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We are blessed with MUCH building material in our fields. For the past four or five years we have been doing a major reroute on our driveway. Building and grading it with solid rock, including a nice big parking area near the house. Where we put our original driveway turns out to be a great site for a big commercial greenhouse I plan to build someday. So obviously the driveway has to move. We pick up rocks from garden/fields after plowing or tilling. Every couple of years there are new rocks popping up all throughout the pastures, so we get them there too. This last winter was very cold and no snow, so I imagine that quite a few have been heaved up. It's just great to be able to harvest the same crop over and over again. I didn't even plant it. In the past we have used many different contrivances for hauling them out. My least favorite method is a wheelbarrow, since it seems that it is all uphill no matter which direction you go. Now we use a Ford 5000 with a loader and boy does it work slick. The kids get paid 50 cents a bucketful. My oldest daughter, who is now almost 14, can't be motivated with that paltry sum anymore, so I better get that driveway done before the others get too old to work for those wages. What am I doing while they are picking? Well, I am skilled labor. Someone has to drive the tractor and operate the loader. And the union has very strict rules about who can do what work. (:>) One thing lots of folks around here do is use the rocks to plug the tops of gulleys which formed years ago when their ancestors thought that this was a row crop growing area. Christopher
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