New Lands.

[JasperFrank]

I'm voting that your username be changed to Sisyphus!

Very fun, cause I have a poster copy of this in my office. And Wife and I came up with the name "Casa de Piedras" as a name for the property. If someone stole rocks from me, I'd probably laugh till my sides hurt.

 

[fried1765]

I bought raw land too, but it was young recovering forest over almost pure sand. Appears to have been pasture/hay back in the 40s, then basically abandoned since the 60s until i hacked my way in.

I definitely researched the soil type map for my county before buying - being able to do a cheap, basic septic field was crucial to affording my home build.

I would love to have more rocks for walls smd landscaping. Every time i find a decent boulder while relandscaping or digging with an excavator, its like striking gold.

I only have 11.7 acres, but have lived here since 1942.
NEVER have seen a single rock!
Wish I had a few just small/medium ones.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Rocks are good for stories.

There was a big underground rock along one of my dad's property lines. He never broke a plow on it, but the plow would skate over the top. Then a gas company wanted to run a 6' deep pipeline along that property line. They dug it out without rock busting, and it was bigger than a full sized pickup. They even hauled in a dump truck full of topsoil to make the ground flat again.

A more fun story was my neighbor 40 years ago who had a 20' diameter rock in his pasture. I had a powder license, and it was the 4th of July. Do you see where this is heading? The rock was flat and sort of lens shaped, so we dug around the edges and installed plastic bags full of 45-0-0, diesel and a small stick of dynamite several places around the edge, then built a shaped charge in the center on top. We were using e-caps, and I set up a wiper that would trigger the edge charges a fraction of a second before the top charge. The theory was that we would lift the whole rock with the edge charges, then hammer it in the middle to break it.

We waited until 10 AM on the 4th for the shot. It worked like a charm, busting the rock into little tractor bucket sized boulders and dropping them right back in the hole. The only thing that left the site was a big cloud of dust. Unknown to us, the neighbor downwind had set up for a big picnic. We left a layer of dust all over his/her trestle tables. Fortunately, no food was out.

 

[JasperFrank]

If ya can't lift it, then ya gott'a drag it. Only came across six that could not be lifted. They became "sentinel rocks," as some real estate people will call them. It blows my mind sometimes to think that people will pay good money to put a Big Rock in front of their property as a status thing. I don't get that,..... at all. I have been offered some money to buy the bigger rocks that have become part of the landscaping. .... which I find to be an insane question. Why would I sell this? Here's pics of the some of two of the big ones that got dragged and placed.

 

[deezler]

So it blows your mind that people want to pay for big rocks, yet its also crazy to part with your nicest ones? Clearly they do have some value to you then, eh?
Big boulders cost hundreds of dollars each in southern Michigan.

 

[DieselBound]

Road construction often requires lots of large boulders/rocks. These, for sure, cost.

I have it on my TODO list to bring in some big rocks/boulders to shore up the bottom of my pond: ducks are eroding it; have a culvert there which outputs to a ditch; my main travel path out to much of my property is across that culvert. There's the cost of the rock and then there's the cost of transporting!

 

[Oaktree]

I only have 11.7 acres, but have lived here since 1942.
NEVER have seen a single rock!
Wish I had a few just small/medium ones.

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

 

[DieselBound]

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

I'll trade rain water [over 100" last year] for some rocks!

 

[JasperFrank]

Fun fact. Every stone in New Orleans was imported: Every single freaken stone.

 

[fried1765]

You can have some of mine, I have plenty!
Being a lifetime New Englander, it just seems weird to pay for rocks.

My house is ~200 years old, so there have been plenty of previous owners to dig out the rocks!

I too am a lifetime New Englander,..... with time out for military service, and a job.
I live (six months) in the 291 year old house that my mother bought in 1932.
There isn't even a pea sized pebble on my property.