You Dig?

I’ve done a lot of digging during the last 20 years of living here. I don’t have a back hoe, and most things I need to have dug out are too small to call in a pro. My largest dig where I should have hired someone was a twenty foot by thirty foot foundation and crawl space, three feet deep.

I hired an excavator to dig the foundation for the first addition I built on the house which was 16 X 24 feet, but that excavator not only broke a favorite fruit tree, but he also collapsed to top on my septic tank and when he came back to back fill he put soil back into where the crawl space was going to be. Since basements don’t work out well here, if I ever have to go under the house I want room to get around, not just the required eighteen inches. Yes, he dug it back out.

Anyway, anytime I ever hired someone to dig for me they always broke or destroyed something, so I just dig it myself.

The cool thing is that I have never dug up any rocks on my property. Sure it’s heavy clay once you get down a foot or so, but never any rocks. I lived where there were rocks when you dug, and that was never any fun, especially when you come into a rock the size of a Volks Wagon.

I recently had a big dig. I had to get down to some crushed stone and drainage pipe under a horse a pen and extend it under horse stalls. It ended up being a twenty foot trench, two and a half feet deep. If digging wasn’t enough I had to lay a drainage pipe and cover it with two yards of 2 inch drain stone.

When I put the spade and shovel down I told myself that I would hope to never dig again. However, yesterday my wife informed me that I need to transplant two Hanoki Cyprus trees. They are presently in big pots and will need holes that will be about four feet across and three feet down.

I often wonder if I will one day dig my own grave.