Digging the trench, part 4

55 feet today, in about two hours forty-five minutes. This is kind of my production target - if I can keep going at this rate, it makes sense to do the job with the Kubota. Sure, it would get done faster with a full-sized backhoe, but it would cost more for the backhoe and I'd have to pay someone to run it. So I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

One thing I noticed toward the end of the day (why never at the beginning?) is that if I run the engine a little faster, the shovel moves a lot faster (not digging, just dumping). Since dumping takes up most of the time, speeding up the process of dumping should make the digging go faster. We'll see next time. I'm going to take a couple of days' hiatus from digging for a variety of reasons which I may discuss in a laster entry.

One worry about this process is that I'm getting close to the house site now, and we haven't actually laid out the foundations. If I don't get a foundation plan soon, I'm going to have to stop digging and do something else during my allotted three hours...