This was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
Our groundworkers broke ground on October 9th 2017. Here's the digger and fuel bowser arriving:
Bit of a squeeze, but they got it on-site in the end! The driver set to work on the site strip right away. He'd been working for perhaps 45 minutes, when work ground to a halt... A land drain was exposed (well, kind of dug up, if truth be told), in the middle of the plot, all of 6" below the ground. The digger had removed a 2' section of it completely, as this photo shows nicely:
Oh well, can't have been that important! ?
So the scrape is completed, with vegetation separated off from topsoil. Here's our mountain of topsoil (about 20m3), ready for when we want to spread it back over our garden (and me, feeling all smug about the progress we're making in the space of a day!)
And the vegetation... well that was loaded by the excavator onto a 32T wagon. Now we had already arranged for pre-acceptance of our clay spoil at a quarry/landfill about 2 miles away, so the driver says "it'll be fine". 30 minutes later, the driver is on the phone, saying "I'm trying somewhere else - they wouldn't take it here". Another 40 minutes, and another call... "I am off to another place"...and so on.
So roughly 4 hours later, the wagon arrives back at site. Still full of the vegetation. "Nowhere will take it", says the driver. "It's because of the roots in the load", says the driver. Turns out, the driver has given my vegetation a tour of the North West, having been to 3 separate counties with it. I'm fairly sure he just took a fancy to it, and they went on a drive in the country... he probably bought it a cream tea in Blackpool and asked it back to his place... Here's the wagon in question:
Still, could have been worse... the groundworkers pulled a magic trick out of their hat. They dug a Transit-sized hole out of the bottom of the plot, and dropped the vegetation into the hole. Then they loaded the spoil dug out of the hole onto the wagon, and that was accepted at the quarry. The groundworkers compacted the vegetation, put a 600mm capping layer of clay over, and job done.
Pretty successful day, if you ask me!
- 4
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