Forking foul-up

I was so excited to get out and start digging up the garden with my new garden fork that I didn't stop to think about where I was digging. I started in on the section of the far back bed where I'm planning to move the badly placed hypericum and immediately struck roots of the Ashe juniper that we cut down last year. I was pulling out giant sections of half-rotted root and turning over huge chunks of soil. I was accomplishing so much, so easily.

My husband had come out to admire my digging prowess when I hit something that felt really big. I assumed it was the mother of all roots and I pushed and pulled and levered and finally pulled up . . . the plastic drainage pipe from our new gutters!

Once I uncovered the whole section of the pipe (it's ridged black plastic about four inches in diameter) that I'd been attacking I found it riddled with holes. And at first we thought I'd cut it completely in half, since one end was poking up above ground and we couldn't even find the other end. We finally realized that I'd speared it just above a joint and had pulled one section out where it was shoved into the next section. We pondered the problem for a while and decided that if we could get the exposed end back into the continuing section and then covered up the various holes I'd made with the fork so that dirt wouldn't gradually fill in the pipe we'd be okay (we decided it didn't matter if the pipe leaked a little on its way to drain out into the alley; hopefully we haven't created the beginnings of a marsh back there). We made a trip to Home Depot to look for repair materials and finally decided that wrapping the wounded pipe with a plastic garbage sack and then backfilling with soil would solve everything for pennies.

I meant to take pictures to show the power of my new gardening tool but once I got started putting it back together I was too glad to get the embarrassing evidence covered up to remember the camera.