During this hiatus from sculpting I made it my goal to do between 1 and 5 hours of physical labor 5 days a week. I built some shelves in the basement and assembled my table saw. There was also a lot of moving things around in the basement on rainy days. During the fairer weather I was busy outside.
Several years ago a Japanese Knotweed volunteered itself in the corner of our yard. I'm not sure what the actual species is, but it grows literally like a weed and takes over most of the yard within a month. The plant sends out rhizomes and each individual rhizome can grow to about 2 inches in diameter and 8' to 9' tall. It's some crazy shit.
We've mowed them, pulled them out by the roots, poisoned them several times and they still come back. The largest concentration seemed to be in the area between our parking pad and the neighbor's garage. So... I waged a little personal war and the battle of Knotweed has begun.
I started by clearing all the weeds in that area. then digging down to get to the rhizomes.
I got down about 5 inches and found a layer of asphalt. Ok, it was cracked so I started pulling it out. Beneath the asphalt was a layer of concrete. Tougher going, but not impossible. Under the concrete was the original layer of bricks that had paved the whole back area once upon a time. More fun. I also found out that this was where the original owners dumped the slag from their coal boiler.
Mixed in with all of that crap was the knotweed rhizome and I still hadn't found the bottom of that. I ended up digging down about 20" to 24" to try to get most of it. I removed yards and yards of the stuff and was left with a big trench.
Our garbage guys won't pick up construction waste. So I made rubble out of all of it and back filled the trench leaving 8" to 10" at the top for the dirt and clay.
All told I moved about 5 cubic yards of material. Twice. The knotweed is mostly gone, but I still have some work to do to remove the last remaining rhizomes before they spread again.
The fun project in all of this was to start building a forge on the back pad. I used Rhino CAD to make a rough drawing of what I wanted.
The bricks were purchased at our local salvage shop. I dry stacked them and decided I needed a 2' x 2' paver to build on. That will allow me to move the forge if code enforcement guys wanted to make a fuss.
I did a lot of reading about masonry before I started, but as with all things, theory just isn't the same as practice. It was time to start throwing mortar.
You can see the other neighbor's knotweed in the background. I got permission to keep that cleared out this summer. Anyway... I doubt that I'll ever become a master mason. But the base is solid, plumb and level. All that is left is to build the form to cast the firebox. I'm also planning to use it as a charcoal grill and that's what I'm telling the code guys if they show up.
Until the fire box is built, I still get to use the base for one of it's intended purposes.
It was a pretty fine dinner that night.
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