Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

By Patrick Vickery

The therapeutic benefits of gardening are well documented, there's nothing like strimming the strawberries, chain sawing the hedge and generally letting loose with power tools in the shrubbery to exercise the mind and invigorate the body.

Plants survive most things, you know, as long as you don't fiddle faddle about. Leave them be, that's what I say, apart from the occasional hearty prune with a hedge trimmer or one of those remarkable battery charged swivel-bladed Sunday Roast carving knives if there's nothing else to hand.

I'd finished pruning the raspberries (last year's wood), dug goose fat around the roses and was using a pneumatic tamper to flatten the mole hills on the lawn whilst listening to ‘The Chillis' on my MP3 Player when bingo, an elderly war veteran of a like minded disposition who occasionally makes use of my dynamic pruning skills, hobbled from his conservatory flourishing a flame thrower. "For the garden," he roared, waving the implement at me. "Burn the weeds!"

Now as luck would have it I'd recently watched Saving Private Ryan on DVD, a serious war film starring Tom Hanks that features flame throwers as weapons of mass destruction (or 'WMD' for those of us who like an unintelligible abbreviation). Little did I suspect at the time that a flame thrower was about to be added to my arsenal of gardening equipment. Marvellous.

It's actually called a Weed Burning Stick (‘WBS'), or something like that, but in essence it's a flame thrower. Fantastic, twenty quid from the local hardware shop or garden centre, two pound seventy five for a screw on fuel pack that looks suspiciously like a deodorant canister, then Bob's your Uncle, Fanny's your Aunt, set light to all in sight: sizzle the Buddleia, frizz the Leylandii and scorch the weeds, which after all is what you should be using it for in the first place.

Strictly for garden application only, of course, aye, aye, and certainly not for scorching Granny's gazebo, the cat next door or any other sort of untoward behavior that somebody with an ‘ASBO' to gain and a Clootie Dumpling for a brain might aspire to.

Of course it's all too easy to set fire to your own feet if you're not careful. Should this happen, do a bingo, plunge them into the nearest water butt and keep submerged until all burning sensations subside. You may hobble for a bit afterwards, of course, but full immersion should dowse the flames.

Luckily, I was wearing steel toe-capped boots encased in a rubbery substance that resembles leather when I set fire to mine and was alerted to the situation by a pungent stench before I reached the water butt stage, but if you're wearing trainers it's a different story altogether: the plastic in the toe area bubbles, or so I'm reliably informed, followed by an acrid black smoke and a spontaneous ceilidh. Now if you monitor your 'carbon footprint' on a regular basis, as many of us 'mean, lean, green, George Foreman griddle machine' folks do, then your footprint instantly metamorphoses into a carbon stampede.

So if you find yourself on the streets of Dingwall, Ullapool or Tain this summer, or anywhere else for that matter - Scoraig or Gairloch perhaps - look to the pavements (although on reflection I don't think Scoraig has any pavements, or it didn't last time I was there) and see if you can spot scorched and bubbled plastic trainers tramping the walkways, a sure sign that someone's been burning weeds in the garden this summer. You may spot a few.

Thought for the day? Once burnt, lesson learnt. Aye, that's it.

This article first appeared in the Ross-shire Journal and on the Rural  Gateway website