so he gets this boulder dug out of his field, then drags it with his tractor to the barns... it's about 8 feet long, 4 feet tall, and 3 feet wide, or 96 cubic feet
and this impressed me the most, a family farm with boulders that were pulled out of fields for over a century, and generations of farmers. I'm surprised they didn't make an enormous chimney out of them, or something. I've never seen anyone collect them like this, and think it's cool to show the perseverance of farmers. By the way, the biggest ones that can't be dragged? Are buried deeper, so they never become a problem again
I grew up in Connecticut, where it's very stony, and most of those stones would have gone into walls. The old joke was that when God created the world he found he had a bunch of rocks left over, so he dumped them there. I just got back from a trip to the Azores, and then to Ireland, where stone walls are very present, though the stones are usually much smaller. I won't go into the sordid history of colonial Ireland, and the reason many fields are so small, but on the Aran Islands there are tiny lots with a less nasty history. There's almost no soil there, so the early farmers built small stone enclosures, and over the generations built up soil inside them using seaweed and compost, and ended up with garden plots, the walls providing shelter from the wind and spray, and a microclimate. Similarly, in parts of the Azores, which are entirely volcanic, the ground is nothing but stone, and farmers made small plots with high walls, and brought in just enough of a soil layer from the higher, ash-covered parts, to plant vines. Again, the shelter provided a microclimate, and with a little irrigation (often with filtered sea water) they ended up with vineyards which have functioned for centuries.
ReplyDeleteI knew a fellow long ago who cleared lots of rocks on his Connecticut property, and made walls and embankments with them. He had one enormous one in a prominent place which he called his " two hundred dollar rock," which is what he paid to fix the foot on his backhoe when it hit the hydraulic cylinder.
thank you!
DeleteWas it a wonderful adventure? Do you have a favorite among the places you stopped into?
It was all quite nice, and the Azores are enjoyable, as is most of Ireland, though some of its colonial history is rough. The "great hunger," for example, often called the famine, starved a million people to death while Ireland was a net exporter of food. But anyway, I think if I were younger and more footloose, I wouldn't mind moving to the Aran Islands! But as an old retired American, I don't have to worry about things like employment, which might be a problem even in the relaxed and relatively self-sufficient parts of Ireland. So we travel instead! But both places, though quite far apart, share in being temperate, green, and relatively unhurried in their life, a quality appreciated by an old Vermonter!
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