Impossible weeding: Horse Chestnut seedling

I quite enjoy weeding: yes, I know, it's a never-ending job, it's boring, makes your back ache, blah blah, but personally I quite enjoy it.

There is a great feeling of satisfaction when it's done, and you know that by doing it now, you are reducing the problem for yourself, because - within reason - small weeds are easier to remove than big ones.

However, I met my match this week: I was digging out Arum lilies (Arum maculatum, common names include Jack-in-the-pulpit, Lords and Ladies, and, hilariously, Waggling Willies. If you don't know what they look like, that last one won't make sense until you do....) which were infesting a small copse of  Beech trees, and I kept finding Horse Chestnut seedlings.

Hardly surprising, as there was a massive Horse Chestnut tree in the next garden: but they're easy enough to dig out because the squirrels tend to only bury the conker an inch or so below the ground, and once you can get your daisy grubber at conker depth, out they come.

Until I found this one.

OK,  this could be considered a bit of an awkward location: it's in the corner of the close-boarded fence, and there's a beech tree which has been planted way, way too close to the boundary, but apart from that, not a problem, right?

That's what I thought, as I wormed my way into the corner, daisy grubber in hand.

Then I noticed that it was growing up through what appeared to be a cow-pat.

Yum, lovely.

("Not.")

Hang on, what's a cow-pat doing in the very corner of a fenced-in garden?

Oh, urgh, perhaps it's a pile of vomit, maybe they have a dog: or perhaps a cat has been sick in the corner.

Nope.

It was a blob of concrete, left over from whatever cowboy erected the new fences. 

And the seedling was growing right through it.

This is as close as I could get: you can see that there was a hole in the concrete blob - maybe there was a piece of garden debris there, when the builder scraped out his bucket and callously tipped it out onto the garden?

Maybe there was a twig or something which fell into the puddle while it was still soft? And then rotted away, leaving a hole?

However it occurred, there's a hole in the concrete blob ("Dear Liza, dear Liza,") and this pesky Horse Chestnut managed to find its way up through the hole and into daylight.

How on earth should I get that out?

For that matter, would it be possible to get it out?

Umm, no.  

The concrete was as hard as, well, concrete: I couldn't lift it up, it was stuck firmly to the fence and the fence post: and of course there was no chance of just pulling on the seedling, it was firmly rooted underneath.

So, when all else fails, turn to Glyphosate. I asked Mrs Client, and within a few minutes, Mr Client had produced a squirty bottle of weedkiller, and I slithered back on hands and knees, and gave it a generous spritzing, taking care not to overspray onto the Beech stem.

(I'm pretty certain that trees can't absorb weedkiller through their stems, having done not only research on the subject, but a practical experiment, which I wrote about in this article... but I'm not taking any chances!)

Hopefully, in a couple of weeks it will have died, and who knows how long it will be, before another seedling manages to find that exact same hole!!

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