Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Gut-Trenching Work
My back and side yards are full of trenches. They're supposed to be two feet deep and wide enough to contain the piping necessary to feed 18 sprinklers in 4 different zones, meaning that they start out with four pipes and then at some point the pipes split away from each other so that the sprinklers in each region are fed by a region-specific single line.
I started digging them several weeks ago with the intention of finishing them in a couple of weekends with a couple of friends and then laying down sod on top of them. However, the evening before the Saturday that we were supposed to start I came down with a horribly dreadful disease--yes, you guessed it--the 24-hour strap-yourself-down-to-the-toilet-with-a-bucket-in-your-lap virus. Fortunately, I was feeling better sometime the next morning, though I still had some sort of mild headache
Anyway, I ended up renting the trencher on Sunday and attempting to dig myself some trenches. Well, they don't make those things very maneuverable. It got jammed in the sand as soon as I started using it, at which point I figured out that you aren't supposed to try to go forward with while it's digging. I managed to dig it out, but then the wheels were spinning freely without moving, and I couldn't budge it. I don't own any loose two-by-fours, but after many, many attempts I finally got some cardboard underneath the spinning wheel and enough sand out of the way of the other one to drive it out of the pit it was in. One of my friends then drove over and stopped by long enough to help me turn it around (no easy task; he is much stronger than I am) and I began digging the trench around the edge of my property.
Every half minute or so I had to strain with all my might to sway it back and forth to try to raise the back end which had sunk into the sand again. Along the back of the property, where there's a fence, after which the soil slopes down sharply to a point well below the street level, I wasn't able to keep it going long enough to continue. I finally gave up on that trench and began working on the one that runs behind the house, past the patio, plus one that runs and the eastern side of the house. Since that's level ground it went a lot easier, but I didn't dare try to dig side trenches coming out of it or even connect the two main trenches, because I knew I'd never be able to lift that thing out of the resulting pit.
After returning the trencher, I began hand-digging the side trenches and trench connections. Unfortunately, Becky came down with the same or a very similar dreadful disease the next weekend. Thankfully, another couple of friends were willing to watch Eric while I dug that day (a huge favor, as I made lots of progress), and then I got some help digging the next day from the friend that had initially turned the trencher around for me.
Now that it's freezing cold outside and gets dark at 4:15pm or so due to coming out of daylight saving time, I don't make much progress during the weekdays. Two weekends ago, Eric "helped" me dig--I gave him a trowel (one of those tiny shovels for gardening) and he dug some dirt off of the piles I had made and then threw rocks into the trenches. That same weekend, we took advantage of the huge JC Penney sale to try to buy all the clothes we'll need for the next 20 years. and last weekend I took Eric to the park adjacent to the elementary school down the street--he LOVED the slides. I still managed to dig out some of the loose dirt that the trencher left behind, for which I'm using the trowel rather than my trenching shovel, because the trencher blade is about an inch or so narrower than the shovel and I don't want to have to widen the trench just to get the existing dirt out. I ended up laying on my stomach--a.k.a. "gut", hence the title--reaching down into the trench to scoop, and lifting my torso up with my abdominal muscles to empty the dirt into a pile in a location that won't interfere with emptying the loose dirt out of the rest of the trench. It's quite a workout.
As for the sod, I ended up planting some grass seed a week or two before it got real cold instead, since I'm nowhere near ready to lay the pipes down--besides having to empty loose dirt by hand for the majority of the trenches, I still have to dig two more side trenches from scratch. We're trying to remember to water it (the grass seed) every day, but haven't been real consistent. We've already seen a couple of tiny little individual grass blades poking through the surface, but I don't know if they'll stick around because it's quite frosty in the morning. At least we know the seed has germinated and didn't all blow away in the windstorm we had a couple of days after I laid it down.
