Going geothermal: Day Two. The big dig.

"I had no idea how deep six feet really was."

That's the quote of the day from my husband, when we saw the trench. It's three feet wide by six feet deep.

Up by the house, the guy doing the digging, Ben, ran into a lot of stones. Oof. It looked like slow going.

But now he's down on the lower lawn, and that's just soil.

He's putting the topsoil to one side and the deeper soil to the other. That way, the topsoil will wind up back on the top.

This precision-digging is amazing.

The trench comes out of the house and down between two stone-walled gardens. Then it will split. Part will go along one side of the fenced-in vegetable garden. The other part will go along the top of the vegetable garden, then make a right and head downhill between the garden and our driveway, then take another right turn into a lower section of lawn.

Good news: He also dug a test hole in the lowest part of the route he'll be taking through our yard, and it started filling with water almost immediately.

The wetter the better, we're told, for heat transfer.