Winter is upon us. Everything in the garden is asleep. Or at least they are suppose to be. Even though it has been cold here, the weeds are doing just fine. I finally had the chance to do my fall cleaning and ended up weeding. But I digress.

The one thing, at least for me, that is year round is cleaning out the gutters. I love fir, pine and cedar trees. They are beautiful and stay green all year round. I hate their needles. They get everywhere! On one side of our house they are close to the house, so the gutters fill up quite quickly. The way our gutters are set up is they drain down into corrugated tubing that hooks each drain into one tube that then takes the rain water out to the ditch by the street. About a year ago the corner drain clogged up so badly that I had to dig the  tubing out and replace it because all 5ft of it was clogged. It wasn’t easy. That part of the yard was covered in years worth of gravel and is where we store our boat in the summer. So it was pretty compacted.

I now have another drain that is clogged. I was hoping all I had to do was clean out at the base of the drain pipe that goes into the tubing, but no such luck. So today I spent a couple of hours digging. Where this isn’t hard compact dirt, it does have a few obstacles. Like the very thick pad from the old heat-pump, a small privacy fence and the garage side door cement pad. It also has the roots of those damn trees. As of now I have it somewhat dug out. I have yet to find the end where it hooks into the main pipe and it worries me because the tube is going deeper and I am right next to the fence.

As you can see there are a lot of roots. A couple of big ones run across the top of the tubing (which I swear it’s in there but the dirt keeps covering it up) and I’m hesitant to cut them. The tree I think they are attached to is rather big and I don’t want to compromise it. If it fell on my house it would hurt it. 😦

I have also been strongly reminded by my body that I am no long 20. That digging a trench is not something I can do in a couple of hours. So this is as far as I got today. Tomorrow, if I can move I will go back out and try again. I know I am close to where the connection is. I just want to get this one done and hope that the clog goes no further. Digging out the entire system is not something I really want to do.

As for the other… let’s see, 1,2,3….5, I hope they will wait until summer when it’s warmer outside and I have more time to spend playing in the yard.

Have a safe and Happy New Year. 🙂

Heidi