Looking for ideas on what to do with the sloped portion of our lot.
http://216.47.41.37/yard/default.html , may take a bit to load.

Thanks,

Mark

TK's Top Ten Things To Do With Your Yard

1. Dig a hobbit hole, declare yourself 'Brandybuck Waterwader', and go
barefoot.

2. Throw raves until the neighbors move away, then squat in whoever's
spent the most on their landscaping.

3. Pan for gold, make a million, hire someone.

4. Raise mountain goats.

5. Take in a foreign exchange student and give them shovel. Do something
nice with terraces.

6. Give the rocks pet names.

7. Mow your lawn naked, then your neighbors will put up hedges and you
can pretend they are yours.

8. Paint a forest on the side of your neighbor's house

9. Install a ski lift

10. Roll and stack Astroturf on a wooden pallet so it looks like you are
planning a big renovation, then as the neighbors spend to keep up,
enjoy their efforts. Drink heavily

Mark wrote:

Looking for ideas on what to do with the sloped portion of our lot.
http://216.47.41.37/yard/default.html , may take a bit to load.

Thanks,

Mark

Thanks for the laugh, TK! Truly inspired!

"Trish K." wrote:

TK's Top Ten Things To Do With Your Yard

1. Dig a hobbit hole, declare yourself 'Brandybuck Waterwader', and go
barefoot.

2. Throw raves until the neighbors move away, then squat in whoever's
spent the most on their landscaping.

3. Pan for gold, make a million, hire someone.

4. Raise mountain goats.

5. Take in a foreign exchange student and give them shovel. Do something
nice with terraces.

6. Give the rocks pet names.

7. Mow your lawn naked, then your neighbors will put up hedges and you
can pretend they are yours.

8. Paint a forest on the side of your neighbor's house

9. Install a ski lift

10. Roll and stack Astroturf on a wooden pallet so it looks like you are
planning a big renovation, then as the neighbors spend to keep up,
enjoy their efforts. Drink heavily

Mark wrote:

Looking for ideas on what to do with the sloped portion of our lot.
http://216.47.41.37/yard/default.html , may take a bit to load.

Thanks,

Mark

Mark,

Assuming the top of the slope is your property line, my suggestions a

1. Plant the slope in a ground cover to prevent erosion. You could also
terrace the slope with drainage installed behind each wall.

2. Regardless of (1) above, install drainage pipe parallel with the side of
your house (about 6 feet from the house) that empties at the rear of your
back yard. Your property appears to slope toward the back of the property.
You should use three or four 12" catch basins with 4" drain pipe. As an
alternative, you could also use perforated drain pipe installed in the ditch
with a gravel bed.

This slope really needs to be addressed to avoid eventual damage to the
foundation. Just my $.02.

Regards,

Joe Morris

Please remove ZAP to email me.

"Mark" wrote in message
.. .
Looking for ideas on what to do with the sloped portion of our lot.
http://216.47.41.37/yard/default.html , may take a bit to load.

Thanks,

Mark

On Sun, 13 Apr 2003 09:31:10 -0400, "Mark" wrote:

Looking for ideas on what to do with the sloped portion of our lot.
http://216.47.41.37/yard/default.html , may take a bit to load.

Thanks,

Mark

Have you considered a water slide? j/k Wild flowers? Wooden tiers?

"Trish K." wrote in message .. .


10. Roll and stack Astroturf on a wooden pallet so it looks like you are
planning a big renovation, then as the neighbors spend to keep up,
enjoy their efforts. Drink heavily

You said Astro Turf?

