Two stages of killing

Sunday seemed a good day for killing, the skies were blue, no rain in sight and sunshine beamed down with a warmth that seeped right down to my winter-chilled bones...yes, a good day for slaughter of a wholesale nature.

I kill in two stages...hang on, before I go on let me clarify...I'm talking about killing weeds in my garden.

Anyway, I kill in two stages with the first being a preemptive strike on the weeds that are the largest and most detrimental to my garden. I also do the edges of garden beds, driveway's and paths because it's easier to destroy those weeds before they creep over and fuck up my lovely straight edges. The reason for this is to knock down those weedy bastards so I can then attend to the smaller ones a week or so later. This is for two reasons.

• Weed killer is costly, the bottle you see in the image was $55 AUD, so spraying it all over the place in a haphazard way hoping to slay all the weeds in one go is wasteful.
• Making the bigger weeds dead first means my second kill-mission can be more strategic. It's sort of like how the Americans used Agent-Orange in the Vietnam War to kill off the foliage in the jungle before putting troops on the ground to do the killing more strategically. Of course, those nutbags still lost the war so it didn't do much good. For me it works a treat.

I don't like buying the pre-mixed sprays preferring to buy the concentrate and use my own (larger) hand pump pressure spray bottle. It's a simple matter of donning some surgical gloves and a face mask then mixing the concentrate with water and from there the killing begins...although the weeds can take a week or ten days to die...a reason one needs a clear day as rain washes off the poison. Once they're dying off I'm able to deploy on the second kill-mission as I can see more clearly where I've sprayed or missed and that means a better use of the chemicals.

The two stages of killing takes a little longer for the garden to be weed-free and a little more effort but the result is more economic and there's less accidental collateral damage through spraying and slaying where one should not spray and slay.

If you're a gardener you kill - slugs, snails and aphids, scale insects, thrips, spider mites and leaf miners for instance -it's important to ensure healthy plants, good blooms and produce and, of course, it looks better in gardens that are designed for aesthetics. How do you kill though? What's your strategy or do you deploy in a random or haphazard manner? Feel free to comment.