More Digging

After the excitement of finding Yesterdays Buried Treasure, Husband spent much of the morning removing it, in the theory that it will not have been helping the drainage in the corner which floods. In doing so, it became apparent, that it isn't just in our garden, but goes quite some distance under our fence too!

The next snag, was the discovery of the footings for an old boundary wall, when the house was first built. This was unsurprisingly, exactly where we wanted the French drain. Never mind, we already have a trench where the trough was, which runs right along the wall, so we decided to make this the position of the drain.

Having dug the trench the length of the bed, it was then filled with ballast/soil mixed. Conveniently available in the very area we are working.

It may have been convenient for the drain, but all of this area is a mass of buried ballast. This means that we are having to carefully sort the soil and riddle the majority of it to remove the ballast. Luckily for us, one of our wonderful sets of neighbours has a home for all the sieved stone.

Once all that has been done, it will then need digging over (you can see some of the sandstone we find in the picture above!), quite a bit of the soil will be removed to reduce the level to the same as the patio. Then it will be time to incorporate lots of FYM before it can be planted up.