Early this spring, while the snow was still falling, we found someone with a backhoe and a low price. The excavation expansion went off without a hitch -- unless you count the fact that the operator snagged our water line. Have you ever realized how many things you use water for? Forget bathing and laundry and dishes -- try brushing your teeth with a dry brush. Try going off to teach without any morning coffee!
But we got that fixed, and before school was even out, we were clean again, had a footer poured and a foundation wall that rose with lightning speed. I started to believe that we would actually be sitting amid the brugmansias in winter, snow falling outside while we basked in tropical splendor.
That was until the backhoe, in making its final exit, snagged the line that carried water and electricity to the back gardens, the pond and gazebo.
We had to excavate a huge trench to get at the conduit and attempt a repair. Huge trenches are never easy, but the same backhoe had just reconfigured the land, and our dirt, courtesy of the upheaval, had been temporarily supplanted by table-sized boulders now needing to be pried up. In the prying process the glue holding together the PVC casing that held all the various tubes and wires broke. And in attempting to repair that my husband somehow pulled all the conduit out of the PVC. To add insult to injury, the pipe, jerking from its resting place as unexpectedly as it did, hit the kitchen window and cracked the glass.
So now all we have to do before we can get down to the business of building the greenhouse is fix the window, dig a 108 foot trench, take up the paving we laid last year, disassemble the rock wall surrounding the raised bed and dig into the center of the garden so we can lay all new conduit and hook up the power and water again. As soon as we have re-laid the paving, rebuilt the raised bed and filled in the trench and planted new grass, my husband can get back to greenhouse building. And I can replant the garden.
The good news there is that since we first built that bed 7 years ago our garden design has changed dramatically, and so the bed could use reshaping and rearranging anyway. Which will be a good way to use up some of the table-sized rocks the backhoe dug up -- if we can hire a forklift to get them to the back of the yard. And this time I'm going to build that rock wall with really good dirt pockets for wall plants.
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