That's quite enough for now

 This morning I headed out early to pick up a couple of bags of layers pellets, some petrol for the chipper and a few essentials from the supermarket. The errands took a little over an hour and I arrived home to see that the drainage contractors were doing their best to cover everything with a thick layer of sticky clay.

Whilst the two lads who have done the work have been brilliant, we are not overly happy with the way the job has been designed and costed. A mini excavator and dumper truck have been costed in, but the site is so wet that all digging and spoil removal has had to be done by hand.  Three tonnes of the wrong type of aggregate has been delivered and then removed. The original drainage design included an attempt to get water to run uphill and the list goes on.

Basically the work that has been done has been perfectly good, but that is down to the two chaps on-site. They took one look at the job specification and then decided to make some major modifications, so that the ditches and drainage will should work.  

It is fair to say that we have had some lengthy and fairly heated conversations with one of the managers about how good their on-site team are, but how appalling their scheduling and solution design were.

The ground is so wet that there is absolutely no chance of them finishing off the work to our satisfaction, so it has been agreed that they will leave the garden as tidy as possible and return in the Spring, once the ground has dried sufficiently.  

The main problem is the low berm that borders the boundary ditch.  This is a vital part of the ditch to ensure we have sufficient depth and capacity to handle the run off from the upslope field. Unfortunately the berm got damaged during the excavations and needed to be restored. It is now topped by an uneven pile of sodden spoil that will need to be smoothed and profiled with a mini excavator. Unfortunately that part of the garden is way too wet to support machinery, so it'll be like that until next Spring.

As I said yesterday, "it'll recover ... eventually."