April 20, 2003

This Grass Is Always Greener
By JONATHAN DEE

Perhaps synthetic life, like the natural world, has a cycle all its
own. For if it seems unlikely that artificial turf -- that banal,
discredited, visually displeasing fossil of the space age -- should
now be positioned as a philanthropic boon to the world's poor,
consider that its unlikely origins were in the world of philanthropy
as well. In the 1950's, the Ford Foundation, alarmed by the
deteriorating physical fitness of the nation's urban youth, financed
an effort by scientists from a subsidiary of Monsanto Industries to
develop an all-weather low-maintenance grasslike surface for city kids
to play on. By the mid-60's they had come up with a prototype called
Chemgrass. The first large-scale installation of a Chemgrass playing
field, at the Moses Brown School in Providence, R.I., was a success in
every respect, not least because it held up for more than 25 years.

Around the same time, 1,500 miles away, ground was being broken for
the Houston Astrodome, the first of the indoor sports arenas. In an
era when stadiums with roofs that open and close and other such
technological astonishments are the norm, it's worth recalling that
the Astrodome was billed for quite a long time as the Eighth Wonder of
the World. Original plans for the dome called for a dirt floor with
natural grass under a clear plastic roof; add plenty of water, the
architects reasoned, and the grass would grow just fine. Which was
true; the problem was, the glare created by the roof itself made
conditions for both players and spectators unbearable -- and when the
plastic was tinted to reduce the glare, the grass died. So the
legendary Houston rainmaker Judge Roy Hofheinz got on the horn with
Monsanto. On Opening Day of the 1966 baseball season, the Houston
Astros took the field on a brand-new Chemgrass surface -- or, as it
was now formally rechristened, AstroTurf.

Though technically only one brand among many, AstroTurf ultimately
became the colossus of its industry, smiting competitor after
competitor until the brand name itself became synonymous with the
product, a la Kleenex or Xerox or Band-Aid. No less a personage than
J. Edgar Hoover embraced the future by tearing up his front lawn and
laying down the artificial variety. Still, the AstroTurf boom was
mostly confined to sports facilities and other heavily-trafficked
public places.

Once the bloom was off the rose, however, the grumbling among the
amateur and pro athletes who played on all that AstroTurf, at first
just a murmur, began to swell into folklore. The most common complaint
was that the artificial surface -- essentially a kind of high-tech
padded carpet laid over a base of asphalt -- was hazardous to their
health. In a 1995 poll of the N.F.L. Players Association membership,
for instance, 93.4 percent said they believed artificial turf
increased their likelihood of injury. The key word, though, is
''believed.'' There's actually not a lot of evidence to back this up.
While it's true that there are some painful but relatively minor
conditions directly attributable to imitation grass (a ligament
condition known as ''turf toe'' is one, and another is a particularly
gruesome, skin-removing variant of carpet burn), when it comes to
serious, career-threatening trauma, you'd be hard pressed to find any
research that concludes that AstroTurf or any other artificial surface
causes more injuries than grass.

Which makes athletes' very real aversion to the stuff seem, at least
in retrospect, a bit more primal. Playing ball on a high-tech rug
doesn't feel natural (''If a horse won't eat it,'' the former
Philadelphia Phillies star Richie Allen once famously declared, ''I
won't play on it''), nor does it look natural. It's not even flat; for
drainage purposes, the asphalt underlay has to be constructed with a
detectable crown in the center. The growing advocacy for grass on the
part of athletes, fans and even the less tightfisted owners (among
other virtues, artificial turf was always seen as a cost-cutting
device) amounted to a nostalgic insistence that games with balls are
meant to be played on fields made of real grass, and that's that.

It culminated in a conspicuous back-to-nature movement that swept
through all of pro sports in the 1990's. The AstroTurf in Giants
Stadium, for instance, which had covered the field since its
construction in 1976, was torn up and replaced in 2000 with
elaborately engineered trays of real grass. New stadiums -- including
the one that replaced the Astrodome -- were built to resemble quirky
bandboxes of yore like Ebbets Field and were given ''Field of Dreams''
style names like the Ballpark in Arlington. It was a public-relations
ploy, to be sure, but one that, for a while at least, seemed to
restore some measure of boyish authenticity to the dismayingly
corporate settings of pro sports.

