New use for a riding mower

Now, with my discovery, you can use your riding mower to find valuable chains hidden in the long grass! Valued at $49.99, this method is foolproof. Yes, you too can find the highly valuable rust patinated chain in tall grass. When left behind by the guy who borrowed your chain it can be recovered and sold now that it has the sought after rust patina. And I will do this for no charge for my friends on rcm. Just tell your friends about this one time giveaway. Here's the secret method: Engage the mower blades and drive over the area with the tall grass. When you hear a god-awful noise and the motor stops dead you know that you have not only found the chain but have also recovered it because much of it will have wrapped around the blade axle. Who knew it could be so easy! Act now and I'll send info on how to remove the chain from the mower blade, just $49.99! Eric

I bet you had to use some mechanics Words of Power.

My old push mower was especially adept at finding buried coils of wire. Baling wire, barbed wire, you name it. That was always fun.

You need a bigger mower. I use mine to find 100 yard lengths of irrigation tubing. It wraps it up so nice and tight and compact. Almost a solid block of rubber by the time it stalls the tractor out.

karl

. Who knew it could be so easy! Act now and I'll send info

I find a rototiller will find things in tall grass too.

Dan

All my tiller usually finds is rocks . Big rocks , little rocks , flat rocks , round ones . I keep hoping it'll find a chest full of gold and jools , but it hasn't happened yet . Oh , and it's pretty good at finding roots too . Usually long stringy ones that get all wrapped up in the tines and have to be cut out with a limb trimmer .

I'm waiting on the odd cannon or box of booty myself. East Texas and lots of fighting went on from time to time. Some bank robberies in the old days as well...

Martin

Ed Huntress fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Nah! GOOD day! He found his chain AND a new use for the mower! Lloyd

It appears that Crom has a special li'l tidbit for each and every one of us, doesn't it? I wish we could skip past all the crap and just get on with the box of treasure, five pound nugget of gold, etc., don't you? 'Course, I'm still waiting to win the 'Win For Life' and claim my $1k/week-for-life prize. (Hell, I could easily get by on $500/wk, if he's listening.) It'd let me give up this hard life.

Right calf's still blue and swollen from the auger smacking me 3 times in 10 minutes trying to get thru some titanium hardpan. I've never seen such tough soil; clay/DG mix and harder than a witch's tit in a brass bra.

With me, it's the same but with my brush hog.

That reminds me when I saw a guy had hooked up blades to a weed-eater, stood on the side of a rowboat, stuck the end in the water and sped away.

My rototiller also excels at finding rocks. What I couldn't figure out wass how, after clearing the garden of all the rocks bigger than an egg, more big rocks pop up every year. But now I have the answer. Rock seeds. When the tiller churns up the rocks little pieces chip off. These are actually seeds, sort of like the eyes on a potato. So I'm going to switch to vinyl covered tilles tines, that oughta slow up the re-seeding I do whenever I till the garden. Eric

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Like the long-shaft tiller-style motors they used on sampans in RVN! Lloyd

If you lived where my family is from -- Greenland, New Hampshire -- you'd know all about farming rocks and how they breed.

I don't think they actually grow from seeds. It's more like the earth pushing them up from below to fill any gaps you leave by removing them.

There's one small farm my family worked for just short of 300 years, before turning it into a dairy farm. They were still getting a fresh crop of rocks every spring.

They just keep making the stone fences thicker. Today, they'd take a direct hit from a 105 howitzer without toppling over.

If large items and small items are put in a container and vibrated the large items will rise to the top. I wonder if something similar is why the large rocks keep appearing. Freeze/thaw cycles, wet and dry cycles, that kind of thing. Whidbey Island is a glacial till formation that is 3000 feet thick and so the geology mixed. My garden, which I have been working for about 12 years, is sandy loam with lots of rocks. However, where the garden is the loam is only about 10 feet thick. The next layer is a 40 foot thick layer of hard pan. I wonder how many years I'll need to till to get all the rocks out of the top layer of loam. Eric

Ha! It's quite a mystery. Maybe a geologist could explain it.

I live on top of a terminal moraine, but the rocks are down pretty deep. The glacier left a lot of sand and silt on top of the rocks and they're spread through the top layer like a thin bean soup.

In the Texas hill country, I call it "mowing the dirt", which also includes "mulching the rocks". I should own stock in the mower blade manufacturer. Not to mention bent spindles, etc. Maybe this drought will end some day. The other day, I damned near mulched a fawn. Didn't see the little critter in the tall grass until I stopped against it and it bolted. It moved fine and I didn't see any injuries or blood, so I guess it was ok.

Pete Keillor

How about a well patinated 43# axe head.

...

The "something similar" / "Freeze/thaw cycles" / etc is pretty close to the usual explanation. See for example which says "In geology, the effect is common in formerly glaciated areas such as New England -- new stones appear in the fields every year from deeper underground. ... Underground water freezes, lifting all particles above it. As the water starts to melt, smaller particles can settle into the opening spaces while larger particles are still raised. By the time ice no longer supports the larger rocks, they are at least partially supported by the smaller particles that slipped below them. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles in a single year speeds up the process."