So, about a month and a half ago I declared one of my new shrubs dead. I had planted 4 Hinoki Cypress shrubs against the house in early summer and it seemed 1 did not make it. I was disappointed since I spent a lot of time caring for them. Though there was a time, I did not water as much as I should have and I determined that the heat got to this shrub. I also noticed that it's root ball was a little higher than the others so I thought I may not have planted it deep enough.
This morning I dug it up and went back to the garden center with my receipt and 2 year shrub warranty. I couldn't find any hinoki cypress, but we agreed on a sea green juniper that grew to about the same size.
After going out and taking some pictures at the battlefield, we went home and had a small dinner. I wanted to get the new shrub in the ground before the sun went down.
I figured, since I already had a hole from digging the old one out, it wouldn't take me very long. I wanted to make the hole a little bigger and deeper and the soil was really soft so I expected a quick planting job. Well, I dug for a couple minutes and decided to go just a little deeper when I hit a rock. I've hit so many rocks and bricks around here this was no surprise. I soon knew that this rock was at least the size of the bottom of hole so I went to get Grant. We kept digging around it trying to find it's edge and soon had a huge hole and were running into the roots of my other shrubs.
After a good 30 minutes of digging and prying we loosened it from the dirt, but didn't know how to get it out. We didn't think we could lift it so we tried all kinds of levers, ropes, we even considered a pulley system with a nearby tree. Eventually Grant thought we were trying too hard so we both got our arms around it, and were able to get it out of the hole, where we rolled it into our wheel barrel, and it was so heavy we could barely wheel that!
By this time it's pitch black outside and we were working from our lamp out front.
I'll put the juniper in tomorrow.
