Rethink Your Life! Finance, health, lifestyle, environment, philosophy |
The Work of Art and The Art of Work Kiko Denzer on Art |
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Cob: I absolutely cannot believe this!Kim West kwest at arkansas.netSun Sep 7 15:52:19 CDT 2003
OK. This is just unreal to me. I am hoping that someone here will have an answer because I know without a doubt that people here have built, or are building, in South and Central America. We live in the southern United States and have imported fire ants that come from the regions mentioned above. I noticed while doing the foundation that they love to immediately inhabit the places that they assumed we were preparing for them--the trench, the ditch, and even the rock walls that the mortar had not even hardened on. They would be up and crawling around the mortar as soon as we got it in the wall. We tried non-toxic methods to get rid of them to no avail. They thrived on the stuff. So, I went and got a bag of 5% Diazinon that I knew would do the trick. The ground level floor of the house is/was currently just up to having the layer of washed gravel down to prevent water from wicking up through the ground into the house, so when I did a perimeter poisoning I also poisoned the ground floor area hoping that it would have done its job and gone away before we moved in since it is supposed to be gone in 6 weeks and it would be much longer than that. The perimeter poisoning done it seemed to work great and we saw no more fire ants. We also poisoned mounds we saw nearby. As we built the cob walls I noticed that mold was growing about 3 days after the cob was down so I started applying a layer of lime to stop the mold. That worked fine also. When I left the cob uncovered it dried too quickly--or it was getting wet from the rains when they came, so I started putting hay on top of the lime and liming the top of the hay also. This also served the purpose of keeping the dogs off the walls--once they got a whiff of the lime they left. Now today, just before rushing in here to try and find some help, I uncovered some of the older cob wall to make sure it will be ready to receive the next layer, and what did I find? FIRE ANTS! Living right there in the lime and cob! How they got across the poisoned perimeter barrier I have no idea--the barrier goes at least five feet out from the house and we have done it twice in the last 2 or 3 months. One of the boys said that they went under everything and I have a hard time believing that. If so, they started out 5 feet from the house, went down about two feet, went horizontally underground for at least nine feet to clear the poison and the cement bond beam, then came up in the cob somewhere that magically I forgot to poison. I may be wrong, I'm not buying that! NOW--Like I said, I know that there are people here who have built in Central and South America where these imported fire ants came from in the first place. Since they are building there they must have come into contact with them and found ways to defeat the little devils. You can't have a cob home with fire ants making their mounds in the cob. It turns a hard compacted cob wall into a pile of grainy dirt! And these suckers are doing it in poisoned and limed dirt. Please do not tell me that I should have built the rock wall taller--these devils have climbed at least 8 feet to make a home in an outside overhang above the bay window in the kitchen where we are currently living. I'm at a loss. HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT ARE/HAVE THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BUILT IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA DOING/DONE??????????
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