I took two weeks off from work to build a shed for my equipment. I bought posts 14′, 13′ and 12′ tall that I planned to put 3′ deep.  Three posts in each row makes nine holes. Once I had the area cleared and the posts painted, I started to dig the holes. I got the first two done one afternoon and I was amazed how hard the ground was.

Using a post hole digger is, or should be, part of every child’s education. (I say every child, but practically that means every male child. Girls aren’t as stupid as boys and know better than to do manual labor.) I say this for several reasons. First, most of us are descended from some form of immigrant who probably came here poor and had to work at manual labor to survive. Digging post holes we channel out inner ancestors. My inner Irish immigrant Kane ancestor merged with my psyche somewhere during the second hole. The other reason that all boys should be taught how to use this device is so they will know how painful it is to make your living through hard physical manual labor. If digging a 3′ deep hole doesn’t scare them right back into school, nothing will.

Engineers tell you posts should be deep enough so that somewhere between 20%-33% of the height above the ground is buried (more is better, of course), so that means a post that sticks up 12′ should have up to four feet in the ground. Engineers are highly specialized at what they do and rarely know anything other than their specialty. These two traits make engineers the virtual equivalent of sadists wearing horse blinders. They don’t actually dig holes themselves, they just tell the unsuspecting of us how to do things they don’t have to do in the air-condigtioned engineering offices. After digging two of those damn holes 3′ deep (I am firmly convinced now that not even Jimmy Hoffa is buried 3′ deep) I revised the phrase “deep enough” down by 6 inches.

I decided next that powered equipment was the key. Since no one I knew had an borer for a tractor, I rented a gas-powered borer. Obviously invented by engineers from where the ground is soft and buttery in nature (or like that dirt Billy Mays churns up in the TV commercial with a cordless drill), it sucked here. At the end of the four hours I had seven wonderfully round depressions in the ground, varying from four inches to six inches deep. If sweating makes you lose weight, during the process I lost somewhere in the neighborhood of three or four hundred pounds and exercised muscles that never existed before, apparently.

I decided to let Mother Nature do all the work and filled my little depressions in with water and called it a day. The water, applied repeatedly, eventually worked when viciously attacked with the post hole digger, manual version.