There Will Be Rocks

During the spring, we went to hear Robert Thorson, author of Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls speak about the geology of Connecticut. He mentioned that southeastern Connecticut is home to the countless tons of rocks that the retreating glacier deposited. He also mentioned that man's activities, especially clearing land without putting on a cover crop leads to the perennial eruption of the endless rocks that are stored under the earth. My husband and I gave each other a knowing look.

Recently, we took receipt of a grape hoe, a generous loan from Hans of H&W Vineyard and Winery Equipment. The catch-22 for us is that we have to (1) put in all our lineposts, (2) put in our trellis wire, and (3) fix our pencil rods to the fixed fruiting wire so that the sensor on the grape hoe will meet a resistance and hoe around the grape vine. We have indeed been working on the lineposts but at such a snail's pace that we needed to beat down the weeds and clear the rocks before we could put in more lineposts. Recently, my husband with the help of our son, Brett made a significant dent in the weed wacking, so yesterday and today, Barry came to help us remove the rocks from the vine row. This photo is our dump trailer at the start of the row. The left side of the tractor are rows that have already been cleaned of rocks and the right side is what remains to be weed wacked as well as de-rocked.

With Barry's help, we can go down the row and pick rocks from both sides of the alley and be done with 2 rows in about 45 minutes. His help yesterday spoiled us because after he left, all we could do was one row before we called it "finito!" The photo on the right shows all of the rocks that came out of just one row. Last year, I calculated that we removed approximately 60 tons of rocks! A photo from exactly one year ago shows where we were at that time with rocks in the vineyard.

There will be rocks! But maybe there will be less rocks and they will be smaller.