Charmion, I hope that the Grampa weeder does the trick, when you can get one. There are other brands available here in Oz.

I totally agree about contracting out, especially for very loud machinery like lawn mowers.

At this point we are in in-between land regarding the garden. We plan to get it all sorted by a garden expert later this year. We had it re-worked about 10 years ago but some of the grand plans fell down badly. Two of the plans sort-of worked: Plan #1 was to have no lawns to mow except the path outside the fence; Plan #2 was to use mulch mat as much as possible to smother the weeds.

The very lovely man who set up our garden thought he would save us some money by using horse manure instead of cow manure. He didn't listen when I told him that my mother always said not to use horse poo - unless you compost it first - because the weeds just go straight through them unlike cow poo, because cows chew their cud and the weeds get mashed up before being ejected at the other end.

Consequently, we were the beneficiaries of all the weeds those lovely horses ate out in the paddocks, especially the really annoying Bidens pilosa aka cobbler's pegs which spreads as easily as COVID 19 and is as difficult to control, IMO. It's called cobbler's pegs because of the little, hard spiky bits which stick to clothes and start growing again when they fall off. It's like fairy dust spread by a lot of bad fairies. The other bothersome weed is summer grass, which grows to about a metre tall and takes over any open ground it can find, like an invading army. If we can put paths and paving down for all the non-gardening bits, we will only have the gardens to tend and we might get on top of this. I hope.

Like I said, I'm not a good gardener at the best of times, but this is just overwhelming me. An insurmountable problem at present until the cavalry arrives - hopefully without their horses dropping more weed seeds.