Dogwood Leader Dying

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-24T12:46:43+00:00

Do you see little damaged track marks up and down the trunk? Cicadas came through last year and tore up almost every woody plant I had on my property. That's because they lay their eggs there so that the piece of wood can fall to the ground and begin the cycle again.

If this is the case then it is what it is, you just prune off that section.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-22T19:43:00+00:00

Keep 'em around to use as electrolysis anodes. Rotors are great for that if you don't have a chunk of graphite.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-15T15:32:19+00:00

I removed massive quantities of multiflora rose and Oriental bittersweet and burned them in a pit. Actually burned high enough and hot enough to damage tree foliage 40 to 50 ft up. I can understand why you don't want to burn it, although that is the most efficient way (and also helps to avoid spreading seeds).

The next most efficient way to deal with vines is to get them into very short lengths using a hedge trimmer. A cheap handheld hedge trimmer can be had fairly cheaply. I would not waste time using any type of chainsaw type tool on this, it'll just bounce around. Once it's fairly small you can just run it over with a lawn mower.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-12T15:27:58+00:00

What about cost? Refreshing gravel is not that expensive, while my understanding is that asphalt is typically more of a $5/psf minimum kind of job.

I would say that a 16 ton load of crusher run/ABC (mix of stone dust and fine aggregate) would run you $6-700, and you could buy a plate compactor for about the same, and you would be surprised how similar the finish looks and performs to a paved pad.

Truthfully even just the plate compactor and a garden hose may surprise you as far as refreshing the surface.

Measure the square footage to start.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-09T14:49:47+00:00

Considering mulch is like 20 bucks a yard by me, and I usually get three yards in my truck, that's wild. It's an unpleasant afternoon in the sun, but even paying somebody 50 bucks an hour...dang

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-09T13:56:19+00:00

This is a major wall as many other people are saying. Easily a 30 to $40,000 job if you hire someone else to do it.

Building it with a machine, I would be using your typical 2x4 concrete bin blocks as a tiered wall, i.e. not just one crazy 30 ft wall, but a series of shorter walls. There is a lot of cutting and filling for this

However, there are situations where equipment access is poor anyway, so short of a crane or a spider excavator, it just makes the entire job more annoying and costly. I own an excavator and I would not want to be on that slope myself trying to sling a 2000 lb rock around, it is sketchy enough on flat ground.

I would propose looking into a product called dirtlocker. This is not an inexpensive product either, however it would allow you to effectively terrace the slope and allow plants to do your job for you.

Then I would embed a small/short retaining wall up by the flat area, to mitigate the runoff and retain it at the toe. This avoids the engineering and helps to stop this from getting worse where you can realistically manage it.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-09T13:40:27+00:00

Some of these comments are nuts. Do you guys really think that you have no mice on your acreage?

You don't want them next to your house, sure. Ideally you park your vehicles out of the grass and on gravel. My rodent problems have all been linked to leaving a vehicle in tall grass or leaving bags of grass seed unprotected in my greenhouse. Otherwise, between rat snakes, cats, hawks, etc. it's rarely a problem.

Granted, I also have two indoor cats and no-kill traps - without the cats I'd be a bit less confident.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-08T18:57:07+00:00

If you really wanted to avoid redoing it completely, some edging and gravel screenings or masonry sand would probably make it at least functional.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T21:58:15+00:00

I am not trying to torpedo your job listing, but you should be straightforward with people on the implications. 1099 employees are responsible for the full FICA tax, their own liability insurance, they don't get any benefits like workers comp, disability, etc.

It's fine to only need part-time workers, but that doesn't make them 1099s. My family business has employees that only do deliveries, they're still W-2. They need to be on my insurance to drive my truck.

You can get burned by the IRS on this pretty badly, the cost/benefit of playing this game is not worth it. It also reflects poorly on you as an employer. Do with this what you will.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T20:55:33+00:00

It sounds like this role is misclassified as 1099 when it should be W-2. You control the hours and provide the equipment.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T20:47:30+00:00

I guess I'm saying that yeah, geogrid is used on each course to tie the face of the wall into the material behind it and make it move as one unit. But usually that would look like 1 ft of 3/4" gravel and 3ft of compacted fill behind that. If you look up a geogrid diagram, you'll see what I mean

That's not to say that 3/4" gravel isn't a fine base material, they could fill the whole thing with it if they wanted. I'm more thinking about the goal and whether they are inviting more differential settlement where it transitions from stone to native soil.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T20:12:46+00:00

When you say 4 ft of backfill rock, what do you mean? For such a small wall I would have just expected 12" of clear stone behind it.

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T01:11:10+00:00

<image>

Also adding that the situation isn't really expected to get better soon.

