Barking at shovels

Ripping-20-foot-Trees-out-by-the-Roots Day

That's what it should have been called, anyway. I did a Community Impact project yesterday, ``controlling the spread of invasive non-native plant growth'' in the Mid-Peninsula Open Space District's Thornehill Preserve (I think it was called). That is to say, weeding out Scotch broom, and a bit of Spanish broom. Biggest damn weeds I've ever seen -- some of the ones we pulled out were bona-fide 15- to 20-foot trees. This was not a crawl-around-on-your-knees kind of day.

As Josh, one of the other volunteers, pointed out, weeding can be somehow more satisfying than planting. There's an instant-gratification aspect to it -- you can see immediately that you've done something, rather than having to wait until the summer to see if anything sprouted.

More than that, though, I think is the sheer physical satisfaction of committing a plant massacre, and not having to feel guilty about it. As the Maxx would say: ``They have no natural predators -- unless you count ME...''

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