vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.
ivywall.jpg
The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

ivyanddirt.jpg
Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 07:32 pm | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: • • • •

2 Responses to “vegetable plutonium”

  1. scorched earth gardening : [ Lost in the Landscape ] on 07 Mar 2008 at 8:36 am #

    […] veg­etable plutonium […]

  2. Amy on 18 Jun 2008 at 4:09 pm #

    I feel for you. Eng­lish Ivy is amaz­ing in it’s abil­ity to apoxy itself to the ground and grow for miles! And why is it that there is never an insect around that wants to eat it, and help you out?

    I hope you even­tu­ally got it all out!

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