Crossposted from https://piefed.social/c/barefoot@piefed.social/p/2201987/our-beach-is-now-barefoot-friendly
When we bought our house last year, this was the state of the lakefront:
It was completely overgrown with pine trees, aspen trees and bushes. The previous owner of the house just plain stopped caring years ago, and it was so overgrown the lake could barely be seen from the house.
So I had a lumberjack fell the trees and clear the bushes. When winter subsided, it looked like this:
Much nicer! But it was pretty much impossible to walk on without shoes on because of all the roots sticking up. A beach you can’t walk on barefoot isn’t much of a beach, is it?
So last month, I got a guy with an excavator to remove all the tree stumps and the roots underground. It took all day and he removed almost 10 tons of roots! That was the beach after the excavator left:
And finally, yesterday and today, with a shovel and a rake, I manually dug up another 800 lbs of roots and decaying organic material - this whole area is peatland, leveled the beach and coarsely sifted the sand to make sure nothing nasty was left in it so that I could enjoy our beach barefoot, as beaches should. Good thing I did that too, because I unearthed a lot of broken glass: apparently, people have been enjoying the summer holidays, drinking beer and throwing the bottles on the beach for decades here.
And now the beach finally looks like a beach 🙂
Now I’m trying to rent a beach cleaning machine to lift up the sand and remove all the small bits of organic material left in it. That’s just too much to sift through manually. But I can’t seem to find any such machine anywhere in the area…
I think the problem is that this is NOT the natural state of this specific shoreline. If being left alone resulted in trees and grass growing then a sandy “beach” shoreline is not in balance with the local ecosystem. Trimming the grass and clearing a small path for access would have been okay but nuking that span of shoreline has now introduced significant erosion risk. Grasses, shurbs, and roots play an important role in preventing erosion. Maybe the 50-100m stretch won’t be a big deal in the long run but if all the homes in the area follow suit then long term large scale problems will arise. Even still at a small scale, I can already see how close this shoreline is to their home. They have eliminated a decent bit of erosion preventing vegetation that served as a buffer from the back yard of their homes. A few seasons of high and low tide cycles will, at best wash away their “pretty walking area”, and at worst undermine the stability of the soil near the building foundation. There is no easy “undo” for the damage they have done, the closest thing is artificial erosion preventative measures which will be concrete, metal, or some other manufactured system that will be much more of an eye soar then the original condition they apparently hated so much.
You know nothing of this area.
There is no tide here. There is no current. The water level is constant. Because it’s not a real lake: it’s a swamp that has been dredged out to prevent mosquito infestation. There’s a 10-acre buffer zone upstream that prevents silt from the catchment area from filling the lake back up, and there’s a dam downstream to control the lake level. That’s so the entire goddamn area isn’t filled with mosquitoes.
It’s not a real lake! All the lakefronts around it are artificial.
Thanks for the clarification. I originally tried to access the piefed post but it wouldn’t load so I worked off the assumption this was a natural lake.
I’ll edit my original post with a note to clarify my misunderstanding.
it seems piefed has put upma login wall in recent weeks. I’m not sure what does that prevent other than regular users visiting links…
How do we know the state it was in before was natural? Invasive species grow and invade natural climes all the time.
Would you suggest all that broken glass was natural too?
That’s a ridiculous strawman.
But, supposing that you were being sincere and not intentionally strawmanning: you can clean up glass and other waste without excavating and literally trying to remove any trace of biological presence. I would encourage everyone to do so.
it’s not even a natural lake, so the “natural state” of things is sort of a moot argument, no?
OP is just naive af and badjacketing this whole thing about a guy who cleaned up the shorelline at his lakehouse. Probably because they’re jealous, probably because they don’t know wtf they’re talking about and think human = bad.
An artificial lake with native wildlife that’s colonized it is better than an artificial lake with a barren artificial beach.
The best was not to create an artificial lake at all, but that’s out of the home owners control
If you read the original post, OP explains that the lake is managed, it used to be an overgrown swamp full of mosquitos, the government cleaned it up, raised the water level and created the lake.
Is it isn’t some ancient natural habitat that got ruined.