9/11/08 Trip

It's only been a week since we were here, but we enjoyed ourselves so much we couldn't stay away. I am going to do some more mowing and we are also going to do some hand brush clearing on one of the ponds. It is suppose to rain some while we are here so we brought some things we can work on inside the barn. When we got here we had a lot of stuff to unload and as we were unloading it I noticed one of the big tires on the tractor was flat. Thank goodness for the local coop, as they have a truck that will come out and repair the tire on the tractor, of course $139.00 later I was able to start mowing again. I have named the tractor "The Chief" since it is orange in color and I am an Illini fan it worked out great.



I found this 12" magnet of the chief



Anyway I spent the next 4 hrs mowing out on the front/north side of the property. As I started mowing I saw a lot of small lob lolly pine trees that were growing which we hadn't seen before. It seems that the cattle like to eat these and they have never had a chance to get over 3' tall. Well now they will as I didn't mow them down.

If you click on this picture you will see the small pines growing along the edge where I have mowed.

We also found a lot of small oak trees that I had to mow around, I think this is also the same thing in that the cows ate the leaves off of them and wouldn't let them get big.

The start/headwaters of Cane Creek starts on our property, it is a small draw on the north side of the property. It was full of briar's, wild roses and weeds over 8'tall. Anyway I started mowing it and the next thing you know you have opened up a new area that if given a chance to let the grass grow and keep the nasty stuff out it will be a great area. Again this was an area that you could not walk through, the cows had not even tried to get through it.

Friday 9/12/08, It isn't raining this morning so when we get to the farm I am going to do some more mowing, when we got there, low and behold another flat tire. This is on one of the front tires, which I can change and take into town to the coop. I left the tire at the coop and told them I would be back at noon to pick it up. When I got back to the farm Lois suggested that we go down to the pond and do some clearing on the dam side of it. We spent about 1 1/2 hrs working and then it was time to go eat lunch. The area around the dam looks pretty good.

You can now drive the golf cart all the way across the dam

After lunch we got the tire and headed back to the farm. Once there we decided that as hot as it was we would spend the rest of the day doing some fishing. Here are some of the pics from that.

Saturday 9/12/08, Today we went to another auction, after looking at all the stuff they had at the sale most of it was junkie, we decided to go back to the farm, it was still a hot day so we decided to just do some fishing, planning and light work. Lois loves to trim trees so here are two of them that she has started trimming down at the south pond.

Before

After

Another tree Lois worked on

9-7-08 Trip to the Farm

We left on Friday morning and went to Union City to get the tractor, we had it unloaded by 2:30 and I was mowing not too much later. I mowed the front of the property and up on the hill, spent 3 hrs doing this. It sure made the areas look a lot nicer

you couldn't even see this small bale of hay as the elderberry plants and weeds were so high around it.




Saturday 9/6/08 We went to an auction this morning and early afternoon, Lois bought a small electric scooter that we hope to be able to use on the farm. Lois also bought an old porch swing that we are going to hang down by the pond by the barn. We also bought a telescope to keep at the farm.

We are going to name this scooter Wall-e as it reminds me of a robot when you see it head on

Once we got back to the farm I mowed for another 3-4 hrs. I mowed down by the south pond. It is a good thing I like trees as I also like being on the tractor mowing and I would be mowing down the entire property. See the picture below, this was an area that was full of raspberry briars and little elm trees. You couldn’t walk through it before, it sure makes it look nicer mowed.

Sun 9/7/08 We went early so I could do more mowing, cleared some areas out that had lots of briars and wild roses on them. These need to be cut often; hopefully we will be able to spray them with brush killer now that we have them mowed. Once we get them killed I hope to plant Lespedeza plants in that area. These are good for deer and Quail. I also mowed in the area where we want to build the house so we could see it better.
Before we left I downloaded the pictures from the game cameras, found out the one camera by the deer feeder isn’t working correctly. I will work on it on the next trip as I didn’t have the instruction book with me. For some reason the deer aren’t coming to the deer feeder like they should be. There was a lot of corn laying on the ground, it may be that the corn in the fields are ready for picking and they are eating it or could be something else. The sooner the camera is working the better.

Lois my wife has done a great job of cleaning up the barn; I have included some picture for you to see what it looks like. I wish we had taken more pictures before she started cleaning, because it is quite a difference.

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