But the more money and labor that was lavished on all this grass --
or, as it's referred to in the sports world, ''natural grass,'' even
though its origins are closer to genetic engineering than to any
process found in nature -- the more players and fans alike began to
miss the one thing that artificial turf had always provided:
consistency. The grass field in San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, site of
this year's Super Bowl, was called ''embarrassing'' by the Kansas City
Chiefs' head coach Dick Vermeil. Heinz Field in Pittsburgh had to be
completely resodded three times last year. A player for the University
of Tennessee openly mocked the grass field in Nashville's Coliseum as
''dirt painted green.'' And Giants Stadium's two-and-a-half-year, $8
million effort to grow grass outdoors officially achieved fiasco
status, as all that unsatisfactory grass was torn up, ground down and
hauled off in dump trucks.

While owners and athletes across the country spent the last few years
learning expensive lessons about the difference between something
that's ''natural'' and something that's ideal, it turns out that the
artificial-turf industry was making its first significant
technological advances in 30 years. Now that the pendulum has swung
again, and disenchantment with nature has set in, the faux-earth
business is poised for a huge comeback. The new generation of fake
grass is softer, more adaptable, more visually pleasing -- such an
astonishing forgery, in short, that the world of sports is no longer
big enough to contain the ambitions of the people who make it.


Which brings us to a company called FieldTurf, formed in Montreal by
two old friends straight out of a buddy movie. FieldTurf's C.E.O.,
John Gilman, is a former Canadian Football League quarterback and the
classic front-of-the-store guy, a big, generous, charismatic man who
was born to sell. When his playing days were over, he made a decent
living in the luggage-and-leather-goods business. But to spend an hour
in Gilman's company is to understand that he's a man who needs some
action, and his doubles partner, a former tennis pro named Jean
Prevost, had just the thing.

In 1988 Prevost, a more reserved, owlish man, bought the patent for a
material that could be adapted as an artificial surface for tennis
courts. For most of the 80's, Prevost had a nice little business going
called SynTenniCo (as in synthetic tennis) and was happily installing
one ''grass'' court at a time, mostly for rich Americans who wanted a
little Wimbledon in their backyards. But Gilman is a big-picture guy.
He set one foot on the SynTennico surface and saw a future in which he
and Prevost played David to AstroTurf's Goliath.

FieldTurf, the product, consists of individual blades, about two and a
half inches long, of a polyethylene-polypropylene blend, woven
inseparably into a carpetlike backing. (FieldTurf's corporate office
is in Montreal, though the stuff itself is made, as is AstroTurf, in
the factory town of Dalton, Ga., aka ''the carpet capital of the
world.'') Poured onto this backing is an ''infill'' mixture made of
finely ground silica sand and so-called cryogenic rubber or recycled
rubber that has been frozen and smashed into tiny particles. A phalanx
of 37 current and pending patents, and Lord knows how many patent
lawyers, surround the specifics of this process.

A result is an awesome triumph of the ersatz: it gives beneath your
feet, it provides some cushion when you run and fall on it and, unlike
the more traditional asphalt-backed surfaces, it doesn't heat up like
a giant frying pan in summer weather. The fake grass blades are
oil-coated to prevent the scourge of turf burn; one FieldTurf sales
rep, in fact, a former N.F.L. player, is well known at trade shows for
stripping down to his shorts and taking a running dive onto the stuff.
The improved drainage capacities of that infill material mean that
only an eight-inch crown is required, as opposed to 30 inches on older
fields. Lines are marked on it with water-soluble paint; if a player
should bleed or throw up into it, a small vacuum removes the offending
patch of infill, which is then replaced. The turf has to be brushed
every month or two, like a shag rug, to keep the nap up. Total
maintenance runs about $3,000 a year. (Compare that with the $35,000
that one high school in Amarillo spent yearly just to water its
football field.) The only drawback, according to some players, is that
FieldTurf's little granules of rubber (nontoxic, Prevost swears) can,
in the course of a game, pop up and leave unnerving pellets on
players' mouth guards and faces.

