Luckily for us, we have had a warm, dry spell early this year, and we have been taking advantage of it by starting our digging. We have these 2 big projects planned for the spring - digging and building a storm shelter with sun room on top, attached to our house, and digging a pond in our slough and planting about 80 trees and shrubs in the area around it. We will have SO MANY things to plant in april, so it is wonderful to get started on some of this work in march.
here's our house before the digging:

here's the hole on sunday

and here's a long trench draining from the bottom of the future basement out to the ditch

and here's some pictures from the progress today:

I was worried about our house falling in the hole. I'm still a little worried about this. Even moving a little bit would not be good for the house. Under the house is the basement of the old house that burnt down here, full of rubble and charred things. This makes the digging harder, the ground less stable, and everything weirder and more interesting. Despite my love of hand tools, and my ethical preference to avoid fossil fuels, it is pretty amazing how quickly this work can get done with a big machine. There is some logic to the thought that it's better to use a big machine once to create something that will last a long time and be fossil fuel free and ecological. This is better than having a system that is dependent on outside fuels everyday. I wish I didn't feel torn by these compromises, but I admit that I'm glad that we are not digging these pits by hand.
hopefully, we will get the walls of the basement built/poured before it rains. Much of it's scheduled to get done on Thursday and Friday, and we are hoping to dig the pond on Sunday. It's been a very exciting week.

-alice