It started raining again Sunday evening. Just a soft, unserious, springlike shower, followed by a few more days of the same. But knowing it was coming, I put in several hours of outdoor work, then prepped for an indoor project.<\/p>\n
Since there was not a lot I could do inside until The Wandering Monk arrived to help me drywall a ceiling, I wandered across the little one-lane road and tried to make more progress cleaning the empty lot that will someday, if all my plans and dreams come to fruition, contain a gravel path with steps down to a homemade pergola, a small picnic area, a few fruit trees, a firepit, and maybe some chickens or even a goat or two.<\/p>\n
It’s a long way from most of that and I’m beginning to despair.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It looks nice from the house, but it’s got two terrible (I’m beginning to think intractable) problems: knotweed and hazardous litter. <\/p>\n
I curse the name of whoever brought knotweed to these shores as an “ornamental.”<\/b><\/p>\n
You will find gardening discussions online where people talk about how many years<\/i> it took them to kill off a single small patch or hedge of knotweed. Amid the long discussions about poisons, barriers, slicing, spraying, injecting, bagging, and otherwise fighting this incredibly invasive species, you’ll find people suggesting that if you have knotweed, you should just make fighting it your lifetime hobby. Or take a flame-thrower to it because nothing else is going to work. One person suggested a hand grenade, only to be reminded by the very next poster that being blown to bits is exactly what knotweed wants, because every tiny fragment of its root system can start a whole new patch. And take over the world.<\/p>\n
Nightmare stuff. And it’s big, too. Six, maybe eight, feet high. <\/p>\n
I’ve got three varieties of it, and not just a few feet, but a triangular patch maybe 75-feet on a side and 50 feet across at the bottom of the hill. This isn’t all on my property. That’s the next problem. As long as my neighbor thinks knotweed is the bees knees for her honeybee hives (and she does), I can never, ever be rid of it. No matter what I do, it will march right back to my property from hers. I know. Three summers’ attempts to poison it, weed-whack it, mow it, and generally push it back have accomplished very, very little.<\/p>\n
It is simply one of the most invasive plant species on this bloody planet. Kudzu. But taller. Bamboo. But less useful. Bureaucrats. But … yeah, herbacious bureaucrats. That bad.<\/p>\n
I think the only alternative is to build a serious barrier — seriously serious<\/i> — to stop its expansion. Like an underground wall 18 inches deep to block its rhizomes, and a six foot break beyond that with something solid — not landscape cloth — laid down to keep even a drop of sunlight from penetrating, then rock or bark or perhaps even brick or concrete on top of that.<\/p>\n
But yikes. That’s labor-intensive and pricey … and what if it still doesn’t work?<\/p>\n
And what’s worse, I have glass that proliferates worse than the knotweed.<\/b><\/p>\n
I’ve loaded I cannot tell you how many trash cans with broken glass, rusted metal, bags of cat poop, rotted carpeting, plastic buckets, broken blinds, and other trash from that lot. The refrigerator, three toilets, 70’s-vintage microwave, and several old water tanks were relatively easy. But but the glass, rusted nails, and other jagged hunks of assorted metal are defeating me.<\/p>\n
Several spots over there were used for dumping\/burning and they’re bad (somebody should have told those past homeowners you can’t burn glass or metal). But the worst by far is a large patch where an old shed\/garage\/barn used to be. Neighbors tell me the building blew down in the Ought-Seven storm. There’s little trace of the building, but OMG, the rat’s nest of crap stored in it is now largely embedded in the ground. <\/p>\n
There were at least (I now realize) a dozen large window panes stored in there, along with canning jars, and their bits are now as much as seven inches deep in the soil. Or worse — seven inches deep in the soil but with edges sticking up two inches in the grass. I’ll spend an hour or two clearing an area … and days later, in addition to the stuff I’ve inevitably missed, new pieces work their way to the surface.<\/p>\n
I’m not so worried about the small pieces that’ll give you an owey, but the ones that could slice right to your femoral artery if you fell on them. Oh, there are “owey” pieces, too. Thousands of them. Plus wrist slicers, tendon cutters, and assorted other varieties of potential harm buried in that otherwise rich, loamy earth. But the big ones worry me. Saturday I reached under a fern and pulled out of the ground beneath it a shard two feet long and about 15 inches wide. In all the times I’d walked that area, I’d never even seen it.<\/p>\n
Yikes. And I thought I’d gotten all the monster pieces last year. This one wasn’t even near the others. So what have I not yet found?<\/p>\n
Sunday’s project was metal. I noticed a two-foot arch of 1\/2-inch steel cable poking above the ground. I managed to dig out about twenty feet of it before it descended too far into the dirt for me to continue. I’ll have to borrow bolt cutters. Just let the rest remain hidden.<\/p>\n
I did manage to unearth 10 rusty plumbing pipes, some as much as 20-feet long and six inches underground for most of their length.<\/p>\n
That stuff … I cuss but I manage.<\/p>\n
The glass, though. I don’t think I’ll ever feel confident I’ve gotten the worst of it. Digging out those old pipes I found large pockets of window-glass among them. Hundreds of shards, the largest six or eight inches long.<\/p>\n
Not sure what to do to make that pretty piece of land safe. Dump “clean fill” over it? Run a rototiller through it and hope to either plow the worst under or bring the last of it to the surface? I simply don’t know. And again, I can’t think of any solution that doesn’t involve painful amounts of $$$$$. More than I have or can afford with foundation work still ahead on the house.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, it’s far too nice a bit of land to give up on.<\/p>\n
Besides, if I give up, within a few years the knotweed will have rampaged through the neighborhood, heading first for the property of the family with the most charmingly landscaped property on the street. <\/p>\n
They’re nice people, but I have a feeling they’d have a few words<\/i> for me if I allowed that to happen.<\/p>\n
So. Knotweed and glass: YOU WILL NOT WIN! I don’t know how I’ll defeat you. But defeat you, I will.<\/p>\n
Surely I must be smarter than a plant and a lot of nasty waste.<\/p>\n
Right?<\/p>\n
OTOH, if I’m not, maybe you are. Ideas???<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It started raining again Sunday evening. Just a soft, unserious, springlike shower, followed by a few more days of the same. But knowing it was coming, I put in several hours of outdoor work, then prepped for an indoor project. Since there was not a lot I could do inside until The Wandering Monk arrived to help me drywall a ceiling, I wandered across the little one-lane road and tried to make more progress cleaning the empty lot that will someday, if all my plans and dreams come to fruition, contain a gravel path with steps down to a homemade<\/p>\n