Well, it happened! We did it! Yesterday the rocks "magically" moved to my house. Last week I went to my friends house and Farmer Ed used his loader to pull the rocks from the woodsline. I was worried because I thought he had a farm tractor, but it was a heavy duty loader and it treated the boulders like they were bowling balls. Once he got them all out of the hedgerow, there were a few more than I thought - 26! Probably 5 or 6 BIG (bathtub sized) 12 Medium (32 inch TV) and the rest Small (microwave sized). Seeing how easily he handled these rocks was very reassuring, so I made arrangements for the loader, truck driver, and unloader for the following week. The weather was terrible here all week. We had a tremendous windstorm with gusts up to 65 mph that uprooted a few of my newly planted trees. Then we had a very heavy rainstorm. Then a spell of our first "winter weather" - 40 degrees, crisp, biting wind. But Saturday dawned warm and sunny and still, a great day for moving rocks. Farmer Ed and his son both arrived with loaders. For some of the big rocks, one loader would push the boulders into the other loader. You could see that the smaller one would not have been able to lift the heaviest of the rocks. They were quite skilled at what they did, I took my four year old son to watch and he loved it. Mike the truck driver was great. Acted as if he did this every week. He said he had hauled some very unusual things in his time, and raw boulders was another on the list. He took longer to tie everything down than it took to load. He was very thorough and professional. Made a phone call as we were leaving so Dick the backhoe driver would be there when we arrived. Dick and Brian were waiting when we arrived. Just immediately drove up in the backhoe and started tugging them off and they rolled away. It was slow and steady work, but happily was done without incident. Just like that! Wow! Now we still have the work of moving them from behind the barn to be placed in the backyard, but that seems a lot more doable than having them magically move 30 miles south. With the fall rain we've had the ground is rather soft for heavy equipment. We'll move them next summer. So watch for another post then asking how to move them into position. But for now I am quite happy! I'm sure enquiring minds want to know, how much did it all cost? Things improved from my initial conservative estimates. The $150/hour was for a quarry loader, which we didn't need because the farmer's loader was one of those BIGGGG ones. Farmer Ed did me a huge favor and did all the loading for $150 plus various baked goods and bottles of wine. Really he was being nice to my friend who owns// owned the rocks. Truck driver Mike was very professional and very reasonable, I thought, for $250 since it took his entire afternoon. Dick would only take $100 for his work since "it didn't take him very long" and he lives just around the corner. So total transport cost was $500 for 25 very nice sized granite rocks. $500 isn't a small sum of money, we've just blown the landscape budget for 2006, but at $20 rock it seems fantastic to me when I think how much work was done. I'm still working on getting a very nice something for my friend too, who was so fabulously generous with her stones. What a long winded post, as you can tell, I'm excited. Here's some photos, I've never done photos before so we'll see how they work.

Oh my. What is a passionate rose lover like you doing in that glacial hell hole? Reading about your endeavors has exhausted me and I haven't even lifted a shovel. I admire your grit and determination, but would love to see you rewarded with thousands of blooms on your rose bushes for all your hard work. I bet they could use engineers in zones 7 to 10!

Thanks for the advice from both of you. s8us89ds - I had to laugh at all your suggestions. :-) All good ideas, most of which we've thought of! I loved your earnestness and how well thought out it was, with the number of easy loops you'd ski, etc.. One important point to note, though, is just HOW rocky it is. It's difficult to convey to anyone who doesn't live in this area just how rocky it is. I have also lived in Maine and Mass. and I've never seen so many rocks. It's like a debris field of granite, mixed in with a little soil. The only area where digging is easy is right around the house, where they filled in (mostly with sand.) Removing the rocks is pretty much out of the question. Oh, also, there are old granite stone walls criss-crossing the woods. (I don't know if I mentioned that before.) We don't want to disturb those, and I am even thinking of clearing around them a bit, since they seem to be fast being swallowed up by dead leaves and such. But it would be nice to have clear trails out to view them. We've also thought of a trail, but we haven't gotten to the point of planning out how we'd do it. With so many rocks, above and below ground, the ground is very uneven. (This wouldn't be much of a problem during the winter when snow evens it out, though.) There's also kind of a boggy area so we'd have to build some sort of wooden bridge or platform in one area, unless we bypassed that area all together. A trail seems great (and we have a "town forest" which has "real" trails yet is only 5 acres, total, so we should be able to do something similar on our land.) It seems like a walking trail would be more doable than a cross-country ski trail, though. Oh, but one problem - we lose a multitude of trees every winter, in wind storms and ice storms. We've had giant trees completely uprooted, and other trees just snap in two. Now it's not just a tangle of thorny bushes, it's a tangle of uprooted and downed trees. The amount of labor needed to clear those downed trees would be great, so we've just cut down the ones which snapped in half (and show from our house) and left the others to do their natural thing.... In any case, right now my biggest concern is working with the transition from yard to woods, and less gardening within the woods (too overwhelming to think about!) All that said, I've rethought this issue a little bit since I posted my initial post. We're going to clear the overgrown blackberry bushes (which form almost an impenetrable border to the woods during the summer) but leave any saplings. That alone will make everything look more tidy. For the most part the cleared area around the house is a basic square (and, by the way, my husband does want to reforest, in part - grass-growing is a never ending battle against nature.) But, we have a little area off to one side of the square which is a perfect area for a firepit. We're going to clear the bushes there and build a stone fire pit. (One would think we'd use the readily-accessible natural stones, but each one is so incredibly heavy and they're half-buried that we will probably use landscaping stones. :-() Then, we just want the transition to woods to look slightly "considered" rather than ignored... at the very least, neatened up. I'd like to grow some lily of the valley... I'd love some wild lupine at the edge, if I can ever get anything to grow. I like the idea of rhododendrons for color. I know there is a woodland botanical garden somewhere in Massachusetts, and they label the native species, and I could visit it to get some ideas.

Virgil, yes Rock Rd is private road, already have permission though. No HOA and out of city limits. County won't pave the road.. The SW corner was my original thought of driveway placement. However, I was thinking I may prefer the garage to not be to their side, mainly because my husband and I both work at the business they own. Sometimes I may sneak in the office late or meet the husband for a quick lunch . While it's not like a huge deal work wise, it would just be nice knowing they didn't always know if I was home or not. Yes, obviously they could walk to the other side to see, but they wouldn't. And with a garage there they couldn't miss the view. Silly reason? Maybe. But then the culvert was brought up. I don't know how expensive it would be or if there is a different solution, my mom just said it was expensive. Even with a driveway at Southwest corner, I don't see how we could get it to make the house centered around the lot. It seems like the house will be on one side or the other of the lot and I'm having a hard time thinking it would look cohesive... I really am typing all my thoughts so sorry if it's long.. But yes to the main areas of the house would be on the North side with the head lights taken into consideration. It's a small subdivision, less than 28 houses all on over an acre. I have the smallest lot. Most are 3-4 acre lots. The traffic is mainly school hours as its used as a cross thru Rd. Other times it's not really that busy of a road. (the main Rd) the Rd in front of my parents dead ends after two more homes. Can anyone think of a certain angle of direction that would look good? Or nix the angle since my builders have said it's more $$. Or think an L shaped design could help bring the whole lot "together" I trust my architect to come up with a great plan once we start brainstorming, but I just want to feel like I exhausted all options as far as the placement before making a decision.