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03/15/2010: "The $80 Experiment"

This has been a warm winter, and not as wet as some other years. Nonetheless, the south yard still ends up with pools of water... right where I planted a couple of rows of raspberries a couple of years ago. Needless to say, the raspberries have not done that well. In the city a raspberry patch is a fierce competitor: they leap fences into neighbor's yards, they sprout out of adjacent garden beds where they're not wanted, and they generally grow into a thick tangle of canes; I expected similar behavior out in the south yard, but the yearly winter drowning, the relentless pressure of the grass, and the dry summers have kept the farm canes looking like a set of spindly stalks.

What has been needed, and for some time, is better drainage in the south yard. With better drainage, the south yard could host all kinds of fruit and nuts: hazelnuts, grapes, blueberries, raspberries, etc. Thinking that this might be the year to develop the south yard, I ordered all those and more from my favorite nursery, Burnt Ridge Nursery.

Burnt Ridge crossed me up, though: they shipped everything earlier than I expected! I had expected to have the month of March to do the tiling (drainage), but all the plants arrived last week.

I put all the plants in a temporary bed for the moment, and set out to accomplish installing the drainage piping. The drainage pipe looks like a large diameter plastic hose covered with what looks like a fabric sock. I decided to rent the same trencher that I had used to dig the trench for the conduit back in 2007; I wasn't sure that the ground was dry enough, but I was willing to spend the $80 to rent it for three hours and find out.

I drove down, whipped into the local big box store and bought two large rolls of drainage pipe (the most that would fit in the little pickup), and then set off for the rental establishment. I got the unit attached to the truck, and set off for the farm a few miles away. I was focused! I was dreaming of running two long trenches down the east west length of the south yard.

Pulling up at the farm, I unloaded the trencher and positioned it at the east end of the yard. It was a relatively dry and sunny day, though it had rained the week before.



I immediately found out that it was still too wet to trench effectively. The trencher would dig into the earth and make a slice, but it couldn't really get traction in the damp grass to move the trenching blade forward. It kept wanting to dig with its wheels, not the chain blade! I debated: should I take it back immediately and see if they would refund my $80? i doubted they would, so I decided that I had to keep going. I went and got some of the barn siding that awaits installation, and I put that under the wheels. This gave me enough traction to be able to move the trencher backwards, inch by painful inch. I just had to rotate different boards into service: as the trencher left a board behind, I would have to stop the trencher, shovel the dirt off the board, and then lay it down behind me for the trencher to re-use.

It was quite the ordeal. In three hours I was just barely able to get 150 feet of trench dug, with very little time to spare for loading the trencher back on the trailer. And it wasn't a great trench, either. The heavy soil did not come out of the trench cleanly, and although the point of the tool was at two feet down the resulting trench was only 18 inches deep after all the dirt that had been churned up fell back into it.

Net result: it's still too early to trench with that kind of tool. I'm eighty dollars poorer. And wiser. I think that if I'm going to do any trenching in March it will have to be done with the backhoe, which thankfully does not have to be rented. It won't be fast, but it seems unlikely to be any slower than the Baretto trencher in damp ground. We'll see next weekend.