[AT] Chore day with the Super M

[Carl Gogol]

Steve / Charlie
Charlie is right, but where is the great story in that?  
Steve - We had plenty of rocks in Jordanville too.  But then I met old
friends of my father farming the Northern hills overlooking East Herkimer.
I couldn't believe what came out of their ground, it was like someone had
just dug a bumper potato crop and the whole family had to get in gear and
load untold hay wagon loads from just a few acre piece.  This is not too far
from where the Drive-in movie place was or maybe still is.
Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com
[mailto:at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com] On Behalf Of charlie hill
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 7:11 
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] Chore day with the Super M

Steve, in hind sight, you folks would have been better off to add a foot of
clean fill on top of the ground to use as a garden!

Charlie
From: Steve W.
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 11:55 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] Chore day with the Super M

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.
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