Crossposted from https://piefed.social/c/barefoot@piefed.social/p/2201987/our-beach-is-now-barefoot-friendly

When we bought our house last year, this was the state of the lakefront:

Unkempt beach

It was completely overgrown with pine trees, aspen trees and bushes. The previous owner of the house just plain stopped caring years ago, and it was so overgrown the lake could barely be seen from the house.

So I had a lumberjack fell the trees and clear the bushes. When winter subsided, it looked like this:

Beach after the lumberjack cleared it

Much nicer! But it was pretty much impossible to walk on without shoes on because of all the roots sticking up. A beach you can't walk on barefoot isn't much of a beach, is it?

So last month, I got a guy with an excavator to remove all the tree stumps and the roots underground. It took all day and he removed almost 10 tons of roots! That was the beach after the excavator left:

Excavated beach

And finally, yesterday and today, with a shovel and a rake, I manually dug up another 800 lbs of roots and decaying organic material - this whole area is peatland, leveled the beach and coarsely sifted the sand to make sure nothing nasty was left in it so that I could enjoy our beach barefoot, as beaches should. Good thing I did that too, because I unearthed a lot of broken glass: apparently, people have been enjoying the summer holidays, drinking beer and throwing the bottles on the beach for decades here.

And now the beach finally looks like a beach 🙂

Now I'm trying to rent a beach cleaning machine to lift up the sand and remove all the small bits of organic material left in it. That's just too much to sift through manually. But I can't seem to find any such machine anywhere in the area...