A trick I learned is that when you are walking the land and staking out where the rocks are, take a large hammer, with you. You may only see a small bit of the rock above ground. Hit the exposed part of the rock with the hammer. You may want safety glasses for this. The easier rocks to remove will vibrate and you'll see a noticeable movement and disturbance of the soil around the exposed part. These are the easy rocks, and I would mark those with a Green painted stake. If you hit the rock and there seems to be no vibration - its a big one. These, I would mark with a Red stake. I pull out all the Green staked ones first, they can be lifted out with the FEL. This will become my smallish to mid sized pile of rocks. Which are 70 to 200 lbs. The ones that where Red staked, need to be hand dug out a bit before attempting a leveraged drag out as in my area, these tend to be too big for the FEL to lift. These go in the "sentinel" pile of 200+ to 700 lbs and other larger ones that have to be dragged, go in a other "Boulder" pile. Really big rocks have a market value, in my area. There are a great deal of subdivisions in the valley, and they, for some reason, want, a few large rocks for driveway entrances and such. They also want the rocks to have moss on them. This is easy to do. You buy a cheap second hand blender, and mix moss with milk, make a moss shake and pour it over the boulder in the fall. By spring, it will be covered in moss.
Deer are a whole other issue for us. We've gone through three entire re-plantings of our flowering gardens around the house, because, the deer would sneak in, late at night knowing the dog was inside, and eat all our new plantings. So everything now planted, is deer proof. And there are a plenty of lists, on the internet of what to plant that are are deer proof. .
