[Cob] Foundation trenches

[Amanda Peck]

Hmm.  You must be farther south than I am. I don't think I've ever seen 
grapevines as invasive horrors.  Greenbriar, poison oak/ivy, kudzu, ivy, 
privet, honeysuckle, blackberries, well, yes.  Although I tend to have mild 
positive feelings about blackberries and honeysuckle.  You can eat them and 
they smell nice.

A small backhoe--some places you can rent one called a Terramite, or small 
excavator is a lot less destructive than a dozer, which couldn't, with it's 
big wide blade, dig a foundation trench at all.  Although a friend of mine 
swore he could manipulate his big dozer without damage to anything he didn't 
want to damage.

I'm debating whether to put a small storage/guest house up on stilts because 
a) the insurance is quite a bit more--and probably won't get less over the 
years, and on the other hand b) holes are a lot easier to contemplate doing 
by myself either just digging or with the tractor auger than a continuous 
foundation.
..............

Lucynda wrote:

i haven't dug my trenches yet, but plan to begin either this fal or next 
spring.  I am going to do it by hand simply because i have seen what having 
heavy equipment on the property can do.  They had to bring bulldozers in to 
make a space in the woods for the mobile home we are currently living and 
and it completely destroyed the area and damaged the few trees that 
remained.   We also have spent the last 3 years racking up gravel from bare 
clay and tryingto get grass to grow on it and cutting through mountains of 
brush pile that were shoved into forested areas and are to close to other 
trees to simply set on fire.
The dirt here is rocky and i don't expect the digging to be easy.    I plan 
on trying to keep the forest around me as undisturbed as possible (well 
except for killing off the invasive muscudine and green brire vines)