Dear Suzy,
Our home has a huge brick patio in back. We like having the brick, but
unfortunately it is often covered with a layer of green slime. Not only is this
unattractive, it is smelly and slippery. The brick has sand under it, is
uncovered, and the algae seems to be worse where there is shade. Directly under
the eaves of the house the brick is clean, I suppose because it doesn’t get
wet.
We have brick (a different type) in our front yard which gets just as much
shade and doesn’t have this problem. What can we do to prevent this and what
can you tell me about brick? Are there different grades? Did they choose the
cheap brick for the back or could it be some other factor, such as
drainage?
Thanks,
Fran H.
Dear Fran,
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I believe your patio is the victim
of the most pervasive multi-level marketing scheme of the 1990s, first
introduced in Oregon, I think, by a group of entrepreneurial single-celled
Thallophyta with too much chlorophyll on their hands. Without a whole lot of
money, without media access, without even any hands, these plants — pond scum,
if you will — convinced all the impressionable humans in North America that
their complex dietary requirements would be fulfilled and they would rid
themselves of colds, backaches, rashes, and dyspepsia if only they would eat
more algae. To be more specific, Blue Green Algae. And the only way to
get this life-altering algae was through selected distributors who had
squandered their children’s college fund to buy overpriced packets of the stuff
to resell at a 1,000 percent markup. So, the original single-celled Thallophyta
have now retired to their villas on the bottom of the Amazon River, while the
humans sell this pipe dream to each other and send their profits to a post
office box in Brazil.
The good new is your patio is a gold mine. You can charge people — and charge
’em a lot — to lick it clean every day. (Although the accumulated saliva may
present its own problems.)
If you can’t swallow the algae conspiracy theory, I have a much more mundane
(and more likely) cause: poor drainage. I talked with Mack at one of the better
known brick companies here in Austin and he concurs. There are different grades
of brick, but because we don’t get those digit-freezing temperatures here in
Sunnyville, there’s not a whole lot of bricks you can’t use. If your brick is
an especially cheap imported variety, which absorbs water like a sponge, this
might help contribute to the problem, but still you have to trace the moisture
to its source. Maybe it’s as simple as rerouting the runoff from your roof.
Maybe it’s as thrilling as an underground spring.
Maybe it’s as grueling as a leaking water line or uncooperative topography.
Then again, maybe it’s more frightening than mere mortals can comprehend.
This article appears in October 25 • 1996 and October 25 • 1996 (Cover).