It has begun. My humble (by most standards, grand by Marigny standards) 20′ x 30′ backyard is a veritable New York style Critical Mass of elephant ears and some sort of low-climbing, vast rooted vine. When thinking about it, the phrase ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor’ comes to mind. Then of course, in a good webternets fashion, people comment with animated gifs of ‘shopped stills from LOTR featuring phrases like ‘You have my hoe’ and ‘And my shears’ or ‘And my rake’ in white using the Impact font with a black outline.
But I digress.
Behold, the scourge:
Now, this isn’t original growth – my contractors laid down what appeared to be a righteous smackdown not but two months ago, but alas, looks can be deceiving. This is, after all, the venerable Alocasia – it is not to be trifled with. Just look at the root to leaf/stalk ratio:
Clearly, it is not a plant that merely dicks around.
Or, in more of a Tarantino sense, it is Mr. Marsellus Wallace and mankind in general is not Mrs. Wallace.
After consulting with my Mom, a long-time gardener / green thumb and more recent Master Gardener, she suggested instead of launching a full-out chemical warfare campaign or brute forcing it with my own two hands and faithful shovel, that instead I should take a different approach: cover and smother. Saturday found me at Lowe’s buying four sheets of 10′ x 25′ visqueen, laying it out across my backyard, and anchoring it down.
Makes sense to me – plants need 3 things to live / thrive: water, CO2, and light. By depriving them of the latter two (really? trying to keep the ground dry in New Orleans in the height of storm season? puh-lease.) for a long enough span of time (I’m shooting for a month), it should kill them good.
I figure that regardless of the outcome, I win. Here are my two most realistic outcomes:
1) the visqueen kills the flora until it dies from it.
2) the visqueen beats the ever-living shit out of said flora.
If scenario 1 is the outcome, yippy-freakin’ skippy for me. If scenario 2 is the outcome, then it should be severely weakened, and a smaller dose of chemicals and perhaps more cover and smother is in order.
Either way, it is on its way to dead, and it will be in late as opposed to early August, with hopefully milder temperatures. Also, I won’t have invested a whole lot of my conscious time – daemon vs. user processes yo.
Anyways, here’s how we looked as of Saturday:
Next update in a month. Let the Alocasian Holocaust begin.
Haha! Seee! Now that you’re a homeowner you’re doing “gardening” posts like me and Belen :-P
Seriously, after the smother phase, try tilling the soil and getting as many of the roots up as possible. I tried covering once and they simply crawled around the tarp and poked out between the blanket and the fence. Also, if you’re planning to lay down sod/grass after the mass genocide, that should finish off any survivors.
Yeah, I believe that was a recommended follow-up by the Mom.
I check for ‘escapees’ every day, just making sure I’m as thorough as possible.
Will be interesting to see the outcome in a month.
Damn that is a big freakin weed! Kill that beeatch
Alternatively, with clear plastic you can cook everything, including weed seeds, a process called “solarizing”. Hope everything goes well for you with Gustav.