More than anything else, though, FieldTurf resembles grass -- not just
on TV, as important as that is, but up close -- in a way that the
AstroTurf many of us remember from our high-school athletic careers
never seemed close to doing. For a couple of thousand dollars,
FieldTurf's installers will even throw in a special spray that makes
the rows of petroleum-derived blades smell like a freshly cut field.
Several clients requested that its FieldTurf be installed in wide
strips of alternating shades of green -- to resemble the marks left by
a lawn mower.

FieldTurf's first installation was a Hamilton, Ontario, indoor soccer
field in 1993. It wore out in less than a year, so Prevost began
tinkering again. Before long he had refined the grass-blade material
to the point where the company could guarantee its product for 8 to 12
years. A high-school football field here, a municipal soccer field
there, and then one day in 1999, a chance meeting with the legendary
former University of Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne eventually
led to Gilman's securing a contract to install FieldTurf in one of the
veritable temples of football, Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb.

By this time, the boys from Montreal had already shown up on
AstroTurf's radar. No longer a division of Monsanto, AstroTurf had
played out a kind of end-of-last-century story, expanding ambitiously,
being bought out by European partners, declaring bankruptcy as a
result of that partner's financial shenanigans and winding up the
property of Southwest Recreational Industries (SWRI, since renamed
S.R.I. Sports). Still, through the upheaval, SWRI's AstroTurf -- its
newer versions are marketed under the names AstroPlay or NeXturf --
continued to dominate. Well into the 90's, selling a product that was
fundamentally unchanged over the years, AstroTurf owned half the
worldwide artificial-turf market, 75 percent in North America.

The hardball started in 1998, when Gilman, suspicious about being
underbid by SWRI for a job in Kentucky, hired a private detective to
videotape the installation and sneak onto the field and report what it
was made of. In a matter of hours after the installation was complete,
FieldTurf sued SWRI for patent infringement, eventually settling out
of court. In 2000, FieldTurf sued again, and a final decision is still
pending. That same year, SWRI sued FieldTurf for, among other things,
violating the confidentiality agreement imposed from the first suit.
FieldTurf had to pay SWRI $1.2 million. To say that there is bad blood
between the two companies is a serious understatement. Maybe it's
because ex-athletes are involved, but unlike many corporate disputes,
the artificial-turf battle has all the decorum of a hockey fight.

In his office full of jock memorabilia at FieldTurf headquarters,
Gilman tries valiantly to restrain himself when talk turns to his
competitors, but he is not a gag-order kind of guy. ''It is not in my
nature,'' he says, ''to take a shot in the stomach and not come back
and hit the guy in the mush.'' Before long he is denouncing, with
irreproducible profanity, what he brands as AstroTurf's ''lies,'' its
''complete and total arrogance,'' and vowing ''to fight to my dying
breath for our rights.''

In the business world, of course, there's lying and there's marketing.
Keenly conscious of the perception of AstroTurf as anathema to
athletes, FieldTurf has successfully disseminated the story that the
rubber element of its turf's infill is made from recycled Nike
sneakers. Asked what percentage of the rubber actually comes from
ground-up Nikes, Gilman smiles somewhat sheepishly and holds up three
fingers. (To be fair, it's 3 to 5 percent.) The granulated rubber
really comes from a much less glamorous and cheaper source -- used
tires.

AstroTurf remains about four times the size of the little guys, but
the little guys like their position. FieldTurf's revenue went from
$1.7 million in 1997 to $50 million in 2000, and the company reports a
60 percent increase in sales in 2002 alone. And athletes do seem
enamored of it. Seahawks Stadium, one of two N.F.L. FieldTurf
surfaces, was voted by the N.F.L. Players Association as the best
artificial surface in the league and the third-best surface of fields
overall. Nineteen Division I college football programs now play on the
stuff, as do Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Devil Rays. FieldTurf
has passed the 600-field installation mark worldwide. Maybe the best
measure of how the company has, in Prevost's words, ''resurrected the
industry'' is the number of new competitors now nipping at its heels,
with names like RealGrass and SprinTurf.

