Re: CULT: Iris Beds
From: Marte Halleck <MorJHalleck@worldnet.att.net>
Sharon McAllister wrote:
>
> Hwy. 70 once ran through our land, so we find chunks of asphalt as well as
> the usual tins & bottles. The strangest item to date, though, was the old
> car body we dug through when putting in the water lines.
Back when Colorado had few year-round residents, a favorite way to cope
with erosion problems (& "dispose" of dead cars & pickups) was to push
'em into gullies & ravines where they, eventually, got covered over with
rocks & dirt from run-off. I've seen gazillions of old vehicles parked,
uh, permanently this way all over the West (& had to help dig up at
least parts of more than one to extend a septic sytem or the like), not
to mention old tires, door-less refrigerators & the ever-popular rusty
bed springs.
Most people in the Evergreen area simply dumped any garbage & junk they
didn't burn in the woodstove into the handiest gully until the county
finally called a halt in the 1960's. When my folks bought their first
mountain house in 1953, my mom asked the sellers how they dealt with
kitchen garbage & was told "Oh, we just toss it in the ravine out back &
the animals take care of it." It wasn't until late that night that Mom
woke from a sound sleep & wondered "WHAT ANIMALS?!"
BTW, all my hillside garden beds are in raised terraces & we, too,
screen the soil using a rig similar to yours -- but if we removed ALL
the rocks there wouldn't be much left to put back in! (The smaller rocks
left behind help keep drainage open, right?) We've hauled mucho "clean"
dirt in here to create gardening soil & make tons of compost, too, but
even screening everything first doesn't eliminate all the oddities. My
favorite iris-bed-digging find so far this summer was a well-rusted by
still usable rock-climbing piton...
Marte in the mtns Zone 4/Sunset 1 Colorado
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