Team Chook and the Kikuyu Project

Team Chook: focussed and ready for action

I alluded, in an earlier post, to my insane and largely futile attempt to get on top of the Kikuyu takeover of my yard.

Kikuyu grass is an impressive adversary. It snakes along under and above ground, pushing out pointy stabby runners and grabby roots. Do not turn your back on it, seriously! It crawls over and under things at the speed of - well, Kikuyu grass - inexorable and unstoppable in its quest for world domination. Forget lizard overlords - Kikuyu is worse than any crazy megalomaniac reptile.

Nasty pointy stabby runner looking for some ground now that it's
managed to burrow beneath the rocks of the retaining wall

Rocks are no obstacle to this stuff - it just powers on underneath

 

If it can't go down, it'll go up and over...

...and down the other side.

This stuff is monstrous, I tell you!

Wikipedia says: The tropical grass species Pennisetum clandestinum is known by several common names, most often kikuyu grass, as it is native to the highland regions of East Africa that is home to the Kikuyu people. Because of its rapid growth and aggressive nature, it is categorised as a noxious weed in some regions. (Hear hear! Here here! say I)

Lawn Solutions Australia says: Due to its vigorous growth patterns, Kikuyu is a very invasive grass and doesn't tend to want to stay put in its designated area.  (And that, my friends, is what's known as an understatement!)

I say: DAMN YOU, Kikuyu, you will not win!!!! Well, a slightly modified version of that - you will not win ALL the garden. Some bits are MINE!

Right about now you should be hearing the theme music from Mission: Impossible  in your head. It's what I hear whenever I look at the expanse of Kikuyu-infested gravel.

To launch this major operation, I enlisted two experienced excavators:

             

Agent Sybil...

...and Agent Tibbs

As these girls have been largely responsible for creating the environment in which Kikuyu can thrive, I thought it a nice touch of irony to enlist their help with the clean-up. Not that they were unwilling. Any chance to get beaks and claws into the dirt.

The area of the gravel patch and retaining wall, circa 2013 - pre chook

This is how we work: I identify a runner or a deeply-rooted flatleaf weed and start pulling or digging it out.  Team Chook joins me in a flash. The girls start pecking, scratching and kicking. Repeat. Over and over and over.

When my back starts to ache or my weedbag is chockers, I call it a day. I return to the site a couple of days later to find that Team Chook has excavated a whole new lot of runners for me. And so it goes on.

I feel a bit like an archeologist. The team has excavated enough Kikuyu to expose what I think may be the foot of the retaining wall. What appeared to be about 12cm high is easily 30cm high.

How was this deplorable annexation allowed to occur in the first place? The first thing you need to know is that I have a long, sorry history of garden incompetence, interspersed with sudden bursts of frenetic activity. The second is this: the chooks, scratching about in the ex-vegetable bed (I ceded the territory to the chooks after a long and fruitless (also vegetableless!) battle), kicked lots of lovely soil out onto the gravel. Weeds and Kikuyu leapt onto it. Layer upon layer kept being added. Eventually the Kikuyu (and minimal soil) provided a fab false "ground" for weeds to set roots into. (TAKE NOTE: This is how world domination begins - with a small corner of the gravel patch.) Compounding factors included a human (me) too flattened by Ross River Virus or other nasty ailments to do anything more than sit and watch helplessly during the last couple of major growth seasons. Sigh.

Thankfully, the pandemic lockdown has given me the time and energy to Fight Back. I will not be vanquished by grass! One day this small patch of garden will be mine again. With the judicious application of carefully shaped chook wire I may even grow lettuces or something.

In the meantime I'm refusing to think about the evil Kikuyu Empire's expansionist behaviour at my borders. That's a battle for another season.

Memorial...and random ramblings

Today is a very weird day.

It's 142 days since The Fire hit Mallacoota.

Today, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and almost 5 months after the fire changed life for everybody in this town, the Grocon cleanup crew have been demolishing what's left of  the homes of my next door neighbour and her next door neighbour, and I've been hit by a huge and unexpected wave of grief. Wow.

On the roof of my other next door neighbour's house stands a tradie with what looks and sounds like a giant hairdryer, drying off the grouting (or whatever it's called) on the roof tiles.

In the middle of the two, armed with one of those weeding implements, I battle Kikuyu grass, ably assisted by my two chooks, Sybil and Tibbs. Overhead - quite low, really, two Wedge-tailed Eagles circle. It's surreal.

I don't know quite what to make of it.

In the months since the fire I've been keeping an eye on my neighbour's place. It'd be a pretty low act for somebody to rob someone who's already lost everything - but it happens, so I've been the archetypal stickybeaking neighbour, dashing outside to check out any unexpected noise coming from "the ruins". Usually it's just a bemused kangaroo hopping over the downed roofing iron, but I also startled the insurance assessor, early on...

I learned, early on, that rubble doesn't sit still. In the strong winds that we get here, the roofing iron has flapped and danced, shifting its position on the land. I used to worry that it would become airborne, but it didn't.

I learned that weeds don't mind creeping underneath the rubble, inching their way across the landscape , and I pulled out great swathes of Thunbergia as it crept under the shifting sheets of iron.

I learned that the ruined landscape, the longer it sits there, starts to look normal. I am no longer horrified by it. When my sweet, thoughtful neighbour says she feels so bad that I have to look out at it every day, I don't know how to react, because my first inclination is to shrug and say "nah, it's ok" - but that sounds so callous. It's not ok, but it's become the New Normal and I've stopped being horrified by it.

When Grocon first arrived to start the job, there was a sense of relief.  And yet, this morning when they put up their temporary fencing and the demolition machine moved in, its long articulated arm lifting and shifting screeching piles of roofing iron, I was overcome by completely unexpected grief; grief for my neighbours and the homes they've lost, because until today, those "homes" were still there in some form. Now they, and everything they contained, will be cleared - erased from the landscape. It's so awfully sad.

That started me thinking then about how those of us who haven't lost anything, actually HAVE - and on top of the "survivor guilt" is the guilt I feel when I dare to acknowledge the fire's effects on me - the loss, however temporary, of a fabulous neighbour; the feelings of security and safety I used to have; the loss of the town I know and love - while I sit in my still-standing home.

Saying "well I lost something too, you know" sounds whiny and  pathetic in the face of other people's overwhelming losses, so you don't say it - and you try not to even think it - and that comes at a cost too, I suppose. I am one of the lucky ones, after all. And as I watch the excavator lift armful after armful of twisted furniture - there goes a bedframe, and a sofa-bed - and listen to the men in Hazmat suits raking over broken glass and crockery, that is reinforced.

Trying to look anywhere but next door, I think again about the Wedgies. The other day, when Grocon was occupied cleaning another ruined property just up the street, I noticed the pair circling very close to the road and quite low over the clean-up area. It was quite a buzz. Imagine my surprise, then, to see a pair circling quite low over the current clean-up area this morning.

Perhaps the rubble has been a temporary home to all sorts of little critters - rabbits, antechinus, bush-rats - and the Wedgies have learned to follow the excavators, whose giant pincered arms resemble the curved beaks of carrion-eaters, pecking away at the wreckage.  Those clever Wedgies must've learned that the giant orange machines mean a potential easy meal for them as the little critters flee the giant scything beaks.

Encroaching rain chased me indoors after about an hour of Kikuyu-pulling teamwork with the chooks, and afterwards, this:

As I said - it's a weird day.