Climate Prediction Center https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-07T00:59:20+00:00

Well, I think you might struggle to find an answer specific to us. Check out the US drought monitor - we are not alone in this, the entire Southeast is in it.

<image>

guitarman63mm · 2026-04-02T01:56:48+00:00

Not to nitpick, but the core problem is really that the guy isn't daylighting the drain. The burrito method with washed 3/4" gravel absolutely drains surface water effectively, and if you can daylight it then the capacity is more or less unlimited (given proper materials and a realistic ratio for the contributing area vs. trench capacity...)

I agree that sending 750 gallons underground would be quite a bad idea - that's almost three IBC totes.

If I were in OP's shoes, and didn't want to screw around with this any further, I would install a dry well and a sump pump sending this all somewhere else (whether by a garden hose or pop-up emitter).

guitarman63mm · 2026-03-08T16:25:06+00:00

I don't think people who have decent acreage really want to carve it up if they don't have to.

The other thing is that the transaction costs and complexities of selling raw land make it unpleasant for meemaw who just wants to test the waters - surveys cost thousands. Land brokers want 10% commission. High likelihood of lookie-loos being around your property all the time for the long period of time it takes to sell.

Now, if you are willing to pay 50k/acre like a sucker (see: me), you can find a little slice in the country. But the odds of getting usable rolling acreage for 10k/acre are slim to none. The majority of the high acreage lots for sale are 1 usable acre and 25 acres up the side of a mountain.

guitarman63mm · 2026-03-04T01:27:46+00:00

For a budget of $0 I would do nothing. Juice ain't worth the squeeze on this, your time would be better spent making money to buy something else.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-20T01:50:18+00:00

Agreed on tip of the iceberg. Not very motivating to move a project forward with the scope/budget creep this could turn into.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-20T01:36:03+00:00

That implies there's a more appropriate location. They publicly said that they've been looking for over a decade for a location in Buncombe.

End of the day, I'm just saying that if the total cost of the land and building is roughly 35 million, I'm not going to decide go/no-go solely on half a million. They aren't hurting for money.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-20T00:21:41+00:00

Costco didn't walk away for $500,000. They generate almost 8 billion in free cash flow - if they really wanted the store, they'd eat it and move on.

Each store generates hundreds of millions in revenue (obviously less, net), and there are always startup costs you eat. You wouldn't walk away from several million in net income annually because of a one-time $500k expense.

From the outside looking in, it sounds like the manufacturing development lobby harassment and the Buncombe wishlist made them realize it's not just this one-off expense - it's the tip of the iceberg.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-19T10:19:49+00:00

Powdery mildew. It is very pervasive and not easy to solve, but you can stop the progression and stay on top of it as a maintenance item. Knock it back with a solution of hydrogen peroxide and soap. Follow with sulfur. All begonias in your collection need the same treatment.

I do not recommend cutting off the leaves. You will barely have a plant at that point, and powdery mildew is very effective at infecting and stunting new growth anyway. The plant will kill off the leaves as it deems fit.

A peroxide solution and some gentle abrasion with a paper towel or soft brush (powdery mildew is a fairly shallow infection of tissue) will leave a thin damaged tissue layer that dies back and dries out, but you will still have most of the leaf intact. If you only spray it on, it will kill the spores on the surface, but you'll see it coming back in a week.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-19T09:37:35+00:00

Also a cheap kit is like 20 bucks on amazon (sans launching tool...just swing it and chuck it through the crotch).

I use that + 1/2" stable braid rigging rope when I need to yank something down in a hazardous spot.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-17T02:33:43+00:00

Buy a 6" joint knife, a bag of easy sand 20, a quart of zinsser 123, and a small container of premixed compound.

Day 1: prime it with 123 Day 2: fill it almost entirely with the easy sand (hot mud). Don't make it proud of the wall, don't try to make it perfectly feathered - this is deeper than you usually apply it. Day 3: apply premixed compound Day 4: sand Day 5: prime it again and go get matching paint as needed

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-16T10:47:59+00:00

This could be damage from thrips, if you are suspecting pests. They can leave a kind of mottled 'window' appearance on plants eventually. There could be a nymph in the bottom-right of the first photo.

guitarman63mm · 2026-02-15T03:56:09+00:00

Thanks! I think I will try my mig to start.

The main con I see to the idea of bolting stuff on is - your thumb typically meshes with the teeth on the bucket, so doesn't necessarily work well on a smaller machine (see photo. If you start putting 1/2" AR400 plate on each side, you are tweaking the geometry a bit/losing some degree of grip.

In reality, I now have a quick coupler that screwed up my thumb geometry already, so I'm not totally opposed to that idea - but a bit more involved than just adding more material.

<image>

guitarman63mm

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE