Picking rocks

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  One I would have much rather spent pruning roses or planting garlic instead of picking up rocks in one of the fields that we farm!  But.....if we did have to pick rocks, it was so nice to have pleasant weather in which to work!

Usually when we are picking rocks, it's in July and it's hot and dusty and just plain dreadful!  Yesterday wasn't so bad and we were both happy to check something off our list.

The rocks we were picking up yesterday were what we call caliche (klee'-chee).  David asked why there were rocks in the field.  One reason there are rocks in the fields in our area is because of the Great Missoula Flood.  Another reason is the formation of caliche.

David's question made me wonder more about caliche, so thanks to the internet and google, I found out some interesting information on caliche!   I will leave it up to you, if you desire further information, to do your own search.  I only read the Wikipedia version, which made sense to me so I stopped there!

Anyway, as always, I have a few photos of our project from yesterday.  And can I just say, that I am almost too old for this kind of work!  The rocks, caliche or otherwise are going to have to be picked by a younger, stronger version of human.

So this is what we were looking at yesterday.

This rock is relatively light, and very crumbly, so it wasn't necessary to pick up every last crumb, just the big chunks.

Some of the slabs were still partially buried, which made it a little more work to get them out.

This is a fairly representative sample of what we were throwing on to the bucket of Kenny.

Kenny was fully loaded and on his way back to unload in to the truck.

Scotty is our faithful rock hauling truck!

Dumping the load in to Scotty.

This is two loads emptied in to the back of Scotty.

And here's Scotty at the end of the day, and the end of our energy level!  A productive day on the farm!