While most Americans will think of asparagus as a tasty compliment to a fish dinner, or alternatively as an inedibly, mushy, misery stick to be substituted for potatoes in every occasion, Down Under it is an entirely different situation.
The asparagus fern is one of the most serially invasive plants on the continent, and one Australian man has gone as far as to declare war on them, armed with a clever weapon of mass de-weeding he invented himself.
In the northern state of Queensland, Ron Gooch took his battery electric drill and modified the hole saw attachment with a section of sewer piping to create “The Asparagus Assassin” which he has used for years to clear the invasive basket asparagus fern.
“There’s a lot of bush between us and the beach and it was full of weeds,” Mr. Gooch, a resident of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, told ABC News Australia. “It became a passion to get rid of the weeds and asparagus was one of the major ones.”
Australia has spent half a century trying to eliminate invasive species, as the isolated continent was overwhelmed by species that quickly filled unoccupied niches in the landscape. Some of the most famous culprits are foxes, feral cats, and cane toads, but prickly pear cactus had become the tyrant pest of the vegetable kingdom.
It was eventually eradicated from Australia with the help of a tiny insect, but the basket asparagus fern has only human enemies like Gooch at the moment. The plant was brought as an ornamental that eventually spread out of control.
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But there are reasons to be sunny about the situation on the Sunshine Coast, as a local group of “bushcare” volunteers found that Gooch’s Asparagus Assassin was so effective that they needed more, and secured a grant for five more.
With extensive underground root systems, pulling the basket asparagus fern out of the ground isn’t enough. The assassin is used to tunnel down to the crown of the roots, encircle it, and then saw away all the connecting roots, ensuring it can’t grow back.
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Gooch isn’t planning on monetizing the tool because he doesn’t want to manage the production, but hopes others will use his design to combat weeds in their environs.
In a video on ABC, Gooch demonstrates the difference between using a folding hand saw to remove the crown and using his assassin, and the job is done in about a quarter of the time.
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We need something like that to rid America of the devastating Bradford/Callery Pear tree. Insects and their larva won’t eat it. The flowers’ nectar is bereft of nutrition. It spreads faster than any other tree. It kills the native plant life around it. Its thorns are the only ones that penetrate tractor tires. Sawing it down brings many more trunks up. It is resistant to poison. Many states have already made it illegal to sell, including my state of Pa this year. But the real issue is the hundreds of thousands already spreading like wildfire. There are tens of thousands just in a couple square miles of my home, in every field and tree/hedge row.