June 11, 2006
We had a pretty nice weekend for this kind of hard work. It was cool out (highs in the 60's & low 70's). We got a couple rains.
I get this much water 'naturally'. I think the gravel bed under the driveway is drying out now that I've dug this out. It took me a bit over an hour to widen it to this far. There is nothing like the bond between a man and his craftsman shovel when they've had so much quality time together.
There is where I burried a 4" line. Where it starts on the left is where the original pipe just stopped under ground. The idea was... the water will just leach out of the pipe into the dirt and that's it. It didn't. In fact that pipe was still full from the last rain.
That's grass seed on top of the fill in. I can keep this soaked up and hopefully get that grass to grow like crazy and take over this fill back.
I got some fireman boots. Not the real thing, but just the cheap China knock offs. $13 bucks at the farm & fleet store. Up to now, I've done the digging with just tennis shoes on. Now I need to stand in the muck and dig, so I got these. They worked great.
I probably dug on this about 4 hours to widen it back out. I stuck the garden hose in a down-spout and turned it on low to keep a good flow of water. It helps me figure out if I'm doing a decent job of sloping the trench down hill, plus a little water helps the clay not stick to the shovel as much.
I have a bit of an arc here, but I think with 20 foot segments of culvert I can do this.
It's a lot harder digging in wet clay and mud than it looks.
I hopefully can bring the culvert to meet this thing. I need to measure out the feet needed and see how it comes out. The problem is when this is 103 feet long and the culvert is in 20 foot segments.
After the culvert is in the hole, I'm going to shovel a lot of this 'yuck' dirt down on top of it. Let the good black dirt I have hauled in to be at the surface.
I need to weed this again. replant some stuff.. the beans and peas are not working out.. Onions, corn, tomatoes and cucumbers are doing great. I just use Burpee Seeds from Home Depot.