Implements of Destruction

Hooray! PLAGGA day today, so we took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward Jim and Kelly’s. Well, maybe not shovels and rakes, but definitely implements of destruction. For the uninitiated PLAGGA stands for Pappinbarra Ladies And Gentlemen’s Gardening Auxiliary, the garden club we share with our friends, taking turns once a month to visit each other’s farms, hitting those big projects with lots of bodies and enthusiasm. There are lots of kids, good food and cold beer at the end of the day.

Today’s project was removing woody weeds from the edges of their creek, hence the implements of destruction – chainsaws, loppers, hand saws and herbicide. I have never been a big fan of herbicide but our group has a high proportion of people who work in weed control and bush regeneration, people who are passionate about both the bush and living sustainably – people I trust, and they see it as an essential tool in their work. I don’t like it but I can live with it in order to be effective in the face of the mammoth task of controlling weeds in our beautiful country.


Today we were removing Wild Tobacco, a member of the Solanaceae family like tomatoes and potatoes, up to five metres tall and with a leaf that looks a bit like the leaf on an eggplant. Each cut stump got a little dribble of herbicide on the cambium layer and then the plants were stacked into big piles for burning once they have dried out. We got a huge amount done but we didn’t manage to clear it all. Then there’s the lantana, the privet, the blackberry.

It’s so easy to get caught in the mundane and the slog of life so PLAGGA is important for our souls. We laugh. We eat together. We help each other grow our dreams. My favourite part of the day was driving back from the creek with a trailer full of kids and adults, everyone hanging on as we bumped across the paddock, another beautiful day in the valley, heading up for some lunch.


One sad thing that happened today was my camera broke. It is just a little, simple Canon Ixus point-and-shoot – not great quality but it fits in my pocket, always at hand for capturing little scenes for posting later. I think it’s been sat on, perhaps it was me.

“I’m grateful that we went to PLAGGA and I held those two chooks at once.”
(Confused? Look)