Setting Up the New Garden Hits A Bump in the Road

On Monday morning, Wifey contacted Miss Utility to have them come out and mark the locations of all utilities coming to the new house.  We thought it'd be a good idea (and legal) to have them mark everything before I potentially did bad things with the roto-tiller.  We also contacted the electric dog fence people (yes, there was one already in place from the previous owners) to mark the location of their lines.

While it was necessary to do, we've found that much of all that is problematic to getting the garden in place.

The picture above shows two runs of orange stripes, some red marks, and an arc of flags.  The flags are the electric fence lines, orange are cable and phone lines, and the red are the power (barely seen in the grass by the Japanese maple in the middle).

The good news is that the power lines are buried 2' down so they won't be affected by the roto-tiller.  At its deepest, it'll dig 1' down.

The bad news is that the cable and phone lines and electric fence are all only 6" deep at the deepest.  They also run across the entire middle of the yard.

So the plan is to remove the electric fence line for certain.  We could likely do it ourselves.  We can certainly have the electric fence company come out and do it according to the guy who marked it.  In the big scheme of things, though, it's less of a problem than the cable and phone lines.

Tomorrow, I'll call the phone company (who we don't use) and cable company (who we do) to see if I can get them to reroute the lines.  They may not be willing to even if we're willing to pay for it to be done.  If they're not willing to do that rerouting, I'll have to use the orange-marked lines as guides for where to put permanent paths in the garden.  I hope I don't have to go that route, but it may be the only option.