Feb 24

We made another trip to the farm on Tuesday Feb. 24th; we needed to take the golf cart back as they had gotten the batteries replaced. When we went up to get the cart they had another cart setting outside that was for sale. It was a used cart that did not have a roof on it and the back seat had been removed and replaced with a metal bed that you can use as a dump bed. Lois has been saying that we needed another vehicle at the farm so you guessed it; we are now the proud owners of another golf cart. I will have pictures of it posted sometime soon. So we had to pull the trailer back with us so we can take the new cart back next week sometime. Since we were there we did do a little work, we had to rearrange the barn so we will be able to get another vehicle in it. Lois wanted to start working on the trash pile down by the barn pond. I will post pictures of this, before and after picks. There will be several trips to the salvage yard as there is some metal in it. Lois also planted some tulip bulbs around the trees on the dam of the pond. I got to do a little fishing, caught one bass that weighted about a pound and hooked another fish that felt like a nice one but lost him without seeing what it was. Hope to post again sometime next week when we go to the farm again.

2/17/09 Farm visit

Well we finally made it over to the farm Tuesday and Wednesday, the 17th and 18th.
Tuesday was windy and the temp was in the low forties, with the wind it seemed awlfully cold. We got to the farm and immediately hooked up the trailer to the Trailblazer, we had the trailer loaded down with junk that we had picked up from around the barn area. Old fencing, concrete reinforcement wire, several sheets of that, a bunch of electric fence wire, old posts and a watering tank made out of an old boiler. 540 lbs worth of metal, we hauled it over to the salvage company and got around $40.00 for it.

On the way home we stopped and looked at an Allis Chalmers 2 row planter that we will be needing sometime down the road. It was in very good shape and one of the best ones I have seen. I have been looking for one of these and they don't come cheap. So Wednesday morning we were on our way over to pick it up. When we got there the gentlemen who was going to load it on the trailer was talking to another man who had pulled in. He told us that the man had stopped in and had wanted to buy the planter. He also said that 3 other people had stopped in to look at it the same day we did. He told us that he was selling it for a friend who takes old planters that are 4, 6, 8 and larger row planters and cuts them down to 2 row planters. This gentlemen sold 6 of them for him last year and this was the second one this year. So there must be good money in it.

We had another tree fall down along the west fence line, I have a lot of work to do cutting up trees on the property. I know of at least 6 trees that need to be cut up that have fallen down in the last year. Most of them are elm trees which I will use to put in some of the eroded ditches to help the dirt in place. There are 2 of them that are cedar trees that I am going to use for posts for a shelter that I want to build on the property down by one of the ponds. I think these cedar trees will work great for this and last a long time.

I did get on the tractor get some work done, two of the trees we had cut down the first year, the trunks and some of the bigger logs were still by the barn so I drug them over to one of the eroded ditches by the drive way coming into the farm and dumped them into it. I also was able to bust up the stump with loader on the front of the tractor.

We also had to get a list of all the model and serial numbers off all the equipment we have at the farm for insurance purposes. I had been trying to get insurance on the barn and its contents since we bought the farm but everyone was so expensive. Get ready for a little advertising here!! Thanks to Farm Bureau Insurance we now have very affordable farm insurance. A special thanks to the agents in Dresden for helping out with this. We also took pictures of everything in the barn since some of the stuff didn't have model or serial #s.

We then loaded up Camo Kirby (our golf cart) grandkids named it that and have brought it back to Gallatin so we could have it looked at as it seems to have lost a lot of power. If it is something wrong with the batteries this could be expensive. Thank goodness this is something that will be a tax write off, I think. As you can see I did a lot of pulling of the trailer, thank goodness for that, one of the best investments I have made.

I did get to do a little fishing on Wednesday, it was a beautiful day and I did catch one crappie. When I told Lois it was time to go as I didn't want to drive after dark with the trailer, she wasn't very happy. She said she hadn't gotten very much porch swing time. It is one of those things that now it seems we don't get to fish or swing as much as we would like to. It is still nice to go over and be there as we know every day there takes so much stress off of us. We did see three deer run across the property before we left.

We also got to meet one of the neighbors that lives just down the road from us. He was riding by on his polares 4 wheel cart and seen the gate open and the blazer so he pulled in and we must have talked for about an hour. A very nice gentlemen. The ponds both look so good filled up. They were so low last year from the drought.

Here are some pictures from the trip. Enjoy until the next time.

The two row planters

One of the ponds and you can see the ducks decoys

Some deer pics

New Years Day Visit

It’s been over a month since we were at the farm, a new job for me kept us from making a trip sooner. It was nice to get there, although we could only spend part of the day there. We checked everything out and it looked good. Downloaded all the pictures from the game cameras (which we will be talk about and look at later), forgot to get a couple of bags of corn to fill up the deer feeder, it was empty. There weren’t any new trees down, everything else looked normal.
Have had quite a bit of rain over there, we needed it the ponds we getting low. See the before and after pictures, these are of the pond by the barn. We were certainly glad to see the ponds had filled up as there were getting awfully low. You could see 5-6 foot of land around the ponds that normally was under water, a neighbor who knows the property well said he had seen stumps in the one pond that he had never seen before.

