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How to Harvest Crystals

Many people, adults and children alike, enjoy digging for or harvesting crystals directly from the ground. Certainly, you may find valuable stones that you can tumble, carve or leave raw for handmade jewelry, but it also gives you and your children an excuse to dig in the dirt for "buried treasure." Some mines are open to the public and allow people to harvest crystals for free. Other privately owned mines charge a small fee for rock-hounding. Whatever your reasons for harvesting crystal, know that improper digging will cause stones to break and shatter. Proper digging technique is essential to harvesting large, beautiful crystals. Fortunately, the process is not complicated, though it requires some concentration.

Things You'll Need

Gloves
Garden trowel
Plastic buckets
Shallow cardboard boxes
Rock hammer
Pry bar
Old newspaper

Instructions

- 1
  Put on your gloves before you begin to dig. Broken crystals and crystal points are razor-sharp and can slice very deeply into your skin. Leather gardening gloves help prevent these cuts and the infection that may come with them from clay and dirt.
- 2
  Line up your cardboard boxes next to the area where you are working. This gives you easy access to them when you work a crystal free, eliminating the need to scramble in and out of craggy, open-pit mines.
- 3
  Examine a crystal cluster you want to harvest closely. Look for the edges and where they meet the soil and clay at the bottom of the cluster.
- 4
  Gently scrape away at this soil at the base of the crystal with your trowel to find the "roots" of the crystal, or where it ends below the earth. Do not pry at the crystal itself; it will shatter.
- 5
  Fit your pry bar behind the crystal cluster, making sure the bar is seated in the soil, not in crystal, and push gently to loosen the crystal. Grip it gently with your hands and wiggle it until the crystal pops free. Lay it in one of your boxes and move on to the next cluster.

Gemology