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Jun. 2nd, 2013 09:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI made Trys ride Te with me on Peake today for a short spin. It was uneventful.
I drug stuff (sticks, boards, broken fenceposts, bale string) out of the field and set it on fire. A lot. I like fire. I like fields with less crap in them. It is sort of exercise-ish, this dragging of stuff. So, huge amounts of win going on.
While I was doing that, I noticed the fairly large number of concrete blocks cluttering up the area below the run-in portion of the barn. (Okay, they've been there for a lot more than sixteen years. I did not just now notice them. They've been pissing me off since the mid-nineties.) The concrete-blockscape is a steep hillside, but walkable, mostly covered in pokeweed and slightly-used concrete blocks with random hunks of scrap metal and dead roofing tin in the mix for flavor. Now, I hate pokeweed. A lot. I also hate the blocks that are scattered about. They're unsightly and take up surface area that could be used for growing grass.
Since nobody else has done jack fuck-all with the cement blocks and pokeweed problem since the mid-nineties (it is possible that nobody but me really cares about the blocks and pokeweed), I inquired today of La if it would be OK if I started removing the blocks from the field and doing something with them along with my dedicated pokeweed eradication project (about which a bit more below when I'm done talking about concrete blocks). She said sure.
I am not really sure what I am going to be doing with the blocks, but I will think of something. We sure could use "gravel" in the gate area of the upper field. It'd be really nice if we had "free gravel" for that project. It might solve some of the mud problem. We could also put some "free gravel" around the water troughs so that they're not sinks of mud all the time. We could maybe break up the concrete blocks with a sledge hammer or something. I'll have to experiment and see what works.
Right now, I'm removing the blocks from the dirt (some of them are partially buried) and lugging them up the fairly steep hill and lobbing them over the fence (chest-high) out of the field. I'm making kind of a pile, out of the way, while I consider my options as to what to do with the blocks. (As mentioned above, the blocks are somewhat used, as in "have mortar and cement on them" and most are broken. They'd been used to make a flat platform retaining wall thing back in the dairy farm days of the horse people's farm. Once the dairy cows were gone, the platform fell to the elements and, subsequently, to pieces. Gravity being what it is, the concrete blocks went in a downhillwardly sort of direction, which is why I am lugging them up the hill. The field is also adjacent to another field except at the top of said hill, so if I lobbed the blocks over the fence anywhere but at the top of the hill, they would land in another field... not really the improvement I am hoping for. I am only good for about ten or so of these a day -- they're reasonably heavy and it's a trek up the hill with 'em -- but that's progress and better than anyone else is managing. Once I get all the blocks out of the field, I'll see what can be done with them.
Anyway, block removal is only incidental to the pokeweed removal project, though. Pokeweed is a native plant species, an herbaceous-stemmed thing that nonetheless manages to make huge clumps of weed, some of them taller than a person, with more-than-1"-thick stems and dangling clusters of very purple berries that are poisonous. It also has massively a huge taproot and comes back more often than Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.
Since the field has, y'know, horses in it, I am not real interested in pesticides. I am going to follow a non-pesticide approach to get rid of the pokeweed. First, I am going to cut it down to the ground. Second, I am going to wait for it to grow back and then cut it down again. And maybe a third time. Then I'm going to dig up its damn tap root and burn it. We'll see how that goes.
I drug stuff (sticks, boards, broken fenceposts, bale string) out of the field and set it on fire. A lot. I like fire. I like fields with less crap in them. It is sort of exercise-ish, this dragging of stuff. So, huge amounts of win going on.
While I was doing that, I noticed the fairly large number of concrete blocks cluttering up the area below the run-in portion of the barn. (Okay, they've been there for a lot more than sixteen years. I did not just now notice them. They've been pissing me off since the mid-nineties.) The concrete-blockscape is a steep hillside, but walkable, mostly covered in pokeweed and slightly-used concrete blocks with random hunks of scrap metal and dead roofing tin in the mix for flavor. Now, I hate pokeweed. A lot. I also hate the blocks that are scattered about. They're unsightly and take up surface area that could be used for growing grass.
Since nobody else has done jack fuck-all with the cement blocks and pokeweed problem since the mid-nineties (it is possible that nobody but me really cares about the blocks and pokeweed), I inquired today of La if it would be OK if I started removing the blocks from the field and doing something with them along with my dedicated pokeweed eradication project (about which a bit more below when I'm done talking about concrete blocks). She said sure.
I am not really sure what I am going to be doing with the blocks, but I will think of something. We sure could use "gravel" in the gate area of the upper field. It'd be really nice if we had "free gravel" for that project. It might solve some of the mud problem. We could also put some "free gravel" around the water troughs so that they're not sinks of mud all the time. We could maybe break up the concrete blocks with a sledge hammer or something. I'll have to experiment and see what works.
Right now, I'm removing the blocks from the dirt (some of them are partially buried) and lugging them up the fairly steep hill and lobbing them over the fence (chest-high) out of the field. I'm making kind of a pile, out of the way, while I consider my options as to what to do with the blocks. (As mentioned above, the blocks are somewhat used, as in "have mortar and cement on them" and most are broken. They'd been used to make a flat platform retaining wall thing back in the dairy farm days of the horse people's farm. Once the dairy cows were gone, the platform fell to the elements and, subsequently, to pieces. Gravity being what it is, the concrete blocks went in a downhillwardly sort of direction, which is why I am lugging them up the hill. The field is also adjacent to another field except at the top of said hill, so if I lobbed the blocks over the fence anywhere but at the top of the hill, they would land in another field... not really the improvement I am hoping for. I am only good for about ten or so of these a day -- they're reasonably heavy and it's a trek up the hill with 'em -- but that's progress and better than anyone else is managing. Once I get all the blocks out of the field, I'll see what can be done with them.
Anyway, block removal is only incidental to the pokeweed removal project, though. Pokeweed is a native plant species, an herbaceous-stemmed thing that nonetheless manages to make huge clumps of weed, some of them taller than a person, with more-than-1"-thick stems and dangling clusters of very purple berries that are poisonous. It also has massively a huge taproot and comes back more often than Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.
Since the field has, y'know, horses in it, I am not real interested in pesticides. I am going to follow a non-pesticide approach to get rid of the pokeweed. First, I am going to cut it down to the ground. Second, I am going to wait for it to grow back and then cut it down again. And maybe a third time. Then I'm going to dig up its damn tap root and burn it. We'll see how that goes.
