Picking up Rocks

You can't always plow in February, but when you can...you should. This past week, I had that opportunity. Part of this ground that I plowed this week is "new ground". Meaning it hasn't been worked in many years. A few years ago we had the scrubby trees and brush ground up with a forestry mulcher. Those things are good at cleaning up the land, but you can't just go right behind them with a plow. It's best to let nature take its course for a few years and break down the wood chips and allow the underground stumps to rot. All of those things have now happened, and it was time to get this land into production. The adjoining field that has been clear for years has good topsoil and very few rocks. after the first pass with the plow, I knew that this new land was a different story. Sometimes when cleaning new ground, you realize why it was allowed to grow up in the first place. However, the soil in this location is not bad, it just had more than its share of rocks. After 3 passes with the plow, the soil was loose and many of the rocks had been pulled up to the top of the ground. I asked Atticus to go with me to the field, which he was happy to do. Yes, maybe I left out some of the details about what we were doing. I remember picking up rocks from new ground with my dad as a kid. It's hard, dirty, back-breaking work. Atticus did it without much complaining. I hope I was that willing to work hard for my dad when I was a kid. We picked up 3 front-end-loader buckets full of rocks (around 5000 lbs.) in a couple of hours. I was already thinking about writing this post as we were finishing up. In my mind, I was thinking of a list of lessons we can learn from picking up rocks. I had a few good metaphors ready for some lessons from picking up rocks. The more I thought about it, I realized I was overthinking it. There is really only one main lesson from that day. That lesson is: Sometimes you have to do the hard stuff. If you want a clean field, you have to pick up the rocks. I want him to see me doing the hard work for something that I wanted. And I want him to have a taste of that hard work so that it doesn't scare him away when he has his own goal that stands on the other side of hard stuff. The field is now smooth and looks better than it has in decades. I am proud when we drive by, and this field will be productive for years. All those benefits are byproducts of doing the hard stuff. As we finished up (in preparation to write this post) I asked Atticus what he learned from picking up rocks. I was seeking some kind of sage insight from the fresh perspective of a child. His answer was: "Buy farmland without rocks". I laughed and thought, yeah, well, that's one way to do it.