Thursday, July 11, 2019

I URGE YOU TO RECONSIDER

I learned how to kill Soviet hardware. Kill it all was the mantra we breathed. "Oh go and kill some of the green things in the garden," she said and it almost sounds like a plan. Of course, to me, they're all green. I will take a mower to the garden without remorse but it doesn't feel quite right. She wanted some of them to live. She, for some reason, still believes I know which ones.

The Green thumb is not an inheritable trait. Two of my great grandfathers were great nursery men who supplied the grand estates in the Hudson Valley and NYC with plants and green things. They owned plant farms. Not one iota of that rubbed off on me. I inherited the military stuff from the other side. Point me at a gardening problem and I'll ask for a flamethrower.

It is taking her awhile to figure that out. We'll have plenty of daylight when we get home tonight. I'm OK with killing plants but I'm gonna need some terminal guidance on which ones need to be destroyed. Sheesh, fall in love with a biologist.

15 comments:

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

I used to have a John Deere utility tractor, named Dorothy. She had a six foot mower, and an end loader. I did a lot of mowing for family and friends, and a fair amount of gardening work, when someone needed something dug up, with a loader.

Dorothy and I were better at killing things, than growing them, alas. But she sure could yank shrubs out of the ground with her bucket, I have to give her that!

HMS Defiant said...

I too used to have a Dorothy. I'm not sure how you knew that she was a pure instrument of evil and destruction but I learned that to my constant sorrow.

That said, have you watched the Tin Man?

capt fast said...

now, a flamethrower sounds exciting. not as great as heavy equipment. my personal choice for destroying unwanted green things is a somewhat largeish hammer. quite satisfying to beat the little green bastards back into the soil. after a while, one only need show them the hammer and they wilt. tried flamethrower once, fire dept. frowned at it.

HMS Defiant said...

I have to confess, I rented a roto-tiller from two different Home Depots to destroy the weeds in question. One for my brother's backyard which was my wedding present to them and once for my backyard in Encinitas where walking on wire grass barefoot was very painful and it had to go if a 2 year old was going to be loosed into that environment. Of course it was just a few months later and, sitting in my home office I watched one of the neighbor's dogs jump over my 6 foot fence and right behind it was a coyote. I had to reconsider letting her out in the back yard at that point. Never without supervision which I found just rediculous. I was adamant that we would not be hoverers hanging over their kids everywhere they went. Turns out the coyote lived in the tall plants in my other neighbor's yard and he promptly eradicated them after the coyote snapped up a little dog across the street at its owners feet in broad daylight. So like you, I believe in heavy equipment and flamethrowers too.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

No cable. But I have heard it is interesting. I had a lot of fun with her. I had built a work platform that fit into the bucket, and that was so useful when putting on/taking off storms and screens. I would hop in my pickup, and go get a teenage niece, and put her in the driver's seat of Dorothy. Girls are rather good at driving end loaders. Madree Anne would lift me and the screen/storm up to the window, and i would swap them out, then she would lower me so I could lean what I took off against the house, I would grab the next thing, hop back on the platform, and Dre would take me to the next window. madree, ( or her sister Shelly ), Dorothy, and I could change 13 windows, in less than 2 hours. Then we would put the sorms/screen in the shed, put Dorothy back in her spot in the garage, I would give my niece a 20, and we would head for McDonalds. Better than spending a whole day going up and down ladders!

Really, given how useful they are, everyone should have a Dorothy!

HMS Defiant said...

You have to go to Life of Brian for to understand my comment. "You lucky lucky bastard." I would have given anything for that memory.

John in Philly said...

Perhaps nuclear weed control. (solar)

I'm thinking of some sort of either a parabolic solar reflector, or a Fresnel lens to focus a beam of intensified sunlight on the weeds.

Someone with much more skills than I have could install an automatic focusing and tracking system.

With sufficient AI I guess you could vaporize only weeds, and leave the good plants alone.

Just be sure to put some sort of guard over the thermal exhaust port of your weed vaporizer, lest the plants mount an attack.

HMS Defiant said...

And all those little fuck#rs would! That was wonderful. :)

Oh? Did I fail the test of hiding the vernacular? Oh well. I can live with that too. It's like a weed.

capt fast said...

I believe some large pesticide mfgr should find a insect that could be genetically engineered to eat and digest only one specific plant-dandelions. if they had that ability, they could also splice in a timer to allow only ten or so generations so customers would be back for more. bugs could be weaponized to target human or livestock foodstuff plants with slightly longer timers spliced in. Hmm. pentagon is probably already funding the research. never mmind...

HMS Defiant said...

The guy that wrote Dune brought us this scenario in another one of his books. I read it, hated it but when I read the words of John Ringo at the end of one of zombie books I remembered them well. A convention of biologists, "All of us know how to create a very specific plague virus but we NEVER TALK ABOUT THAT!!!!!!!!!!!"

HMS Defiant said...

I actually like dandelions. They're green, therefor progressive, they fight global warming I think by making CO2 back into O2 and they look good in an otherwise misfortunate looking yard. Not on my street you understand but on all the other streets every house is surrrounded by a yard that could instantly be transported to any PGA golf course for use as a putting green. We hates them.

John in Philly said...

We grudgingly cut the lawn and do little else to it.
I have perfected the blank stare when told, "Your lawn has a lot of brown spots and clover."
If I did noting whatsoever that would be a better use of my time than the time spent mowing.
One of my dreams is that a PGA certified greens maintainer would be driving by our house, glance over at our lawn, and begin crying hysterically.


Brig said...

One of the things I don't care for living in town, flame throwers are frowned on. Guess it could be worse, if I lived on the wrong side of the river, in Portlandia...

HMS Defiant said...

Now I'm curious since x-in-laws live there, which is the wrong side of the river? I still recall the Captain asking me if I wanted to stop and refuel in Astoria and I told him Hell no. One of the nice things about the divorce was that I never needed to go there again. Except that one time and we drove out the next morning heading for Big Sur.

HMS Defiant said...

Just for the hell of it, the Hackers and Slackers played 3 PGA golf courses in Palm Springs in August, drank an ocean of liquer and I utterly collapsed at the 15th hole on the last day and had to be dragged back to the clubhouse by my boss in his golf cart. But yeah, around here, the yards look like that, except on my street. If I could be brought to care I'd shudder about what I'm doing to property values but I don't care.