Turkey Hunting

In April, Brady and his family came to Tennessee for the first time to see the farm. I met them in Greenfield and we stayed in McKenzie at the Best Western for 5 days. While there we discovered that McKenzie had a Rural King store. When we visited it on one of the first days Colton my grandson found a John Deer pedal tractor that he liked, so we bought it. You will see him riding it at home in a picture I have attached. We had a good time at the farm. Got some work done with Brady and Nicole's help, cutting down trees, picking up trash and framing of walls inside the metal building. Brady did do some turkey hunting without any luck. He also got to find out about the cows. He put up a portable blind one day and was going to use it the next day, the cows got back into our pastures and they proceeded to knock down the blind and then pooped all over it. Needless to say Brady was not happy. We also fished in the ponds, Brady caught a 3.5 lb bass and Nicole caught a 4.5 lb channel cat out of the barn pond and I caught several bass and crappie out of the south pond. The kids really liked the farm and they did get to see some deer one evening. I also got one of the nicest birthday presents ever.

Cows

We were leasing the property to a rancher to run his cattle on our pasture. This turned out to be quite a learning experience for me. I went to the property in March to plant some trees and grasses and to also mark some of the flowering trees on the property. I planted 2 apple tree, some pompass grass, a lilac bush and a flowering quince. Upon my return to the property a week later the pompass grass had been pulled out of the ground, apple trees had been pushed over and numerous trees that I had marked with plastic ribbon, had the ribbon pulled off. Another thing I have found out about cows is that when you change something on/in the area they live in they have this urge to mark it once it is changed. To do this they will poop all over the thing that is changed. I will tell more about this later on.

These are pictures of some of the wildlife Lois and I saw the first time we visited the farm in Dec. 2006. We spent 2 days at the farm, we met the man from the forestry service and he did a forestry plan for the farm, which will allow us to get reduced taxes and help us enroll in government plans.