The rock work on my bucket list

[lesa]

It looks so gorgeous- you just have to finish it now! Where are you getting all those rocks? The entire yard looks wonderful!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Do you remember when Marshall asked for some nagging to help him get things done?

How much rock have you moved today? Any????? Really!!!!!

 

[journey11]

Wow, that is amazing and so artistic. It really draws your eye back to the woods and makes a nice sharp border. I'm jealous, now I want one!

Were the rocks available on your property or did you have to purchase them by the truckload?

All we have here is sandstone, some of it softer than others, but they all break really easily. I've been raiding my MIL's creekbed and the hillside of my Dad's farm for enough to line my front landscaping and we also built a simple fire pit in the backyard. We use it so much, we think we'll re-do it with a better type of stone and mortar them together.

When I go mushroom hunting, we find a lot of quarried sandstone that has been hewn into large, rectangular blocks, 100+ pounds each, used for the old foundation stones on homes and barns long gone. They are all nicely aged and mossy and I wish I could haul them all home! You can buy them for ridiculous prices off of contractors and logging companies, but I don't want to pay the $$$.

 

[NwMtGardener]

Journey, you just reminded me that a few years back, i was visiting my family in Pennsylvania. My mother informed me that she sold the rocks from the fencerows on my grandparents farm. Now...we're not talking about some nice accessible rock wall here, we're talking about ancient, dilapidated, mostly buried rocks, sorta in a pile, in the woods!! I was astonished, but there were the workers, digging through the woods and carting out these round field rocks, carefully so the moss and character stayed on!! Apparently there's quite a market for this!! My mom justified it by saying you couldnt really see them anyway, which was true, but it does seem like an odd/sad thing!

 

[journey11]

I don't imagine that she could have moved them if she had wanted to do anything with them anyway. They are super heavy!

 

[NwMtGardener]

Oh these arent super heavy rocks, they're just small round rocks picked from the fields over the years, most just bowling ball size or smaller. I just think its weird there's a market for that!!

 

[thistlebloom]

Wow! Maybe I should be selling rocks! The trouble is everybody around here has more than enough .

All the rocks I've used have come from our property. When my son built the dry creek bed on the east side 9 years ago he picked up probably a few dozen wheelbarrows full of mostly fist sized rocks. That was a lot of hard work and hours spent bent over picking up hundreds of rocks.

Then I started the dry creek on the west side with some big ones that we pried up out on the edges of the property. A couple of years ago we had our roads renovated and the crew came through and jack hammered the huge ones out of the roadbed and tossed them off the roadsides onto everybody's property. That was a huge score! The snowplow guy was very thankful too because those rocks used to wreak havoc on his equipment.( The downside is now everybody speeds on the road )

All I had to do was drive my truck along the road and pick up the boulders ejected onto the property. I would have had to move them anyway so our tractor guy could mow the weeds in the summer.

Gator loves getting into all the shots!

 

[so lucky]

Journey, you just reminded me that a few years back, i was visiting my family in Pennsylvania. My mother informed me that she sold the rocks from the fencerows on my grandparents farm. Now...we're not talking about some nice accessible rock wall here, we're talking about ancient, dilapidated, mostly buried rocks, sorta in a pile, in the woods!! I was astonished, but there were the workers, digging through the woods and carting out these round field rocks, carefully so the moss and character stayed on!! Apparently there's quite a market for this!! My mom justified it by saying you couldnt really see them anyway, which was true, but it does seem like an odd/sad thing!

When I was about 10, my older brother and I found an "ancient" pile of rocks in the woods behind our house. Thinking it surely was covering a treasure, we threw all those rocks aside, and found nothing underneath. When we mentioned our failed treasure hunt to my dad, he sternly ordered us to put all the rocks back exactly where we found them. :/

Unfortunately, we had moved an old, but still valid, property line marker. It was the boundary line belonging to a neighbor who used to "patrol" his property lines every day with a gun. Ooops!

 

[Nyboy]

Thistleboom is your truck purple? Here can dig a small hole without hitting rocks.

 

[journey11]

Sounds like you really endeared yourself to your neighbors, Thistle. I keep wishing the Asplundh guys would come by and pile some tree mulch on me. LOL

Oh no, So Lucky...you are also fortunate that you didn't turn over a snake! That is too cute. I can just see a kid doing that, swept up in their imagination and on a mission. We've had neighbor's like that before too...meaner than a snake. Glad he didn't come along and spoil your fun!