Mike finished the box last night, counter sinking the lag bolts and staggering and leveling the back of the box. Miraculously, perhaps only to me, the back side of the box is parallel to the house foundation. The back side is meant to keep soil and water off the house siding and foundation.
I began filling the water trough with five bags of gravel, about two inches from the bottom. There followed topsoil from the pile in the front of the house. I shoveled topsoil into two large feed bags, lifted the bags into the wheelbarrow, hauled them into the back yard to lift again and pour. Repeat twenty or so times. The commercially packaged fruit and herbs soil filled the last quarter of the trough. Thirty-six inches in diameter and thirty inches high, however many cubic feet of topsoil that calculates.
Mike did not see the necessity of making the topsoil fill as labor intensive as possible. He brought up the Kubota tractor to move the last of the topsoil into the newly finished box. The bucket measures 48 inches across, and fits through the two gates easily. Mike maneuvered the tractor to the topsoil pile, lowered the bucket so that I could shovel in the maximum amount for each of four or five trips. Considerably easier than wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow.
I dumped the rocks that I had collected around the water trough, added paver set and watered. The effect is rather nice. I did not have enough stones to complete the area. I will need to scour the land for more stones, small sized for the most accessible areas in front and to the porch side of the trough. The roadway was scraped recently to smooth over the rivulets from lots of winter rains, and many small stones should be available at the side of the road.
A Year at the Snake 