I’ve refined how I kill weeds around the house. I recently got a small jug of 25x RoundUp and I was wearing blue nitrile gloves and using a paint brush to paint leaves with the RoundUp. I was in the middle of killing some nasty “Ornamental Grass” which is actually a weed and it struck me that I have these gloves on and all I have to do is just stick my finger in the RoundUp solution and then I could reach out and touch the plants I want to die.

That sped things up immensely. I wandered through my property and anything that I evaluated “This has to die” got a loving RoundUp soaked stroke of death on its leaves. There is a nasty weed, amongst many other species on my property. It grows very tall and has slender long leaves and there’s a central cluster that always looks like it’s on the verge of blossoming but never does. This week chokes out all the other plants and so I selected it to die. There is also a nasty vine-weed running throughout the back yard in my garden and it’s wrapped itself up around all the trees and it’s again, choking out all the other plants. It has smallish maple-tree-shaped bronze leaves and it has as well, been selected for death. Finally, there is our enemy, cypress spurge. I have found clumps of it all over the property and I have caressed it to death where I was sure I wouldn’t touch any other plants.

When my mosey of death is finished I cap the RoundUp and peel off the nitrile gloves. Then I go inside and wash my hands vigorously in hot soapy water just to make sure that there isn’t any RoundUp on my hands that somehow made it through the nitrile.

In a few days to a month we should see systemic shutdown of growth and subsequent death in all the selected-to-die plants that are trying to grow on my property. It kind of made me feel like a grim reaper. Walking along, just tousling the tops of noxious plants with my hands and softly whispering “time to die” as I moved along.

It certainly beats stooping, trying to pull the damn things up and not getting the whole plant or watching it just pop up somewhere else because a runner or rhizome decided it would try life as a pioneer. This way the entire plant, it’s leaves, stalk, and root systems all die.