It is impressive how much work a digger can do in such a short time. Alister had been working on the block for just over a week to get the work done that he had quoted for. To me I believe that it is money well spent and I just can’t wait to get to the next stage of building a house, but we still have a bit of work to do before we get there.
The building site ended up being bigger than I had expected which is a bonus as now we have room to also build a three bay farm shed behind the house. Alister had also used the ripper on the digger arm to put a pipe in the ground from a creek up above the building site right down the hill so that we can have a water tank just above the house. The digger ripped the ground once before putting the pipe down at between 1.5 and two feet deep so it will not freeze in the winter. We had to use three hundred meters of pipe and it would have a drop of up to a hundred meters so it will be interesting to see if later on we can also run a pelting wheel off this water for extra electricity. Once the pipe was in Alister made a level site for a water tank to go. The next job was to clear an area for a fence line so that I can make an area for Mr Pig as I will not put him in the pig block with the other pigs for two reasons. One is that he might kill one of the other pigs and the second reason is that I know that he would kill any over aggressive dog if he had half a chance. A big part of training pig dogs is doing it responsibly. There is no point in putting a dog on a pig where the dog could get hurt, also on the other side of that there is no point in putting a dog onto a pig that the pig could hurt. We would not send our kids to learn how to box and put them in the ring with Mike Tyson because that would not teach then anything but scare them.
So one of my next jobs is going to be erecting another fence. Also while the digger cleared the fence line he also put in two small flat areas so that I can put a pig house on each one as my plans are to have two areas. One for Mr Pig and the other where I can open a gate to let the pigs from the block into for food this way if I want to take a pig out of the block for any reason I should be able to open a gate and get the pigs to come in for food then when they go back out I can just draught a pig out and keep it in there. So if the sow was going to have a litter or a pig got hurt I could take it out to give it a break from any dogs.
The last job that Alister was to do before leaving was to put some culvert pipes into the ground along the main track in so that when it rains the water does not scour the track out but gets diverted off the track.