Long time no blog. Not that there has not been interesting house stuff to blog, just it hasn't been done.
At the moment we are trying to set up our grey water scheme. Grey water is the stuff from the shower, bath and laundry that normally goes down the sewer or septic. In Victoria (Australia, not Canada and not anywhere else either and certain not good old Queen Vic herself) it is legal to divert greywater onto the garden. So we are. It will mean that we can set up our little apple orchard and never have to worry about it having too little water again.
The plan was to dig an increasingly deep trench in the back yard - there is a wee slope towards the front yard so to get the water to flow "uphill" we would need to dig the trench deeper and deeper (so it actually flowed down).
So I set up a line to dig along. Nathan loosened the soil up some with the mattock and I started digging a trench.
Along the way I discovered this:
That is a root of the camphor laurel that appears to be bigger around than my thigh. I dug down about 20cm around it and never found the bottom of the root. It is slap bang in the path of the trench.
Of course trenches can go around roots but I also noticed that the camphor laurel is shooting again, so we have to pour more woody weed killer into it. This means there is very little point planting an apple orchard near it.
So I made an executive decision to point the grey water out the front. The front is downhill. I still have to make a trench but it is easier to deal with and does not need to be so deep. The apples will live quite happily in the front yard. They are only bubby apples on dwarfing rootstock.
The trench went in fine and the water even runs through it:
Then I started digging the holes for the apple trees. a) clay. b) see below:
A copper pipe. Right under where I want to plant the trees. Hoo-ston, we have a problem!
anon!
PS - a hint of some action inside the house....
