I HATE GORSE

I was weeding a section of the garden yesterday and it was actually quite enjoyable. 
The sun was pleasantly warm on my back, I had just had a lovely lunch (spicy pork meatballs in noodles) with a glass of a robust Cabernet Franc/Merlot from Marlborough. 
I had my little MP3 player blasting out one my favourites in my earphones (Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Thomas Tallis), and just as I grabbed a particularly evasive weed's root to pull it out, I found that I had also grabbed a dead branch of a gorse bush.
Now gorse is Scottish, and when in bloom it is quite pretty, giving an almost coconut smell to the air, but I hate the bloody stuff.  It is difficult to kill, and needs at least three glyphosate applications to make sure the job's done right.
I had an infestation of gorse when we bought this house, mostly on the high banks behind the house (officially land belonging to the NZ Army, under DOC control, but the buggers just leave it alone, so all sorts of nasties grow up there) and I gave the gorse bushes a good soaking in glyphosate with an added surfactant to aid wetting of the thorny leaves.  It worked, and after a couple of years of repeated applications, the gorse was dead.
The branch I'd grabbed had fallen off one of the dead bushes up on the bank, and had become covered by some other weeds.

Some of the thorns went in under my thumbnail, and one went so far in, I swear I felt it grate on bone.

No more weeding while I soak my thumb with acriflavine.  I don't want to end up like Jim Henson (of Muppet fame) who died from a septicaemia caused by a thorn in his hand.  Especially as we had recently fertilized a lot of the garden with sheep and horse manure.

So I, the poor wounded soldier, had to sit back on a lounger, with a medicinal glass (or two) of the robust red, and finish the day reading and snoozing under the glorious NZ sun.



Such is life.