Ochna was sold in nurseries for many years as "Mickey Mouse" plant because of its bright red sepals and black fruit.

The problem is, now it has become a terrible bushland weed and you will see it popping up in backyards all over the north coast of NSW and SE Qld.

You can see, even a small plant produces masses of fruit ready to germinate bellow the mother plant. Not only that; birds eat the fruit and spread the seed all over town.

Once the plants get going, they are quite difficult to pull up, because they develop a long taproot very quickly even when they are small .

So how do you control them? Well the first thing you need to do is cut them back and dispose of the tops. That’ll reduce the numbers of viable seed straight away if they're in fruit. You can get in and dig the rest out with a mattock, but be careful not to break the taproot because they can re-shoot.

The most efficient method of control is to scrape the bark to expose what we call the cambium layer directly beneath the bark. Then paint this area straight away with undiluted glyphosate - that’s the active constituent in most of the popular weed killers you’ll find. Once that goes on, it’ll be drawn into the vascular system effectively killing the plant.

But don’t delay - get in and control this nasty weed before it gets any worse. You’ll be doing yourself and our community a big favour.