New Lands.

[JasperFrank]

I'm voting that your username be changed to Sisyphus!

Very fun, cause I have a poster copy of this in my office. And Wife and I came up with the name "Casa de Piedras" as a name for the property. If someone stole rocks from me, I'd probably laugh till my sides hurt.

 

[fried1765]

I bought raw land too, but it was young recovering forest over almost pure sand. Appears to have been pasture/hay back in the 40s, then basically abandoned since the 60s until i hacked my way in.

I definitely researched the soil type map for my county before buying - being able to do a cheap, basic septic field was crucial to affording my home build.

I would love to have more rocks for walls smd landscaping. Every time i find a decent boulder while relandscaping or digging with an excavator, its like striking gold.

I only have 11.7 acres, but have lived here since 1942.
NEVER have seen a single rock!
Wish I had a few just small/medium ones.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Rocks are good for stories.

There was a big underground rock along one of my dad's property lines. He never broke a plow on it, but the plow would skate over the top. Then a gas company wanted to run a 6' deep pipeline along that property line. They dug it out without rock busting, and it was bigger than a full sized pickup. They even hauled in a dump truck full of topsoil to make the ground flat again.

A more fun story was my neighbor 40 years ago who had a 20' diameter rock in his pasture. I had a powder license, and it was the 4th of July. Do you see where this is heading? The rock was flat and sort of lens shaped, so we dug around the edges and installed plastic bags full of 45-0-0, diesel and a small stick of dynamite several places around the edge, then built a shaped charge in the center on top. We were using e-caps, and I set up a wiper that would trigger the edge charges a fraction of a second before the top charge. The theory was that we would lift the whole rock with the edge charges, then hammer it in the middle to break it.

We waited until 10 AM on the 4th for the shot. It worked like a charm, busting the rock into little tractor bucket sized boulders and dropping them right back in the hole. The only thing that left the site was a big cloud of dust. Unknown to us, the neighbor downwind had set up for a big picnic. We left a layer of dust all over his/her trestle tables. Fortunately, no food was out.

 

[JasperFrank]

If ya can't lift it, then ya gott'a drag it. Only came across six that could not be lifted. They became "sentinel rocks," as some real estate people will call them. It blows my mind sometimes to think that people will pay good money to put a Big Rock in front of their property as a status thing. I don't get that,..... at all. I have been offered some money to buy the bigger rocks that have become part of the landscaping. .... which I find to be an insane question. Why would I sell this? Here's pics of the some of two of the big ones that got dragged and placed.

 

[deezler]

So it blows your mind that people want to pay for big rocks, yet its also crazy to part with your nicest ones? Clearly they do have some value to you then, eh?
Big boulders cost hundreds of dollars each in southern Michigan.

 

[DieselBound]

Road construction often requires lots of large boulders/rocks. These, for sure, cost.

I have it on my TODO list to bring in some big rocks/boulders to shore up the bottom of my pond: ducks are eroding it; have a culvert there which outputs to a ditch; my main travel path out to much of my property is across that culvert. There's the cost of the rock and then there's the cost of transporting!

 

[Oaktree]

I only have 11.7 acres, but have lived here since 1942.
NEVER have seen a single rock!
Wish I had a few just small/medium ones.

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

 

[DieselBound]

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

I'll trade rain water [over 100" last year] for some rocks!

 

[JasperFrank]

Fun fact. Every stone in New Orleans was imported: Every single freaken stone.

 

[fried1765]

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

I too am a lifetime New Englander,..... with time out for military service, and a job.
I live (six months) in the 291 year old house that my mother bought in 1932.
There isn't even a pea sized pebble on my property.

 

[dlctcg]

I too am a lifetime New Englander,..... with time out for military service, and a job.
I live (six months) in the 291 year old house that my mother bought in 1932.
There isn't even a pea sized pebble on my property.

That's the thing about N.E. "There isn't even pea sized pebble on my property" yet we are probably less the an couple to a few hours drive from each other & our pebbles are the size of VW bugs or bigger.. lol

That is a 500cc Quad in the pic...

