Angry Villagers

.

We decided to try to burn the seed heads off our weeds in the garden. After so much of the garden had died, due to the fusarium wilt, as well as much of my time being spent in the kitchen, learning more about the wonderful world of canning, our garden looked like this:









The seed heads of the weeds are what is scaring me. There are some vicious, thorny weeds in there and they are LOADED with seeds.

I don't know if we spray them, if the seeds die too, or if they will drop and be fine. A friend wondered about burning them off with our propane torch. Nice idea, but I can't afford to go get the tank refill.

What is a girl to do.....?

I know! Build a torch!

You can find almost anything online. We learned a lot about torch building. One thing I SHOULD have thought of but didn't, was using a green branch, instead of the handy, ever-so-movie-torch-like, club you see here. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but also catches fire all the way up to your fingers, if you don't watch it.





Also, the staples in the staple gun were not long enough to do the job. But you need to use 100% cotton, so you don't get any nasty burns from having melting globs of fabrics fall off and stick to your screaming flesh.

And Tiki Torch type fuel is good. Clean burning. You can use oils of other types, like motor oil, but that will give you smoke. Don't use more flammable things like gasoline.

We began by stapling the folded old t-shirt to the club.





Then the fabric must be pulled very tightly as you wrap. If you don't, you will have too much oxygen in there when burning and it will be brighter, but shorter lived. Rather like a flaming ball dropping at your feet.





Stapling every few inches, all the way around, we wrapped as though we were peasants, ready to invade Notre Dame.

Seth gives ignorant approval.





Then the staples began falling out. So we grabbed God's gift to humanity, baling wire.





Completely unprepared for this endeavor, we had only enough to pour over the torch to barely soak it. The actual instructions call for soaking the torch in a container of oil for 10 minutes. It was very thirsty.





Oooooooo! Scary villager!!!





And this is how we discovered that this method is extremely ineffective for this purpose.





The seed heads were too green to burn as well.





This garden may never dry out before those seeds drop, so our next approach is to go out with scissors and bags and trim them off.

And now you know how to NOT build a torch and eliminate seed heads.

I'm sure I can use a torch for more fun projects however. Stay tuned!

~Faith

.