Posts Tagged ‘digging trench’
More Digging
What’d you do yesterday? I dug through dry, packed gravel that was as hard as concrete to uncover even more of the AC power wires to the barn. With Cyndie’s participation, we worked together from two ends and met in the middle.
The owner of the Electric/Plumbing company we use for service stopped by in the morning to assess the situation. He was concerned there could be an additional splice and convinced me to dig up the rest of the lines all the way to the barn.
That was easy for him to say and a heck of a lot of work for us to do. At least we now know there are no other splices, at least not in that direction. I have very high confidence the patchwork that was done over ten years ago did not involve any more than the bare minimum repair to solve (and bury) the problem they had created.
What still remains unanswered for now is whether or not the splice is where power is actually being lost. I have notified the company that the cables are exposed all the way to the barn, allowing them to schedule an electrician to (hopefully) verify the splice is the problem and then redo all three splices with a much higher-quality up-to-date process.
I’m looking forward to that work being done so we can put all that class 5 gravel and thick clay soil back where it came from.
I don’t know what today’s projects at Wintervale will be for us, but I’m going to make every effort to avoid anything that involves digging.
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Wild Plums
We hadn’t put much focus on the wild plum trees growing on our property until last year when the yield of fruit was so high we couldn’t help but gather bowls full for making jam. This year the yield looks as good or better. Maybe that’s because we are more focused on it now.
It seems like the plums turned red really fast and the trees near our trails started dropping fruit over a week ago.
Cyndie has demonstrated great interest in gathering this year’s crop so we have been making frequent visits to shake trees and bag what comes loose.
Some of the plums look pretty big but after biting into one, I quickly discovered the pit takes up about half the size.
When making jam out of wild plums, removing pits ends up being the majority of the work.
The few that I ate while collecting the best-looking specimens weren’t as sweet as what I remember from last year, but they weren’t sour or bitter either, so they should still make for good jam.
Collecting plums provided a nice diversion from another project I was toiling away at for a second day in a row. In addition to spending an hour a day trimming portions of fence line, I started digging a trench in search of the AC power lines feeding the barn.
We still need to fix the break in one phase line that was discovered last winter. I suspect there is a failure at the point where the wires were reattached back in 2013 after they were accidentally cut by a skid-steer tractor. We have been reviewing photos from that time to determine roughly where the broken cable is routed but it is still a bit of a guessing game. We don’t have the luxury of a device to precisely locate buried cable.
I’m also not sure about how deeply the cable is buried. I wish I had paid more attention to what was going on when they fixed it over ten years ago.
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Done Trenching
We had a variety of options available to work on yesterday, but chose to stay with the project to bring electricity to the chicken coop. It seemed as though the chickens were wondering when we were going to show up. When I stepped out of the house, they were all up near the front door.
I turned back to warn Cyndie, because she was bringing Delilah out with her. Despite a recent occasion when I was distracted while holding the leash and Delilah jerked violently in an attempted chase after the chickens, Cyndie reports a series of well-behaved, closely supervised, successful passes between dog and chickens.
Delilah is acutely aware of the chicken’s presence as Cyndie leads her past for a walk.
Despite the third consecutive day of abnormal heat for September, we braved the blazing sun to complete the trench to the barn. That was not an easy feat, because the last stretch crossed an area where we had laid down a lot of gravel for the driving path extending beyond the back of the barn.
To put it mildly, it was rather unforgiving. That’s great news …for a road. Not so great for trench digging.
Once inside the barn, we routed the cable to the circuit breaker box on the far side. That was about the extent of energy we had left to offer. Final connections will wait.
The hard part is complete.
We are done trenching, thank you very much.
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Relative Something 