 

[NorTracNY]

The first time we used our brush hog, the neighbor thought we were using a rock grinder. It takes time to make the land as you'd like.

 

[Jstpssng]

The first time we used our brush hog, the neighbor thought we were using a rock grinder. It takes time to make the land as you'd like.

That was me, yesterday. I mowed a small patch, then went over to see my neighbor-who-knows-everything. He thought that I had hit something metal... I need to change the blades but there's no sense until I get the field smoothed out.

What he heard though, was the heavy metal drive shaft shield on my 50 year old IH rotary mower.

 

[JasperFrank]

Early on, I thought I could do something "structural" with these rocks.... like slip wall building for making small structures. However, all the subsurface retrieved rocks are coated with a thin layer of clay that resembled terracotta. Mortar will not stick to them. This would explain why, in this area no one ever built a stone house, as wood was readily available, and these rocks, with odd shapes, just don't work to stack anything. Even the hearths people made did not last long.
There was a huge mound, that stood out, in the valley below me, which has many large, flat fields used for farming, and for years, I drove by this little hill, speculating that it was a Native American burial mound, or some natural geological formation.
A few years ago, the owner of the property, flattened the whole thing out to use as a heavy equipment parking area, and it was clear to see that this was where all the local farmers, for 120 years, had taken the rocks, they had found and removed from their fields. This was common practice in the 19th century.

 

[oosik]

I live on my 80 acres on the northern edge of a large area called the Channeled Scablands. What remains after the great Lk Missoula floods. To the south and east - the Palouse. To the SW - the run of the Lk Missoula floods.

I have a few rocks on my land. The biggest feature - many areas are bare basaltic lava ( Scabrock ). This feature can not be moved or dug out. It is bedrock on the surface with no dirt cover. You simply farm around it. The foundation of my house sits directly on this bedrock.

There are plenty of areas for garden patches. There the organic soil can be up to ten feet deep.

You just have to pick your spot and "DO" with what Mother Nature has given you.

A summer picture of my five acre lake. Taken off of my front porch.

 

[ljjhouser]

When I built our house, the county required us to perk test the soil. I called an environmental spec company. The man came out - he had 2 5gal buckets of water - he carried on and I the other - back into the woods and up the hill where the house would be. When we got there, I asked - what do we do now? He said I'm going to dig a hole about 2' deep and pour in water until the hole holds the water.

Now about rocks. This is in the Ozark Mountains. I had to dynamite the mail box, a year dynamiting the water line - want to dig a hole? get out a stick of dynamite. I had an ATF license to mix binary explosives just to plant the waterline.
He dug the hold 16", hit bedrock. If you don't know, bedrock is a really big rock. Ha.
We poured in the water. Took about 2 gal and dumped the rest. He said, NOW I will come back tomorrow and we will see how much water it takes to fill it again to find how much was absorbed by the soil.

The next day - carried another bucket of water into the woods and up the hill. NOT one drop of water had disappeared. Then he said, well hell, this soil won't even perk. flunked the test, We had to haul in about 15 loads of dirt for septic.

Another short story. When I was much younger and started coming to Branson, I rode a motorcycle. I pulled into a campground. I said I wanted to camp for 2 nights. I was asked - Want any hook ups? I said - No, I just want a small square of grass to put my tent on and that will be great! He looked at me kinda funny and said "boy, there ain't a patch of grass in this whole damn county, this is Stone County. Never a more true statement.

The hard thing about using dynamite is that after you crack up bedrock, then you get to dig out the smaller rocks like these. I would dynamite with 30" spacing, 30' a shot.

