A couple tricks to others down the road reading the blog is to place plywood down on the lawn or driveway before you dump the stone.
If I could do it again, I would not have sifted the stone on the lawn because picking up the stone off the lawn again brought a bunch of junk with it. I would have just shoveled the total mess to the driveway first, and that would have eliminated a round of sifting. In my case, though, there still would be plenty of junk in the gravel because it was already buried under grass and bark chips for years before we bought this place.
It's easy to sift the dirt out with a trommel, but it doesn't do much for grass (catches on the trommel for removal, but time consuming) or bark chips, which are too big to fall out with the dirt. They end up still mixed with the rock.
Solution I came up with was to float it out in water. By the time I had an efficient system designed (in my head) for that, it was more work than it was worth for what I was trying to achieve.
I should have just scooped all the damn stuff out of the yard with Barney and put it in a trailer to the dump. Would have saved myself 5 days. 5 f***ing days for 1.5 yards of useful gravel. Just because I wanted to reuse materials onsite. lol. Top 5 dumbest ideas I've ever had.
Only saving grace is that I get a weird satisfaction out of solving little engineering problems like this.
An other trick we have used when having to move stone is to have the stone loaded into a similar bag
They're called super sacks around here. I actually went and bought one at Lowe's to see if I could speed up the bog build by using Barney to load a super sack and then carrying it with the bucket to the filter. Didn't work due to access. Path to filter from driveway is too narrow and have to navigate under eave of house. No way to carry the sack with the bucket without hitting the house or dragging the bag. Bag ripped open on the first trip from ground contact and spilled the gravel everywhere. Oops.
