Flax plants are something else! (Hy sal my nie wen nie!)

Although this is a photograph of a random flax plant and not the one that was flourishing in front of the big stone in our garden, it gives you a good idea of the task which we tackled and which very nearly got the better of us. Much research, a whole morning cutting the leaves back (which incidentally are an absolute haven for snails) and then a couple of hours exposing as much of the root structure as possible. (This exercise having been tackled over two seperate weekends - which meant that the bugger was sprouting again by the second one. I'm sure that if you sat there and stared, you could watch the thing grow!)

After a fair amount of digging and chopping, the roots were open enough to take a strong, nylon rope around them, with a view to pulling them out. You can forget tugging such a plant out - the only option, dear blog followers, is to attach your rope to your 'ute' (kiwi for bakkie folks) and driving the thing away slowly. To no avail! The rope, pictured here, is not your common or garden flimsy piece of string - this is a really 'fris' nylon one - as you see, it snapped before the flax roots even moved a smidgen! Undaunted, we reattached the repaired rope (more than once) and gave it another couple of heaves!

No go! The next step - of course, was to open the roots up a bit more and get the spade down really deep and make a little lift.  This picture gives you an idea about what the south african spade (cleaned up and sterilised in South Africa, to satisfy the fellows of MAF and dutifully inscribed with the words - Afrikaner, made in Sheffield England )- did. Bugger all! and now lies in two sad and sorry pieces in the garage!

So - right - now for the big guns. Jo has a 'fancy' (kiwis use the word 'flash' here) tow rope in the back of the work ute - apparently it has breaking strength of 7 tons (kiwis spell that word 'tonnes' and pronounce it to rhyme with 'cons' )





One end of the tow rope attached to the ute.

The other end around the 'spade smashing roots'! VOILA!!!

Now, we did consider, before the decision to uproot the flax was made, whether we would be inclined to use the plant for the myriad of projects which the local maori have done in their history. It's a dying art apparently, but we have decided to give these skills a miss - we have enough hobbies as it is.

Cradles and mats and skirts - gorgeous for the traditional meetings and celebrations at the marai (meeting house), but not for us 'bloody foreigners'!  So the flax has been dispensed with - not without much fuss and bluster!

I forget where I found this, but it's a rose called "South Africa" - quite splendid we thought! 

 Dis al!