Whenever the weather is good and we feel like doing something in the garden, but don’t want to undertake any major projects, we dig out cherry roots.
We have two huge cherry trees, one on each side of the house. Around the tree at the rear of the house we also have lots and lots of very small ones. Most seem to have started from cherry pits, but it’s possible that some are shoots from the roots of the main tree. They’re dotted around the lawn and don’t really cause much trouble – until they’re cut down by a lawnmower. That leaves small stubs sticking out of the lawn, perfectly hidden, just stiff and sharp enough to be really uncomfortable for bare feet.
And of course when you mow them down, you don’t kill them. They just try again, sending up a new shoot next to the old one. So one sharp stick becomes two, three, four, an entire knobbly lump with sharp points. Many of these lumps appear to have been around for years: they have roots as thick as my thumb.
When I found the first sharp stick last summer, I thought I’d just pull it out. But of course then I discovered the lump around it, and the thick roots, impossible to pull out. Vigourous frequent mowing might kill new shoots, but wouldn’t help with the existing ones, which would go on hurting our feet. So now we have an extirpation campaign. Armed with strong shears and a weeding trowel, we dig out the root as far as we can, and pull out the rest, or twist or cut it off. The bigger ones leave somewhat unsightly scars in the lawn, but that’s a smaller problem.
By the end of this summer we should be done with all the big old lumps. We’ll probably miss some smaller ones, but after next summer we’ll hopefully have a stick-free lawn.
[…] run them over with a lawnmower and they will just keep coming back, until there’s a hard, gnarly lump of a root with pointy stumps sticking up – painful to step on with bare feet. So I plucked them out […]