Every year one of our first "harvests" is picking stones from the fields. With this year's elongated winter, we started picking stones much later than normal. Even though we are a little behind on our field work, we cannot skip picking the rocks. With the rocks in the way the farm equipment cannot do its work. Years ago farmers would use stone boats to remove the rocks. A stone boat is basically a sled pulled by horses or oxen through the fields. Stones are rolled onto the stone boat and moved to the edge of the field to a pile or made into a stone wall. While we do not have a stone boat, we have moved many stones from the fields over the years and we have built a lot of stone walls. This year we are trying a "newer" piece of equipment called a stone rake. This will pull the stones from the top few inches of soil and rake them into a line making it easier for us to remove more stones. 

Winter frosts will continuously heave up more stones from the subsoil into the topsoil ensuring that we will never stop picking rocks. But, the rocks in the soil are not all bad. They do provide minerals to the crops and they also serve as a heat reservoir helping to warm cold spring soils and bringing us slightly earlier harvests. There will always be enough stones in our soils and so we will never feel wrong removing them to the edges. In Italy many farms now have rock buriers or rock crushers to either bury the rocks several inches down or to crush them into small enough sizes to not harm the farm equipment. I have been eyeing these newer inventions but they do not come cheap and will need to wait for another year.