And then there's Giants Stadium, one of the marquee locations in all
of sports. In late February, FieldTurf won a bid to install the
surface that will be played upon by the Giants and Jets and was
christened last week by Major League Soccer's MetroStars.

In 2001, the artificial-grass game got a lot more competitive when
FIFA, soccer's global governing body, shocked the sporting world with
a change in its regulations: World Cup preliminary matches, previously
restricted to grass, could now be held on FIFA-approved artificial
pitches. The first to receive such approval was Nickerson Field at
Boston University, whose brand-new surface came from FieldTurf.
Thirty-nine fields worldwide have been approved, from FieldTurf,
AstroPlay and a variety of manufacturers.


But while football, baseball and soccer stadiums are certainly
high-profile business, there's a finite number of them. A much deeper
market is found in budget-conscious high schools and municipalities;
FieldTurf is working on the Parade Grounds in Prospect Park in
Brooklyn, for instance, and SWRI reports that its installations in
schools and city parks more than doubled in 2001 alone.

And then there are more inventive applications. While golf tee boxes
and driving ranges have been artificially turfed for many years,
FieldTurf has just completed its first nine-hole course made entirely
of artificial grass. (Think of it: no pesticides, no water, no mowing,
no divots. . . . ) One of Gilman's pet projects is Air FieldTurf,
artificial landscaping of the acres of wasteland surrounding airport
runways: not only would maintenance costs be near zero, but the fake
grass, unlike the real thing, would discourage the presence of birds
and other wildlife. And why not lawns, an ersatz branch of nature
under any circumstances? Four hundred to 500 people in the Southeast
alone have already ripped up their lawns and replaced them with
low-maintenance, eye-fooling FieldTurf.

But for a real glimpse of the future, all you have to do is leave
Gilman's large, warm, dark-wood office, with its autographed photos
and its array of football helmets, and walk down the hall to where
Jean Prevost spends his working days, in a small office overlooking
the parking lot. Here there are no comfortable chairs for visitors, no
assistants bringing coffee; nothing hangs on the walls, and the floor
is covered with papers and drawings and three-foot-square sections of
turf tagged ''Hawaii'' or ''San Diego.'' Prevost still has that
inventor's glint in his eye. His horizon line extends well beyond the
desire to deliver a knockout blow to the archrivals at AstroTurf.

One of the company's most treasured stories about itself, which
borders on the biblical, concerns the time a sapling was found growing
in the end zone of a FieldTurf installation in Seattle. While true, it
wasn't quite the revelation that company literature makes it out to
be. Way back when he was installing tennis courts, Prevost confesses
that ''clients would call me up to complain that their
artificial-grass tennis court had real grass growing in it.''

It's true: real vegetation, counterintuitive as it seems, will
actually take root and grow in Prevost's fake earth. The idea clearly
consumes him. In the end, if he has his way, his legacy won't be just
an invention that saved wear and tear on the joints of millionaire
athletes: FieldTurf will feed the world. ''My pet project,'' he says,
''is the arid countries of Africa, areas where the land is not arable
because the topsoil blows away. One 40-square-foot container of
FieldTurf could feed a thousand people.''

With this picture in his mind's eye, the company's potentially
explosive financial success starts to look more like a means than an
end. ''I feel good about where the company is now,'' he says. ''That's
going to allow me to do the bioengineering research I need. I'm
putting together a team right now. The depth and range of this project
will knock people's socks off. It's going to be huge.'' He sits back
in his chair, seeing the heretofore unseen, and there's nothing fake
about it.


Jonathan Dee is the author, most recently, of the novel ''Palladio.''
He last wrote for the magazine about the myth of the 18-to-34
demographic group.


(This article was e-mailed to me by the NY Times based on my recorded
e-mail preferences, and is forwarded to you for your amusement)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/ma...nt&posit ion=