And then we got to digging ( and digging and digging and digging). To keep out those persistent woodland creatures (side note, I saw a bunny chasing a squirrel through our yard the other day. We live in a children's book, apparently) we have to put in a pretty serious fence. Not only does it need to be about 4 ft tall, but we are going to sink it 6 inches into the ground and kick it out six inches at a 90 degree angle. That way if anything digs down, it will hit the fence, even if it backs up a bit and tries again. This meant we had to dig a trench around the perimeter.
We're still debating ditching the garden and putting in baby crocodiles instead. Once that was done, we had a lot of holes to dig. Since the fence will be four feet tall, we decided the corner posts should be 4x4s to help keep things square and solid. We stood around and debated for a bit about how deep they needed to go in... 1 ft was the first suggestion, but that seemed too shallow, so then we thought 2 ft, but none of us really knew for sure so we called Mr. Wayne to see if he might know. Turns out, he estimated about 40 inches would be a good depth to keep the freeze/thaw and frost from pushing the post slowly up and out of the ground. Well, that was deeper than we were planning, but we reset our expectations and got to work.
The best technique was to use a breaker bar to loosen the dirt and then the post digger to pull the loose dirt out. Eventually we got all four corners done and the post put in, squared up and the holes filled in. It took quite a bit of time and all 4 of us (one to man the level, one to hold the pole, one to shovel dirt and another to tamp it down) but we made it.
To round out the day we also found a home for the swing and Matt cut the grass while I picked up the branches and pine cones that had fallen during the winter.
And then he changed the oil in both cars. Is he superman? Perhaps yes. And I'm pretty glad he's my man :)
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