08/27/2026
I needed to harrow the "Middle Field," it is due to have some "hot beds" laid down for both fall garlic and some late fall greens. It is a good field, soil is rich but it is a late field. It is the field you cannot even look at upon spring thaw; the water just bubbles out-the-ground. It had some beets and cabbage on it earlier in the season, the next planting of cucumbers are happy on it currently, and the upper portion of it had nothing. It is late ground because it is wet ground; a field that has a natural spring that gushes out water when the rainfall is high. We always have joked. "if only we could bottle it."
I ran my heavy Athens Harrow over it. I had to stop two separate times due to large stones getting stuck between the discs. You know, the ones that just pop up out of nowhere and stick between the iron like peanut butter?! But there is nothing a pry-bar and some farm muscle can't unstick. Ugh, it needed to be rock-picked. Again. Second time this year.
I called The Farm Stand and put out a message, "send my kids to "The Middle Field." Like any farmer, our fields have nicknames and they only make sense to those that work it. The kids came right down; parked their four-wheeler and instantly knew the task at hand.
"Just reminding you, if you pick rocks every year; as many as you can...you won't have to pick them when you are farming."
It is literally the exact line I told my children today; fully knowing it was a tale as tall as the sumac berries.
I was told that line, over-and-over again. And I oddly believed it until I did not. But I was sure to use it today; rock picking is a New England Tradition after-all.
No Farmer nor any Farm Kid truly likes picking rocks. But when you are little, you find it like a great exploration. Plus, you get to see how strong your little arms truly are. You notice that some have certain shapes and colors; some break apart easy and others can be perfectly round. And if you are lucky, you unearth a beautiful 11 # Milk Quartz with stunning color (those are the ones you are sure to add to your collection of 'little things')
If you grew up on a farm near here; you know rocks. They are a lucrative crop. If you pick them in the spring, harrow and plant; more will pop up. You will need to till under the expired bed, pick rocks again and then replant or lay your cover crop. And then P**F!, by next spring more have grown.
They make machines to burry these things in the ground now, but we do not have one.
But still, I consider myself lucky.
The ones that farmed here before me had to walk their workhorse up to the rocks, get the old-lad to stand, toss their collections into their iron "stone boat" and move the rocks up to the stone pile and offload them --- BY HAND. They had to pick them TWICE in just one picking. Sometimes, they would come across one so big, they needed to move their workhorse in every-which-way to get the stone uprooted enough to scoop it with the boat.
But not me.
I threw my tractor in park, lowered the bucket and stepped down the three steps of my air-conditioned cab; my 90's country playlist was cranking on the radio (Sammy Kershaw at that moment), and it was so loud I could hear it above the hum of the diesel engine. Briar (eight) and Chevelle (five) would pick around the tractor with me and then I would move the tractor forward (every-so-often) until we would assume the ground de-rocked. A big one? No problem! The corner of the bucket of my 100-horsepower tractor just needed to tap the corner, and it could be uprooted and scooped.
Not before long, the bucket was full, so I climbed up to the cab of the tractor, took a seat on the cushy chair and lifted the arms that were holding a full ton of hand-picked rocks. "I will be right back," I hollered, "keeping picking."
I buzzed to The Rock Pile; music cranked, ice coffee in one hand, cell phone in the other talking to a fellow Produce Grower; with just my knee steering my workhorse. I arrived at The Rock Pile, the same one that has been receiving and collecting the yearly harvests for the last 316 years. I drove into the old Walnut Grove (my tractor barely fits between the trees), hit the arm lever and dropped our collection. HA! I only had to touch those suckers twice.
Same Fields.
New Stones.
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