I felt terrible on Friday, and left work early, but mostly just napped. I slept most of Saturday too, but at least I didn't need Nyquil all day. All that happened those two days was that my new weed whacker arrived. It is a cheap POS battery operated one. I don't expect it to live long, but I was curious how well they worked. When I pulled it from the box, it felt even cheaper than I had expected.
Sunday I finally dragged myself out and put it to work. I whacked everything in the ditch.
The blade looks a little worse for the wear, but it is thin and cheap. I have to admit, it worked better than I expected. I doubt it lives long given how cheap it feels, but at least until then it seems to work fine.
I ended up making a Tractor Supply run for more glyphosate and landscape fabric, since I couldn't find mine. There was still green in the ditch, albeit very little. I don't understand how this stuff works for people at the rated strength. I mix it at 3:1 water:chemical ratio (1/2 gallon chemical, gallon and a half or so of water), when it is supposed to be mixed at 8.5:1, and it still doesn't kill everything. I understand the knotweed is hard to kill, but this ditch was just run of the mill weeds. It has doubled in price in the last couple of years too. Ugh.
When I got back, I pulled out all the ditch stuff. Annoyingly the sock somehow got wet despite being inside a sealed plastic bag. This made the cardboard tube it was one useless. I sprayed the ditch down with glyphosate while I waited for it to at least try to dry out.
I got the fabric down and got a little bit of gravel in the bottom for the pipe to sit on and hold the fabric in place.
The sock didn't dry out, so I had to manually put it on the tube. It isn't hard to do it this way, but it is a lot slower. I also knocked a bunch of leaves and stuff out of pipe.
After that it is just laying pipe, pull the sock over it, and put gravel down around it and bury it.
I quickly realized that I didn't have nearly enough pipe and stuff. I bought 100ft of everything, and the house is only 44' long, and you can't fit another house next to mine up there. I really thought it would be enough. I don't think I actually got 100ft of pipe though, I think the roll I grabbed was only 75'.
I also realized that I never dug the other downspout for the creek side. Oh well. Too late now. I was thinking I might make the back like a raised bed or something anyways since I was planning on leaving most of this drainage as pure gravel all the way to the surface. This just makes that more important assuming I ever actually put up gutters. Currently my plans aren't more specific than something over the windows so that rain doesn't come in every time it even as much as dribbles.
I got the pipe laid until I ran out. I have gravel on it periodically, but I don't currently have enough gravel to finish the job, I will need probably another dump truck worth.
I put a concrete block in it to hold the pipe in place. I go shopping tonight and will pick up the rest of what I need.
Because I can't get the tractor across yet, I have been moving all the gravel by hand, a 5 gallon bucket at a time. I will say I have become a major wimp, after about 10-15 buckets, which was a little over a quarter of the pile, I was spent. This pile is about 2/3 of a dump truck, the last third was used on the driveway last year.
After that I was tired, so I went and ran the sprayer out of juice in the driveway and called it a night. There wasn't a ton left in it after spraying the whole ditch.
I am hoping to get another truck of gravel delivered today. that way I can use the tractor to do the gravel work. That is what I bought the tractor for to be blunt.
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