit that only offers to lend to other non-profits. I emailed anyway - offering to pay a nice rental fee. No response. Does the fact that I have no equity in my house qualify me as a non-profit? I guess not.

Moving on. It appears that the main competitor (or should I say successor?) to the Weed Wrench is a Canadian company called Pullerbear. Like polar bear - get it? Sounds warm and fuzzy! And look at all the different models!

Naturally, I had to read some reviews before deciding. After all, I didn't want to have to try to return this thing to Canada if I didn't like it, and it wasn't cheap. The very first page I looked at, in a section dedicated to the tool on davesgarden.com, started out with a not-so-hot review, followed by increasingly irate and irrational tirades from someone claiming to be the owner of the Pullerbear company. The posts strike out at extortion, terrorism, schilling, and more mischief, all aimed at the company by its customers. The poster even went so far as to divulge the negative reviewer's location.

What was he thinking?! That someone would empathize with his cause and take up their swords to fight his battle? "Okay, let's all go over to South Carolina and give this guy a piece of our mind, on behalf of the good people making the Pullerbear! Bring your torches and pitchforks!" Another review was tagged by davesgarden as having been company-placed.

This is a case study in how NOT to sell things, folks. Thanks, anyway, I'll pass. I don't want to risk getting angry email from some tool-wielding guy with bad judgment. Plus, I'm close enough to South Carolina that he could make one trip and tell me and the reviewer off in person. That's also why I didn't link to the review, but you can type pullerbear in the search box on davesgarden.com and it should come up. (Man, I hope the magic of Google doesn't bring these people to my blog.)

After all the drama involved in tool selection, I decided that maybe someone else who already has tools should do this job, so I went shopping on craigslist. I found an ad headed "Lot Cleanup," that mentioned debris removal, brush clearing, downed tree removal...all the things I was looking for in a guy. I thought it would be a match made in heaven. I called, he came over. As we stood looking into the yard, my craigslist conquest dumped me. "I don't think I'm the guy for you. This would be difficult and take a long time." I got the old, "It's not you, it's your yard" brush off. We parted friends, and as he walked away, he turned back and said that if I was willing to let him just cut the privet down to ground level, he was willing to do it. But I'm not ready to settle just yet. I'm holding out for the fairy tale.

The next time I am asked ask why I decided to rent goats, I will say that goats never complain that the job they are asked to do is difficult or time-consuming, nor do they stop work as a form of political protest, or crawl the web looking for opportunities to flame me.

Anyone know of an animal that just loves to uproot privet?