Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

Not just neglect Fred, there is a good dose of stupidity in it too and probably corruption.

 

"our" road was made some 150 years ago during famine times. Destitute farmers then got paid a pittance to provide hardcore for new roads. Before then there were just cart tracks running West-East. Our present road is running SW-NE. In those early days with minimal traffic it did not really matter that parts of this road were very steep.

These days it is different. Unless you have a very powerful 4 wheel drive tractor many people with an older tractor find they can only reverse up the steepest part while transporting a single silage bale for instance. Going straight would make the tractor tipple backwards.

But anyway, some 50 years ago the County Council that is supposed to maintain these roads put tarmac over the hardcore less than an inch thick. When we first came to live here 27 years ago that was no problem. Few families had more than one car and when weather was bad we sometimes had only one car per week coming past, the postman.

 

Gradually traffic has increased. We have one neighbour who drives up and down about 4 times a day to visit her mother who lives only about a mile away. This young woman drives at high speed but she could not reverse even a foot if her life depended on it and of course this is a single vehicle road with some grass growing in the middle which leads to problems when you meet her on the road. Her husband works for the Coop and drives a 20 ton truck home every day. This leads to regular road damage. When he breaks the tarmac is peeled off. We now also have a big schoolbus coming past twice a day that is really too wide for the road so the sides of the tarmac are being cracked off all the time. Some other neighbours hate to see grass on a road so they have one wheel constantly on the soft ground beside it. this makes for channels that lead rainwater directly on the road surface.

Earlier this year we had some of the Sitka spruce plantations around us clear felled and then we had double arctic lorries racing up and down with huge loads. This has made that the road surface has subsided more than a foot in places since the underground is bog/turf in most parts. Left and right side of the road are now far from level.

And the year before we had a 40 to excavator tracking up the road that did a good bit of damage. Normally the County Council issues severe fines for track machines on a tarmac surface but since my family are foreigners in Ireland they did not care.

 

Then combine all this with huge volumes of rain carrying loose stones over the road surface and you may get the picture. The County Council will come by several times per year with a big truck from where two people on foot will shovel loose hot tarmac to fill the worst of the holes. Since the financial situation in Ireland is not great with so many cases of high ups filling their pockets wherever they can  I can only see it getting worse.

 

John

: Re: [Livingontheland] Please, don't try to buy a survival-stash of seed for the zombie apocalypse !

On 1/31/2014 5:56 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

And no we have plenty of small frosts but nothing much that goes even a few inches deep in the ground.

John

So the potholes are just neglect. 
Fred

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