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…
You could have put in a deck and accomplished almost the same thing (better IMO since it’s wheelchair accessible and you could launch something like a kayak or small boat from it) WITHOUT removing a bunch of nature.
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You know that this is a chronicle of habitat destruction, right?
This is a managed lake. All the beaches around it are either artificial or have been turned into lawns. This too used to be a regular beach also until the previous owner stopped cleaning it up.
I did think of the environment: I left the original lake sand on. All the neighbors lined theirs with root growth prevention fiberglass mats and dumped tons of garish yellow sand over it. Ours is still the boring original grey sand, and it will quickly be covered by water grass - which I don’t mind: all I what I wanted was to be able to tread on it barefoot safely.
Anyway, the waterfowl don’t seem to mind: we have a colony of mallards that go up the ramp left by the excavator every evening and go nest in the forest - something they could never do before 🙂
No need to see the negative side of everything all the time…
All the neighbors lined theirs with root growth prevention fiberglass mats and dumped tons of garish yellow sand over it. Ours is still the boring original grey sand,
The horrors of boring grey sand.
Just because what your neighbors did is worse doesn’t mean what you did isn’t destructive. And just because this was man-made doesn’t mean that it’s not a habitat.
Sigh…
Theyre defending you here
Jesus there’s some flood of screechers turning this into something it’s not… extending and maintaining a shoreline isn’t “destroying a habitat”… the habitat is still right there, same exact reeds and weeds 10 feet seaward.
OP, the shoreline looks great. Good job. You should plant some bushes along that ridgeline to help slow any soil erosion along it. Plus adding some flower/bushes will really pretty it up.
There’s no soil erosion here. The water level is constant - like I said, the lake is managed: it’s a fake pond the city made out of a putrid mosquito-infested swamp decades ago. There’s even a huge filter upstream to prevent silt from the catchment area from reverting it back into a swamp. There’s no current, and there’s little wind here. As for the land above the beach, it’s held together by a dense network of roots, so no issues there.
I would caution against thinking that the level is constant. I also live next to a managed lake, you probably won’t see the level rise above your beachline, but its possible in doughts for the level to drop until it can be refilled. Not a major concern, but a factor.
More likely any erosion you see is going to be from rain. That will slowly leech your ridge to the sand as the rain washes down to the beach. It’s not an immediate problem, but something to monitor. And like I said, adding some foilage/flowers always looks nice too.
The grass will quickly grow back. It’ll be all green and stabilized with grassroots before winter.
That’s kind of why I refused to put a fucking fiberglass mat on it actually.
There’s zero worry about erosion anyway. If there was, all the neighbors’ beaches - which are completely sterile and devoid of life, and have a fiberglass mat under em - would have washed away long ago.
s’fair. It’s your area and beach, I’m sure you know it best. Anyways, it looks great dude, good job again, sorry about the others.
That’s just the internet. The less people behind their keyboards know about anything, the more opinionated they are, and haters gonna hate. I don’t see why you should need to apologize for the internet 🙂
“waaahhhhh! Someone landscaped their yard!”
I mean, you can see the house right there, it’s not like this is pristine wilderness.
Nice job, OP. Looks like a very comfortable place to enjoy your residential property.
edit: for the haters: I bet OP even has to drive a CAR to get to this property. You should probably drag them for that too, and ask why there isn’t a train going within three blocks of their home.
forreal forreal. I bet OP isn’t a vegan, OP is probably looking forward to having friends over for BBQ steaks at the pond front. The horror…
Ad hominem is all the rage among people who can’t get by without it.
ohmygod, go back to reddit with your headass
Glad you decided to meticulously and proudly destroy pristine natural habitat because you’re too much of a spoiled pussy to checks notes wear shoes, be a little careful while walking, or just not walk there.
Read my other post: there’s nothing natural about this lake.
The 10 tons of peatland tree roots and the picture of undisturbed, seemingly native flora beg to differ. When my neighbor throws a used tire in the creek, I don’t start throwing my used pizza boxes in there and say how cool it is because they’re biodegradable and I could’ve done way worse.
seemingly native flora
Exactly.
So you are implying that you looked up which species living on that bit of shoreline were native and then prioritized their preservation before beginning this work?
If not, “exactly” is just you being defensive because somebody pointed out something that you did not think about.
