Stone Picking the day away!!!!

I am sitting here and can barely stay awake, its been a long long day but I decided to end it with a nice can of cold draught Guiness :)

Started the morning working for my Dad at 5.30am, he delivered papers and for some reason the setup was poor this morning with papers and bundles missing so I was out until 9.45am, luckily my sister Marian was with me in her motor otherwise I would not have finished until 11am.

Georgeous morning, very sunny, so got a quick breakfast and was out and ready to start stone picking at 11am.
I bought a "Landscapers Rake" yesterday in NCF, its about 3ft wide with a long handle, also bought a fork, the two cost me 70 notes, so bit pricey. Also I enquired about the grass seed there and was told it was going to cost me 100 euro to cover the whole 3/4 acre.

The area I was to start with is 60ft by 20ft, roughly. I found that there was serious amount of stones, but I got stuck in and did my "molly Malone" and wheeled my wheel barrow etc.

Sean the next door neighbour and plant owner came over to investigate and suggested I get out a mini digger with rake.
He had one out so he got hold of it for me and with the rake buckets he started to tear into the area, I had at this stage probably 20 odd barrows of stone removed.
But once he got stuck in he took out in or about 30 mini digger buckets of "Skutch grass" and stones.
But it still needed to be covered by me also. So I also raked it for another 3 hours with him.

Then he came back with it and levelled it with the bucket of the digger. Again we took off another 5 buckets of stone, then he returned the machine.
To hire a machine like that is 140 euro but it costs 40 euro to transport!!!! Pricey for the day.

So I had to re-rake and re-level it again with my "super rake". I went in for a bit to eat at 6pm. Out again for 6.30pm and started the re-rake. Sean, fair play to him came out about 7.30pm again and between us spent another 1.5 hours raking and levelling.
I told him to head off home as we had 90% of it done and we also had the side section done, about 4ft wide by 40ft.
So at 9.30pm I finally finished so we are ready to seed this section. Considering that this section is 111 sq m , what remains is over 900 sq m then we are a LONG way off :)

I will try and take a pic of this tomorrow, that if I can walk. Working a 5.30am so I will be gimped!!!
Over and out