Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Green thumb drama in suburbia

I've got a sore left thumb at the moment. I took a slice off the top of it when I was cutting a tomato for breakfast two days ago. At least it got me off from doing the dishes for a couple of days.

However it didn't help me yesterday when my wife and I commenced digging out about 18 square metres of 'lawn' at the front of our house. It's a small area and is all the lawn we've got aside from the street verge. But it hasn't been doing very well since we planted it with rolls of commercially grown turf about six years ago. The area had since declined in a mixture of common couch grass, kikuyu and bald patches. It was not at all inviting. It had to be replaced with something better.

Digging out the old stuff had to be methodical. My job was to loosen the now-feral herbage as deep as I could with a mattock. My wife then teased out the roots - every little bit because if the slightest piece of couch or kikuyu remains it will rise again like a trifid. So for much of the day I chipped away a row at a time and then sat down to let my wife get on with it.

About mid-afternoon we noticed a helicopter slowly tracking something west along Canning Highway, which runs past the end of our street. We twigged what it was straight away. The chopper was following the funeral cortege for Heath Ledger. The family had decided on a cremation at Fremantle Cemetery rather than an paparazzi-pestered interment at Karrakatta. The Fremantle Cemetery is adjacent to the southwest corner of our suburb, Palmyra. We watched the helicopter hover over the cemetery for a while - then it moved on, and we went back to work.

The grass we are thinking about as a replacement is a relatively new soft-buffalo licensed variety called 'Sir Walter.' It's a bit of a daggy trade name, but we've heard plenty of good reports about the product. It costs $11 a square metre, so we will be up for $198, plus fifty bucks delivery. I don't mind the delivery charge because the turf farm is way north of Perth.

We've still got a bit of old grass to dig out. We'll finish that today, then I'll modify the watering system.

While I've been typing this note this morning, our now six kilo cat Mad Max has been on the other chair in the office. He's been trying to get comfortable and changes his position now and then. Here's the first picture, and here's the second.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

My original still photographs are stored in a cache at my Panoramio website. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to the relevant essay. All the images there can be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

Advertisement