Best way to clear rocks for a food plot?

[nybirdman]

I live in Northern NY and NOBODY has any more rocks than we do!I have a quarry five miles away as the crow flies.Our farm is at least 150 years old and somebody picked a lot rocks by hand for sure.Every year I just pick what is really necessary both by hand and the really big stuff with the bucket/thumb.In my garden area that I roto-till,I just leave the discharge flap open and spits the small ones out the back.

 

[Gary Fowler]

I tried raking, tilling, running cultivator (broke a lot of shear bolts) used box blade scarifier teeth (broke a couple of teeth) but nothing seemed to uproot the larger stuff. Finally I just used the backhoe to dig up the entire garden area but it was no where near the size you are talking. My larger rocks seem to be majority concentrated in spots about 10 feet in diameter then none for a ways then another buried pile. Nothing but a back hoe will dig them out.
Tiller seems to find them easily but they just keep coming. Just about any method mentioned will turn them up but not necessarily get them all except the rock picker. If you have one available for rent AND have a tractor large enough to pull it, then that might be the way to go. I plan to go back over my new garden spot with tiller and BH to bring more of them to the surface as soon as cooler weather hits this fall. I figure that if I clean them in the first 18" of soil, it may last for several years prior to them showing up again. Small ones will be missed if using rake or other tool and will continue to harass the tillers.

 

[Egon]

I tried raking, tilling, running cultivator (broke a lot of shear bolts) used box blade scarifier teeth (broke a couple of teeth) but nothing seemed to uproot the larger stuff. Finally I just used the backhoe to dig up the entire garden area but it was no where near the size you are talking. My larger rocks seem to be majority concentrated in spots about 10 feet in diameter then none for a ways then another buried pile. Nothing but a back hoe will dig them out.
Tiller seems to find them easily but they just keep coming. Just about any method mentioned will turn them up but not necessarily get them all except the rock picker. If you have one available for rent AND have a tractor large enough to pull it, then that might be the way to go. I plan to go back over my new garden spot with tiller and BH to bring more of them to the surface as soon as cooler weather hits this fall. I figure that if I clean them in the first 18" of soil, it may last for several years prior to them showing up again. Small ones will be missed if using rake or other tool and will continue to harass the tillers.

That is what I did for my daughters garden.

 

[Egon]

I tried raking, tilling, running cultivator (broke a lot of shear bolts) used box blade scarifier teeth (broke a couple of teeth) but nothing seemed to uproot the larger stuff. Finally I just used the backhoe to dig up the entire garden area but it was no where near the size you are talking. My larger rocks seem to be majority concentrated in spots about 10 feet in diameter then none for a ways then another buried pile. Nothing but a back hoe will dig them out.
Tiller seems to find them easily but they just keep coming. Just about any method mentioned will turn them up but not necessarily get them all except the rock picker. If you have one available for rent AND have a tractor large enough to pull it, then that might be the way to go. I plan to go back over my new garden spot with tiller and BH to bring more of them to the surface as soon as cooler weather hits this fall. I figure that if I clean them in the first 18" of soil, it may last for several years prior to them showing up again. Small ones will be missed if using rake or other tool and will continue to harass the tillers.

That is what I did for my daughters garden.

 

[oosik]

My neighbor - for reasons unknown - has a seven shank scarifier. His smallest tractor is 350+ hp - so it was of no use to him. Anyhow, I borrowed it, and going very slow it worked well. But, how very discouraging. I now have a three acre plot simply full of rock from 4" to basket ball size. Now I need to find somebody with something like a rock rake. And I'm pretty sure there are more rocks in that plot every spring. Or I could find someone who wants rock, for some reason, and they could come out and take them all. Darn, a three acre plot with more rock than dirt.

 

[Slickheadhunter]

I hate rocks!

 

[Piston]

I hate rocks!

I say the same thing every time I'm working the ground or trying to build a trail in the woods, but then, I realize how much I actually love the rock, or at least all the rock piled neatly in the hundreds of thousands of miles of stone walls in the country.

It's because of the beauty of stone walls that I don't mind dealing with it. Stone walls will break up a boring flat field with no character and turn it into a beautiful landscape worthy of a painting.

To me, a farm isn't a farm if there are no stone walls around it!

 

[sdef]

I just completed making a driveway for my retirement home site out of what looked like mountain property- meaning densely wooded with hardwoods and a huge amount of rocks, mostly granite and sized up to ~ 2000 pounds. My original intent was to use a box blade's shanks to bring the smaller rocks to the surface, then use the rock grapple bucket to sift through what the box blade turned up to filter out the rocks from the soil. But this method was far more trouble than it was worth for so many reasons, mainly due to my ground not being perfectly flat.

The method I finally settled on and which was the most effective and by far the easiest, was to go over the area with the 710#, 6' wide, ROBB's shanks to kick up the rocks. Then manually pick up the rocks football sized and larger. Then go back over with the HD ETA (395 #) landscape rake to gather up the remaining smaller rocks.

I also tried using the ROBB's blade to gather rocks, which worked with varying degrees of success as it would also remove the dirt, which I did not want.

If your ground is hard in any manner, you will not want to use lightweight equipment, such as that sold in most farm stores. My 710# ROBB was minimal and the shanks seldom penetrated the ground more than a few inches; I would have been better served by a 1000# - 1200# ROBB in my hard clay soil.

 

[1026mrg]

I say the same thing every time I'm working the ground or trying to build a trail in the woods, but then, I realize how much I actually love the rock, or at least all the rock piled neatly in the hundreds of thousands of miles of stone walls in the country.

It's because of the beauty of stone walls that I don't mind dealing with it. Stone walls will break up a boring flat field with no character and turn it into a beautiful landscape worthy of a painting.

To me, a farm isn't a farm if there are no stone walls around it!

Can you imagine how tough and determined the old timers were who dug up all those rocks by hand & them moved them by hand or by horse/ox drawn sledge?

We fuss, pontificate & worry about which diesel powered implement to use, but they did it with sweat & grit.

 

[oosik]

Be careful what you hook on to there, Gary. I was out "rock harvesting" this spring with the tines on the ROBB. Hooked on to a really big one and as luck would have it, bounced off. Got off to check it out and after a little digging and some fruitless levering - I found it was an attached chunk of my bedrock. It was anchored to the core of the earth. All the land around here was originally homesteaded in the mid-1890's. There are "stone walls" running all over the country. The neighbor to the north says his land was homesteaded by a family with four sons and one daughter. The sons spent from dawn til dusk digging, loading, transporting and stacking rock to clear three 80 acre fields - took them three years. They had two horses and a wagon. All that work and never a spade full of dirt was ever turned. Its still open range land. I have large areas that are fully exposed bed rock. Fortunate thing is - no work necessary to create a trail there. Always got to look on the bright side.