The wife and I are 'downsizing'
After 22 years at our current address, the wife and I are taking on the significant challenge of 'downsizing'. We are currently on half an acre; being 2,012 square metres, or—for my US readers—2,406 square yards. Obviously the house only sits on a small part of the 2,012 square metres. The rest of the land is a little bit of garden, some paving here and there, and then all the rest is owned by the weeds.
We have summer weeds, winter weeds, autumn weeds, and spring weeds. Keeping on top of the weeds is a full time job and about 10 years ago—maybe longer—I totally gave up on any attempt to control them. I tried all the good advice but, weeds being weeds, they always end up winning.
So we are moving from 2,012 square metres down to 650 square metres. That should mean a lot less weeds.
The other problem with the current block of land is that it has about 4" of dirt and then you hit coffee rock. Really hard coffee rock. So to plant anything you basically need a half stick of dynamite to break the ground up and someone with a shot-firers license to do the blast; or you hire a mini-rock breaker for the day and break the rock up with that. Hard work. Needless to say, we have not planted very much in the yard.
The weeds seem to do okay but. Even where it is paved!
And getting weeds out of paving is actually (much) harder than pulling them out of the ground. They manage to get their roots under the paving so you only ever manage to snap the top off and leave the roots behind. Sure, you can slice them with a shovel; which then marks the paving. Or you can poison. But with two cats (three really, if you count whingy McWhingy) poisoning is also a tricky option.
There is a bit more to this story, apart from the fact that my wife has now been formally diagnosed with MND (see post on this here), and I will likely cover this in future posts on the subject of downsizing.