August 22nd - 23rd trip to the farm

This trip over to the farm was more of a relaxing trip and a trip to get a tractor. We got there on Friday and went to Union City, Tn to look at tractors, there is a Kubota and a John Deere dealer located there. Well as luck would have it the Kubota dealer had a tractor just like we wanted that someone else had ordered and didn't take. We didn't even make it to the John Deere dealer. I hope to have pictures when we go to the farm on the next trip which should be Sept 6-7. Of course we don't have any pictures from this trip due to the fact that we forgot the camera. One trip we leave the camera at the farm and the next we leave it at home, what can I say???

We didn't spend much time at the farm as we went to an auction the next day and spent most of the day at the auction. I did however get the deer feeder set up and filled it with corn. One of the problems we have had with the deer feeder is coons climbing up the legs to get to the spreader and causing all the corn to come out. I am going to spray the legs on the feeder with WD-40 to see if this will keep them from being able to climb. It will be interesting to see how the deer are affected by this. I did put some Black Magic deer attractant down by the trophy rock so hopefully this will attract them.
So stay tuned to see what all this will bring.

August 16th trip to the farm

Well we made it over to the farm sooner this time, we didn't wait a full month to go over. I wanted to check out the dove hunting prospects and check the game camera's. The new camera had used up the batteries already, I knew I shouldn't have bought that brand of battery. The other camera had been moved about 1 inch around the tree so it wasn't aimed in the right direction. I can only assume that a coon or deer bumped against it. I do know the coons had been climbing up onto the deer feeder when I had it set out there trying to get to the corn so it would make sense that they would investigate the camera.

We had a great time at the farm, it was a spur of the moment trip on Saturday afternoon, so it was around 5:00 pm before we got there. We had stopped in McKenzie and bought sandwiches at Subway and then went on out to the farm. Once there we unloaded the blazer, loaded fishing equipment onto the golf cart along with the computer to download the camera's. We stopped at the first camera and downloaded it, that is when I found out the batteries were dead. We went to the next camera and downloaded the pictures from it. There were 276 pictures, which I will discuss later, as we had a new visitor make an appearance on the camera.

Our daughter had purchased us a little horn for the golf cart which Lois had mounted on the roof support bar on the riders side of the cart, the horn was red in color. I had just gotten done with the camera and had sat down to leave when a humming bird zipped right by Lois's head and went to the horn thinking it was a flower. It was comical as he hovered there trying to figure out what to do. Lois said it sounded like a 747 when he flew by her ear.

We then headed to the south pond, ate our supper of subway sandwiches and started fishing. Lois wasn't going to fish and she always carries a set of pruning shears in the golf cart to trim briars that may grow along our patch. Well she had spotted a vine growing up on one of the oak trees and when I turned around from fishing, she was over cutting this vine. I said "Lois do you get poison ivy?" She said " is that what this is". I said "yes it is". Well luckily she doesn't get it as nothing has shown up 2 days later. She did come down and start fishing. She was using a beetle spin on an ultralight fishing rig and ended up catching 4 bluegill, 5 crappie and a small bass. I was using purple worm rig and caught 5 bass in the 2 pound range. It was just a beautiful evening, the temperature was just right, no bugs, real relaxing way to spend the end of the day.

The new visitor to the game camera is a hawk, he must have caught a mouse, snake or something right in front of the camera area and we got three pictures of him. Just a reminder that if you click on the picture it will enlarge it

We spent the night in McKenzie at the motel, Sunday morning we were up and at the farm around 8:30, we did a little fishing. Lois again was using the ultralight fishing rig but this time I had tied a 3" rapala lure on it. She went to her favorite spot between 2 cedar trees that has a limb out over the water that has bag worms on it. Well it wasn't long and she hooked a fish. It was causing quite a ruckus so I went over to lend some support and give some coaching. Well some 8 - 10 minutes later she landed a 22" channel cat that looks like it would weight about 4-5 lbs. And to keep the record straight, I did not catch a fish this morning!!!!

We spent the rest of the day working on the barn, it has a lot of leaves, spider webs, wasp nests and dirt in it. So we have been doing a lot of cleaning. I also said in an earlier post that we had built some shelves in it and a rack for hanging tools.

I am going to change the tool rack area, by putting up plywood across this area so I can hang more tools.

Here are some before pictures of the trash that is in some areas of the barn, I will post after pictures in a few weeks.

You often find unexpected things when you do cleaning like this, one of the things we found was a snake's shedded skin, I took pictures of this skin next to a measuring stick, I would call it a yard stick but it is 48" long so it is a 4' stick. Anyway I could not believe how long it measured. 53", I could not keep it straight when I took the pictures, but you can see it is curled in several places.

This is one of Lois's favorite things at the farm, driving the golf cart around, we did spend some time just going to different areas to look at ways to mow, upgrade, clear timber, etc.

We also love seeing the wild flowers, butterflys and the wild birds.

We were on our way into McKenzie Saturday nite and the sun was setting in the west with a pretty sunset and the moon has come up and it was a full moon, it was so pretty. The picture doesn't do it credit.

We are going back this weekend, leaving on Friday and coming back Saturday, hope to have the deer feeder up and going, hope to finish cleaning. Want to see about a tractor and go to an auction. So we should have a lot to tell about when we get back.
I will be posting new game pictures on the other blog site.

August 1st visit

I haven't posted anything lately, even though we did make a trip to the farm on August 1 & 2. This is about that visit, it was a work visit, as I wanted to build shelves and a rack to hold things in the barn. We did download the game camera and got some great pictures of some nice deer. I took pictures of the some of the work but forgot the camera at the farm so you will have to wait until we get back there and get it. We did set up one of the new camera's. New cameras, I was at Walmart the other day and happened to be in the sale aisle and found two game cameras on sale, so I bought them. We put one of them up in an area that we had gotten some pictures of deer earlier in the year. We put a trophy rock out to help attack and hold the deer in the area. On the next trip we are going to put out the deer feeder at this location to see what we can attract. We didn't do any fishing on this trip. All work, of course I had to pick the hottest weekend to go and do this work. On Saturday it got up to 98 degrees and Friday was 2 degrees cooler.
While we were working in the barn I found a shed snake skin, I pulled it out and we measured it, 53" long. Will have pictures of it on the next post.
Here are some of the pictures from the game camera,
Nice young buck.







Another young buck







Another young'un







Get them coming to the trophy rock when they are young







Another new dog that is crossing the property