{"id":24341,"date":"2026-04-29T22:04:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T20:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=24341"},"modified":"2026-04-29T22:15:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T20:15:24","slug":"another-full-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/another-full-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Another full day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starting with putting barriers around my newest apple tree in my back garden and the already chewed Japanese Flowering Cherry in the front. As far as the latter is concerned, it still has a few leaves on it and as they are reputed to be avid growers and I don’t have the time to do anything else with it for the time being, now I’ll just wait and see if it recovers. If not…<\/p>\n

Then I refuelled both of my new machines which was a slow process as neither have any means of showing the level in its fuel tank until it overflows. That’s undesirable at the best of times but at the moment fuel on the ground, or worse, fuel all over the engine, is an expensive waste that needs to be avoided. Then I could get on with my digging, except that I couldn’t.<\/p>\n

The reason was that I decided to continue from the other end of the excavation, the left hand side closest to the new excavator garage. The reason was that I thought that if I ended up there I’d be boxing myself into a relatively tight squeeze. The big problem, though, was that now the big old walnut trees and other greenery have leaves on their branches, they had dropped down into the area in which I needed to position the excavator.<\/p>\n

I knew that this was going to be a problem that would need to be dealt with at some time so today was as good as any to take my life into my hands and risk almost instant death by climbing up into the upper branches and sawing off the ones against which I’d be leaning my ladder. After a couple of scares when the ladder threatened to fall down taking me with it it actually went quite well and I lived to fight another day.<\/p>\n

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The amount of foliage that I removed turned out to be much more than I expected. I’ll leave it for now but as soon as I can get around to it I’ll have to chop it all up with my electric saw, put it in my trailer and take it to the ‘d\u00e9ch\u00e8terie’ at Rouffignac for disposal.<\/p>\n

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I also took my saw (hand, not electric) to the large root from yesterday and cleared the area of ground from which it had emerged.<\/p>\n

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Only then was I able to get excavating again and at the end of the day I’d managed two more bucket-width strips. This was much slower than a ‘pro’ would have done, especially with a bigger machine, but I’m still learning the knack of working both levers in order to scoop a good bucket-load of earth cleanly out of the ground, then raise the bucket, swing the machine and drop the load into the dumper.<\/p>\n

The other thing, of course, is that I’m running each dumper load up the garden, depositing the earth on the slope behind my house and then spreading it with a large rake to reduce the steepness of the slope, all of which takes more time.<\/p>\n

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After digging the first strip the excavator’s swing beam came into its own as I had to dig the second strip to one side of the excavator, as I will have to for all the subsequent strips. All of the ‘cheap Chinese mini excavators’ that you see on the internet don’t have swing beams so are much less capable than my machine. I didn’t take any photos of it in action but I will next time.<\/p>\n

Finally, two shots of the earth I’ve dumped and spread on the slope behind my house in order to reduce its steepness. It doesn’t look like much but I’d guess that it must amount to around 2 tonnes, so an impossible task to do by hand, especially single-handed.<\/p>\n

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My two new machines are performing exactly in the way I hoped they would \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Starting with putting barriers around my newest apple tree in my back garden and the already chewed Japanese Flowering Cherry in the front. As far as the latter is concerned, it still has a few leaves on it and as they are reputed to be avid growers and I don’t have the time to do … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24341"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24354,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24341\/revisions\/24354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}