[AT] Chore day with the Super M

[Steve W.]

jtchall at nc.rr.com wrote:
> Come on up to the house and you can have all you are willing to load! I've 
> already loaded them once to haul out of the field so I don't plan on 
> handling them again.
> My cousin wanted a big rock for a new flower bed last week so her husband 
> went and got one I dug out with the subsoiler a few years ago. It was about 
> all the loader on his 40hp Deere could handle.
> 
> Red clay and rocks, that’s why all our tillage tools were heavy duty. They 
> put in a new subdivision about a 1/4 mile from here back in the 80's. A HUGE 
> grading contractor got the job to build the roads. Cutting the main entrance 
> managed to break everything they had big enough to attempt to get through 
> the rocks. The tract of land they developed was a farm we rented for many 
> years. When my family moved here from about 10 miles east in 1942, most of 
> the mule/horse plows were not heavy enough to stand up to the rocks. 
> Adjacent to my place my uncle broke 3 or 4 plow points one afternoon. My 
> grandmother was renting the farm with plans on buying it. He told her if she 
> rented it he wouldn't farm it. She didn't buy it, unfortunately. She did 
> rent it the majority of the time. When she died, the money was still in the 
> bank that she could have purchased it with. Eventually it got developed and 
> sold for $30K for 2 acres. My next door neighbor still has a rock the size 
> of a small car in his back yard--we farmed around it. It was going to cost 
> too much for the developer to haul it away.
> 
> John Hall
> 

I HATE rocks....  In 1975 my Dad bought a chunk of land to put the 
trailer on. The first year it wasn't bad. We cut the grass (3 acres) 
with a JD sickle bar pulled behind the F-20. Then we got a riding mower, 
11hp, 38" cut, took a while to cut the grass. Every now and then a rock 
would get out of the ground enough to hit a blade.

The second year Mom decided she wanted a garden, Dad bought an old JD 
trailer plow, and a set of spring tooth drags. Laid out the area for the 
garden and started to plow. I think he made it about 4 feet and the 
hitch tripped open! This operation continued until he had opened about 
1/2 acre for the garden. I lost count of the times that hitch tripped.
Then he hooked up the drags and leveled it out, Then the "fun" began. 
There were so many rocks that seeds would have been lucky to find dirt! 
So we started the annual tradition of picking rocks.

 From that year until my Mom passed away (1992) We would plow, drag and 
pick rocks. The catch was that we were not picking just common stones. 
We found out that the entire property used to be a mill pond area, and 
that the owner had decided back in the late 40's or so to fill it in. 
The town and contractors would dump whatever fill they had in there, 
broken concrete, roadbed, tarmac, clay, sand, and just about anything 
else was dumped there. Was nothing to find river rocks next to blacktop 
setting on field stones or a chunk of curb.

The trailer we used to pick stone was 4'X 8'X 4' and had a rugged frame 
and springs. When it was full of stones the springs were bottomed out 
and the tires looked flat with 75 pounds of air!
Normally that trailer would be filled by parking it in one spot and 
picking withing a 10 foot radius in about an hour!
We removed so many stones from that garden that the entire garden sank 
almost a foot into the ground.

Getting them off the trailer was a fun thing. There was a small creek 
that ran along the back edge of the place (dried up in summer but NY 
still tried to call it a trout stream!) and at the top end of the 
property the creek was down in a hole about 10 feet. Dad would back the 
trailer over the edge and let it hang on the ball to dump the stones. 
There were times when they wouldn't slide so he would use the clutch to 
jerk the trailer. That F-20 would snort and start the nose climbing into 
the sky, Then as the rocks slid off it would slowly float back to the 
ground.

Did I mention that I HATE stones.......

-- 
Steve W.