 

[Jchonline]

Many folk here are probably looking at the "Get back to the land" sort of living. You may see some "raw land" that looks very inexpensive. I did that, and it sort of worked out, in the early nineties, yet I didn't know about some things. The biggest thing I didn't know about was rocks and soil types. I didn't know I would have to deal with so many rocks, and so many big rocks. Its been 25 years, just taking out rocks and moving them on to something else. This has been my life for 25 years. Moving rocks. The land is now a bit of a paradise, with lawn and house and garage and stuff, yet it was a hard, hard fight, the whole way in those twenty-five years to get these rocks out and put them into other structures.
This is probably why we lose agricultural land, all the time to developments, that focused on river planes and Triple A Dirt with no rocks. For residential, we SHOULD let people build in the places that can't grow crops. Yet I have to say that this is a difficult ethical decision now, after working all these rocks for 25 years. If you are a young person looking at raw land, know the geology of it: I didn't, and that was a bad combination of attempting to fix the land. Just say'en.

Did you enjoy the work? Did it give your purpose? Now that you are done do you miss using the tractor as much?

 

[Larry Caldwell]

A disc plow will work up rocky ground. It won't hook rocks and break like a moldboard plow. If you have a lot of fairly small rocks, see if you can find a potato picker. Unless you have sandy soil you have to loosen the ground first, but then it will dump the rocks in a trailer or on a skid.

If you are lucky, you may be able to find an old one row potato picker that is too small for modern farms, or there are still small 3-point spud pickers being manufactured.

 

[JasperFrank]

Jcholine- "Did you enjoy the work? Did it give your purpose? Now that you are done do you miss using the tractor as much?"

Very interesting question!

Three things pop into my mind as an answer...

The first, is that this has instilled a huge respect and admiration for pioneer farmers and the collective efforts of the many generations before me that created tillable lands to grow stuff on, be it corn, grapes, hops, mint, cotton... etc.. Those plant-able areas, didn't just happen. They represent an untold amount of effort over many years. Makes me cringe now when I see Urban Growth Boundary Annexation, for subdivision building, on Ag lands.

Having traveled to Europe a bit, I see that they don't allow this at all. And why, farms in the USA are the easiest areas for being developed into single family houses. There are no big rocks.

Second, is that this was a good task, and for many hours took my mind away from the Technical World I was dealing with. Dig out rock, put rock in bucket, move rock someplace else, and think about where said rock goes, was a simple, almost, meditative activity and good exercise.

And lastly, when we do eventually sell this place, being too frail and old, I will remember all that effort and value added to the land. I can just laugh at the "We will buy your land" people, offering pennies on the dollar.

 

[dirttoys]

When I built our house, the county required us to perk test the soil. I called an environmental spec company. The man came out - he had 2 5gal buckets of water - he carried on and I the other - back into the woods and up the hill where the house would be. When we got there, I asked - what do we do now? He said I'm going to dig a hole about 2' deep and pour in water until the hole holds the water.

Now about rocks. This is in the Ozark Mountains. I had to dynamite the mail box, a year dynamiting the water line - want to dig a hole? get out a stick of dynamite. I had an ATF license to mix binary explosives just to plant the waterline.
He dug the hold 16", hit bedrock. If you don't know, bedrock is a really big rock. Ha.
We poured in the water. Took about 2 gal and dumped the rest. He said, NOW I will come back tomorrow and we will see how much water it takes to fill it again to find how much was absorbed by the soil.

The next day - carried another bucket of water into the woods and up the hill. NOT one drop of water had disappeared. Then he said, well hell, this soil won't even perk. flunked the test, We had to haul in about 15 loads of dirt for septic.

Another short story. When I was much younger and started coming to Branson, I rode a motorcycle. I pulled into a campground. I said I wanted to camp for 2 nights. I was asked - Want any hook ups? I said - No, I just want a small square of grass to put my tent on and that will be great! He looked at me kinda funny and said "boy, there ain't a patch of grass in this whole damn county, this is Stone County. Never a more true statement.

The hard thing about using dynamite is that after you crack up bedrock, then you get to dig out the smaller rocks like these. I would dynamite with 30" spacing, 30' a shot.

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You do a great job of describing the ozarks!!

Gravel is pretty affordable, black dirt is slightly cheaper then gold.

re perk test. The guy that built my first house, went out and bailed the test hole over night. Passed, and oddly didn't have any septic problems.........

Best,

ed