It is widely known that rain tends to make ground softer,
and wind pushing on trees in soft ground tends to cause
said trees to fall over. This Idea is about preventing
that.
First, consider the humble roofing nail. It is normally
used
to hold shingles onto a roof, and they have wide heads
because standard asphalt-saturated shingles are made of
soft-ish material that can tear around small-headed
nails.
The invention here requires a wide head, also.
An ordinary screw has a shape that is also called a
"helix".
When the screw is large-sized it is sometimes called an
"auger", but the important thing here is the helical
shape.
We want a quite-large screw, with a head and a screw-
thread that is at least 6 inches (about 15cm) in diameter,
and perhaps a couple of yards/meters long. The head of
this screw, a Teelix, will have an appropriate way for a
tool to be used to make it turn, much like a screwdriver
can turn an ordinary screw.
Now let's consider ordinary tree roots, MOST of which
radiate from the base of the tree in all directions. The
tree may or may not have a "tap root" that grows deeply
into the ground, but every time I've seen a fallen tree
and
looked for a tap root, it doesn't seem to be there. It is
certainly not a very large-diameter root.
Compare that to an ordinary wooden telephone pole.
I've
seen how deep a hole is drilled into the ground, before
the
pole is inserted --about 1/5 the total length of the pole
is
underground. Hurricanes don't generally blow telephone
poles over --they will snap first, simply because they are
so
solidly connected to the ground.
Since we want a Treelix to last a long time, it cannot be
made of ordinary steel, which rusts and eventually fails.
It
needs to be made of more-resistant stuff like stainless
steel or titanium (both of which are also, usually,
biologically inert).
So, near the base of a tree, perhaps half a yard/meter
from it, we screw several Treelixes into the
ground, evenly
spaced around the tree. We want to MISS the major tree
roots! We want the wide flat head of this device to hold
tree roots down. We want the depth of ground-
penetration to be the equivalent of the underground part
of a telephone pole, only we are giving the tree several
of
these connections to the deeper ground, where even if it
is
soft ground, the force needed to topple the tree goes up
considerably.
And so the tree will now be less likely to become a
victim
of bad weather, and its beauty will last longer. That's
all.