Defeated by de Fence

We are back to the drawing board.

Rick went out this morning to dig another hole (the third one) for our fence.  I knew that this hole would be the most difficult because it was very near where we have removed a fairly good-sized cottonwood tree, so I suspected that he would hit roots.  Never did I dream, however, that he would encounter what he did.

He was outside before I was, but from the kitchen window, I could see that he was already hard at work with the SawzAll.  By the time I went outside, I was shocked to see that he had cut through and chipped away at about 10 inches of tree.  He had not just come across a large, horizontal root; instead, he was trying to put a hole right through what appeared to be one side of the vertical trunk root of the tree.

Digging a hole straight down the trunk root of a tree
is not a good idea.

As the picture shows, the tree part that you see in the hole is not looking down on the root, it is looking at the side of the hole and thus the side of the tree trunk that Rick was trying to cut through.  He worked at it for a couple of hours before finally deciding that the task was impossible without a trencher with a fairly good-sized bucket at the front.  We could not possibly put a hole in that location.

We looked down the line of post locations at the back of the lot, and Rick decided to try a hole in the other potentially trouble spot located just behind one of our birch trees.  He dug down one shovelful of dirt before encountering a web-like structure of roots.  Thankfully, the largest was about an inch in diameter, so we were able to use a pruner to go through those roots.  They took time and were irritating to deal with, but after the trunk root, these were manageable.

As he dug a little further, though, Rick came upon what we suspected was a telephone line since we were near the line the utility man had painted on the ground.  As we looked closer, we both thought for an instant that we had already severed a line.  Closer inspection showed us that the severed line really was a tree root, but the whole experience made us pause.  We also thought that we had found the main telephone line, but that, too, proved to be a large root.

Leaving that hole about a foot and a half deep, we moved on to the south side of the house.  Rick wanted to see if another hole near the painted lines would result in us finding the buried utility line.  This time, to our surprise, we definitely found an underground cable, but it was going perpendicular to the painted line that supposedly marked utility lines going either to our house or to our neighbor's house.  If we had known for sure that the line belonged to us, we would have just cut it since we no longer use any telephone land lines in our house.  However, without trenching up half of the yard, there was little way of knowing exactly where that wayward line lead.

That was three for three today, and Rick and I both were frustrated with the whole process.  Our only alternative, as we could see it, was to totally redesign the fence and to relocate all of the stakes to where we should dig the holes.  That meant that we would have to fill in the two four-foot deep holes that Rick killed himself to dig the past two days, but we saw little choice.

We decided that if we started in our original starting place on the northeast corner of the lot, we could go out with two shorter, four-foot panels on the north and the east sides.  Doing so would move all of the posts on both sides down four more feet, thus straddling on the east side where we knew the trunk root was for the old cottonwood tree, and moving further away from the birch tree. On the north side, we would move the posts four feet away from the wayward telephone cable.

To avoid the underground wires -- and hopefully be able to use a power auger to dig more holes -- we moved the fence line another foot closer to our house on the north side.  We also moved the fence line a bit closer into the property on the east side.  While Rick relocated the lines, I took a shovel and filled in all of the holes that he had dug today.  Then, together, we reset the stakes where the new holes should go.

This has been a frustrating day, to say the least.  The fact that the skies are cloudy and the weather is just damp and cold did not help our dispositions.  Rick had worked four hours only to have no new holes dug that we could use.  We have a new plan, but we are back to square one as far as the labor is concerned.

I just hope that this time we have a plan that will work in the end.