I have been doing some other things, so I haven’t made much progress on our front walk. I got back to it on Sunday. I was digging out about 10 feet from the bottom of the front steps when I hit concrete. It was our septic tank.

I knew the tank was somewhere around there, but I thought it was a little further from the steps and the front of the house. Hitting it there means I have to curve the walk around it, since I don’t want the walk to be actually on the septic tank. I suppose an arrow-straight walk looks best, and is easier to lay, but I was going to have to curve it around the base of the slope anyway. This new curve will give the walk a serpentine look, which might look good if I can pull it off.

This is where I left the work on Monday. The walk has to curve around those dead-looking ornamental grasses. I hope I can make the curves smooth.

There are two stakes on the left side of where the walk will go. They mark the corners of the septic tank. At the end of the excavation on the right there is a collection of what looks like rocks. That was the second buried treasure I found.

I was digging along, going pretty well, when I started hitting what I thought were rocks. Most of the native sandstone where I’m digging is soft enough to actually slice through with the shovel. These rocks were not. When I started digging them out I found that they were broken-up pieces of concrete. That’s the material the grader used on our driveway during construction. It’s a lot cheaper than crushed stone, and it’s available a lot closer. It’s also bigger than crushed rock and a lot uglier. The driveway, fortunately covers most of what was there when we first moved in, but there are still deposits here and there. This was one of those deposits. It might have been put there to keep the trades people’s trucks from parking in the mud. It was eventually covered when the front yard was graded.

It is a problem because even when I break up the dirt with a pick, I can’t get the shovel through it because of the pieces of concrete. I have to use a hoe to drag the dirt out, then pick through it to find the rocks and toss them aside.

I would rent a small backhoe for this work if I didn’t have to worry about the septic system leach field. We have already had to have a repair done from when someone parked on the leach field and collapsed the drain lines. So it’s going to be dug by hand.

Well, OK, the septic tank and the crushed concrete were not really treasure, but they were buried.