Rhododendrons And Me Part 3

Day six of our rhodo bashing - or day four of the weed-killing part of it. And, after nearly being destroyed by two days of actual work after eight months of lounging around at college, this week was considerably kinder on my shoulders. The spray tank hadn't gotten any lighter, but a weekend spent mostly lying around and eating (recovery, in sporting parlance) had allowed some muscles to grow back on my shoulders.

There was still the getting covered in blue dye part of the activity, which is getting to be a bit of a pain in the arse. The tank is full of a mix of round up weedkiller, 'formula b', which is to help the roundup stick to the rhododendron's waxy leaves, water and a blue dye. The dye is so that you can tell what you've hit and what you haven't which, in the middle of a a very dense bit of woodland, comes in very handy indeed. However, despite wearing a white pesticides boiler suit and rubber gloves, manages to get all over you. At the end of the day, we were joking that, by the end of next week's session, we'll be looking like a pair of smurfs.

Getting back to the 'dense woodland' part of proceedings, the area we are zapping was once plantation woodland. I'm making an educated guess about the history of the place but I reckon that, having previously been heathland, it ploughed up and planted up with conifers, with drainage ditches being dug. Those conifers have since been cleared and birch woodland was then either planted of allowed to grow up of it's own accord, which is what is now on the site. As well as the rhododendron, obvs.

If the picture below, we see exhibit A, which is a latex glove that has been placed over a sapling some years ago and that sapling has since grown into a tree with a latex glove still wrapped around it.

Kinda like one of those environmental memes about pollution only a bit more slapstick. I also found a very old jumper that had used to belong to an employee of the forestry commission. I didn't find the remains of it's owner anywhere nearby, so have to assume that he left it there.

In years to come, the next bunch of mugs contractors sent in to zap the next sprouting of rhododendron will probably find ripped arms and legs from our spray suits, which did not stand up very well to a day's tramping through the undergrowth. That's kind of why we're all blue now but I digress.