Today I pulled the mother of all weeds, actually it was some sort of long grass, from one of our front shrub-beds. It had been bothering me for a while, but I didn’t realize how long until I just heard Andrea tell her mother that she had tried to pull that same clump of grass from the bed LAST year, had failed, and that it had been growing there ever since.
Hand tools were useless; I thought I’d have to dig it out with a shovel like a tree, but five minutes prying with a pitchfork managed to free the whole root bundle. It weighed about as much as Elizabeth when I first broke it free, but I managed to salvage much of the soil by beating the root bundle for several minutes with a hand hoe.
Added Monday 8 August: the evidence.