JONESBORO, Maine — Now that the last of the company’s 300 acres of wild blueberries have been picked, Hennessey Brothers is busy picking rocks out of its 300 acres of barrens in Jonesboro.
Ernie Spaulding of Danforth jumped in his excavator at 3 a.m. Friday for a long day of clearing boulders from a barren off Route 1.
The Machias-based company has been “land-leveling” for years and has now cleared more than 250 acres. Rock-free fields accommodate mechanical harvesting, as the task of recruiting crews of human hand-rakers has become more difficult in recent years Down East.
“These are small,” he said Friday afternoon of his rock harvest. “There are some that I can dig out, but not carry off, because they’re just too heavy. We need to bring in even bigger equipment to do that.”
Spaulding estimates he has logged as many as 30,000 hours picking rocks for Hennessey Brothers.
There’s a boulder season?
It comes right after Construction Season.
Yep right before hunting season
A Mechanical Harvester ? Are they serious ? When I was a kid my friends and I looked forward to raking to earn money for school clothes etc…Guess I must be living under a rock??
I did the same as a kid, kids now are a different breed…Bubble wrap kids…They are coddled from crib to grave..
I would pick rocks for free, give me an excavator and some fuel, beer and let me go to town…