Mud Pit

I mentioned in my last post that we had to stop watering our lawn for a week and a half leading up to the tractor coming.  So, after the hole was dug, we needed to play catch up with the watering.  I ran the sprinklers during the night on Monday and then again on Tuesday during the day.  Can you guess what happened to our hole?  Yep!  It filled up with water.

We have horrible clay soil here, and we've always had a problem with standing water in the area where we were burying the trampoline.  That's one of the reasons we planned to bury it there, to help with drainage.  We had hoped that if we got through the first few feet of clay, that we'd hit more porous soil that would let the water drain away.  And when we were digging, we did hit nice loose dry soil, so we thought it wouldn't be a problem.  Well, we were wrong.

So, Scott made a trip to Home Depot and rented an auger.  Then he proceeded to drill holes deep into the pit and fill them with gravel.  It was very messy work (and Scott worked really hard at keeping his expletives to a quiet rumbling under his breath so the kids couldn't hear).  Oh, and you see the lovely shade of brown that our grass is?  I'm really, really, really hoping we have a lawn back before the end of the summer.

 

Scott finally finished the holes just after dark.  We hoped that we'd wake up to a dry hole this morning.  Instead, we woke to torrential rain--all day long.  I went out in the middle of the day, and estimated there to be about a foot of standing water in the hole.  But, then this evening I went back out, and there were just a few little puddles, which means the drilled holes are working.  Now if the rain will stop long enough for the mud to dry, we can proceed with the second step of burying the trampoline.  The trampoline guys will come out and dig ledges around the edge of the hole, shorten the legs of the trampoline, and then place the trampoline in the hole.  It will be so nice when it's finished!