August 23, 2020:

Trenching to lay down the drain tile had unearthed stones, rocks and boulders that now needed to be dealt with once the ground had been levelled. The easy way for us to deal with this problem would have been to rent a stone picking machine. We did not know such a thing existed in the farming world; but apparently is a fairly normal practice – at least in Nova Scotia!

We of course chose to do it the hard way! Firstly, because we are doing all of this on a shoestring budget and secondly, it gave us the opportunity to rent and drive around a tractor on our land for the first time!

We started early in the day and after a day and a half of picking rocks off our land we were done! This by no means meant that we had picked all the rocks off our land. It meant that we were physically done! We had no strength to pick any more rocks. Looking at the pile at the end of the two days we did make a pretty good dent.

Another thing we have learned is that mother earth constantly keeps churning up rocks to the surface. To this day we have gone through another focused weekend of picking rocks before the first planting and still keep picking rocks in in between rows and on the land in general. Needless to say, the rock pile is much bigger now! The silver lining to is that all these rocks will make for great foundational material once we start construction of our buildings.