Berrying before digging holes

I have posted on my vegetation monitoring blog about my efforts to control the blackberries around the property.  It is more a matter of control rather than eradicate since we do enjoy eating the fruit so will probably keep one or two bushes once we get on top of the ones we don't want.

 Note the thorns on these bushes. If people in the mediaeval times had picked blackberries there would have been no need for people to get leeched to let the bad blood - or come to that the good blood - out!

Last year we got very few fruit since the bushes were influenced by the preceding very dry year.  At a rough calculation this year human foragers (us and my friend Rob) have taken about 28 litres of fruit.  Here is an expert picker at work.

Being up by the dam one gets a chance to view the wildlife.  Rob viewed a duck which had been sheltering under a bush he was picking: I think it was only the leech-like efforts of the brambles that prevented his systolic pressure hitting four digits!  We didn't see any large wildlife but there were many dragonflies around

and quite a few native flowers of which this twining glycine was particularly attractive.

I referred above the images to human foragers.  While we were working on this pick the birds were also active.  I noticed Crimson Rosellas (the usual suspects in fruit pecking), Noisy Friarbirds and Yellow-faced Honeyeaters all indulging in a gobble.  No wonder the seeds get spread around.

The reason for digging holes was not to do with interment (aka burying) but the transfer of some Photinia robusta bushes from point A (where they were not wanted) to point B (where they would contribute to a hedge - but not a hedge fund: I do have some principles).

This was one of those exercises where step B had to be completed before step A.  Other than getting a bit sweaty from the digging and using a crowbar on recalcitrant shale this was quite straightforward.  However persuading the plant that it needed to move was not simple.

Having dug a trench around the plant and severed quite a few lateral roots I decided that horsepower was the go and hooked the tree - via a strong rope to the trusty Subaru.  My driving skills turned out to be better than my knot-tying skills since the clove hitch came undone (which I, and Baden Powell thought impossible).  So it was back to plan A, - different to Point A referred to above- involving leverage, brute force and plentiful ignorance.

In the next image note how the crowbar displayed the hitherto unknown elastic properties of steel bars.  Contrast the positions of the end of the crowbar in this image and the previous one, before I stood on it.

The Photinia sneered at these efforts also, so it was back to the Jesse Ventura model of gardening.  In making that analogy I am referring more to the time when he was known as "The Body" than his later career as Governor!

By adding a felling axe to my list of tools (previously limited to spade, mattock, crowbar, towbar, saw, loppers and shears) I finally managed to achieve victory and, in the WWF approved fashion, gave the shrub an aeroplane spin before dunking it in Point A.

There are about 4 more of these plants to transfer.  However: I am going to wait see how this one deals with the trauma of losing to a mere human before tackling another!