Dude, where's my horseshit?

I am. I am trying to do it every day. However, each new day brings a brand new set of opportunities and obstacles. I am lucky enough to say that my days have been filled to the gills with plans.

Where does one get roughly a ton of stone for free?

Fifty years ago, half of Staten Island was undeveloped. I think it's safe to assume that there was rock everywhere. They came with their trucks and backhoes and dug up hundreds of thousands of foundations for homes, paved the roads that take us to places and carted all the rock away.

I'm not raging against the injustices of home-building or road-paving, or even the absence of precious rocks (although we all know I could). I am merely musing on the direction that our requirements for existence have taken over the past 150 years or so. I can go half a mile in any direction and find somebody willing to sign me up for a cell phone plan. All manner of food from the far corners of our globe can be prepared for my consumption and then delivered to my house for a nominal fee. The internet is literally everywhere I go. These are certainly achievements as far as the advancement of humanity should go.

Now with that said, the things that have been preoccupying my mind as of late are:

stones (large and small)
cow, pig and horseshit
bales of hay
massive piles of leaves

It is far from easy to procure any/all of the preceding. Bump me back in time 150 years or so, and I'd be tripping over rocks, stepping in all manner of animal droppings, and jumping offa bale of hay into a massive pile of leaves. And then after that was all said and done, I'd go and use them all for my garden.

That's right. I'm planning a garden. I am struck by how important these items can be, and how rare they are to come across without paying out the nose for them. Don't get me wrong, because I need my cell phone, I like to eat exotically, and I need that stinkin' internet to show me just how expensive and difficult it can be to get rocks, hay and animal shit. But I would gladly trade a little of modern convenience for the convenience of the non-modern.