Before pics

look at bottom of trees in back

Where I am standing should be under water

After
Look at bottom of trees, see the difference

I was a little disappointed by the pictures from the game camera’s, the new one only had 32 pictures on it, this is the one that we were getting at least 200-300 pics a month on. Don’t know why the area has changed. I am going to refreshen the trophy rock and put some deer magic out and we’ll see what happens. The other camera had 90 pictures on it which is about right as the feeder was out of corn. There weren’t any bucks on either camera, yet we found 2 nice rubs that we had not seen before. One on a 4” diameter tree and the other on a 6” diameter tree, see the pictures below.

4"

6"

game camera pics

Not much else to tell about, other it was great to get over there. We did find a 2 row planter that I am going to call about. I also need to find a 5’ or 6’ disk, both of these will be needed to make food plots.
We also purchased some new duck decoys to put on the ponds, the ones we put out earlier look so good on the one pond we decided to put some more out. I won’t be able to do that until the next trip, I have to get some weights to be able to tie them down.
With this new job I don’t know what hours I will be working yet, but with any luck it will allow me to get to the farm at least once a month this summer. I wasn’t able to do that the last two years, this will allow me to plant more trees and to keep them watered. We lost most of the trees we planted last year due to the drought and not being able to water them.
See ya next month.

More on Thanksgiving at the Farm

Here are some more pictures from Thanksgiving day at the farm. The first is of Jay and Carmen taking a fish off the hook.

The next is of Lois and Scott riding in the golf cart on the dam of the pond by the barn

This picture is hard to discribe, Scott was reaching to get a cola out of the cooler when his chair started to tip and down he went.

The last picture is of me, it looks like I am fishing, I'm not, I actually am trying to hook one of the duck decoys that is in the pond. It for some reason has turned over sideways and looks like it is going to sink. Of course under actual fishing circumstances if I was casting like this I would get hung up on the the wire that holds the decoy. I could not for the life of me, get hook to hook onto the wire or decoy, so I will have to get the decoy out some other way.

Until I get more pictures back that is it for now. See ya soon.

Thanksgiving at the farm

Well we did have thanksgiving at the farm and we actually did have a wiener roast this year. I had gone over the Sunday before thanksgiving and dug a small fire pit down by the barn pond. I also moved some of the cut wood down to it so we won't have to do it that day. The weather was great, temps in the low 60's, no wind or rain. We did some fishing, shot some trap and shot the pistol. Carmen caught the biggest fish out of the south pond. It was bass that weighted about 3.5 lbs. That's not Carmen holding the fish, that is Jay, Liz's boyfriend.









I hit the most clay pigeons, not that I did that great, just had more experience doing it.
I got my camera back from Moultrie the week before, it had got broken so I had to send it in to be fixed. They sent me a new camera with a new warranty. So when I went to the farm the Sunday before thanksgiving I put it back up. I downloaded the pictures from it, it had only been up for 3 days and their wasn't many pictures on it. Hopefully it isn't because of people being back there trying to hunt. When I was there on Sunday I did download pictures from the other camera, it had the most pictures it had ever had on it. It has a corn feeder by it and they had not been using it very much until this time. The ground under the feeder was bare of grass and corn, they had been using it so much. You can see in the picture all the leaves on the ground.







You can see in the picture below all the leaves are gone beneath the feeder.







There were several pictures with 4 coons under the feeder. You could see their foot prints trying to get up the legs of the feeder to get more corn.







Of course the coons weren't the only things eating the corn as you can see from this picture.














This is the nicest looking buck that I have seen on this camera.







I hope to have more pictures in a week, I didn't get to take any pictures so I am waiting for them to be sent to me. When I get them I will post them.

A few more pictures

Here are some pictures that I thought I had misplaced from a recent trip to the farm.
Here is a picture of a lizard that has started hanging around the front door of the barn, actually there are two of them that seem to like the front door. They have just shown up since we moved the cattle off the property, once the grandsons show up they may move again.

Here is a picture of a hat Lois found on one of our trips that she though I should have since I got the tractor. Since we have gotten the tractor whenever I get on I can spend hours on it so this hat is appropriate.







Here are some pictures of the little living area in the barn, Lois has done such a great job of making the barn so nice. When you are sitting in this part it is hard to believe it is a barn. You can see the duck decoys that are now part of the decor.























I still have an area for ther farm stuff

Toilet Installation

Well we made it to the farm last weekend, had a very enjoyable time. The weather was so nice. The trip to the farm was the best, we have found a quicker way to the farm. The leaves are changing and it was a beautiful ride. See some of the pictures.

Once we got there Lois wanted to drive down to a neighbors place to visit them, so I stayed at the farm and installed the electric toilet, yes we got it back and it is installed and working. It is amazing, if you have a place that you don’t have running water but you do have electricity this is the way to go. It is called Incinolet; you can find it on the internet http://www.incinolet.com/index.htm. We have made a small bathroom and put it in it.

While I was working on the toilet, I heard a noise outside the barn, being from Illinois originally and having hunted pheasants for some 35 years, I thought to myself that sounded like a pheasant. So I walked to the door on the barn and sure enough there stood a pheasant about 20 ft away. I backed into the barn got my phone out and took a picture of him. This is unusual to find a pheasant in Tennessee as they don’t live here. He stayed near the barn all day long. Later Steve, the guy that cuts hay on our property, stopped by and I asked him about the pheasant, He said that some man down the road had raised a bunch of them and had gotten tired of feeding them so he turned them lose. Remember that you can click on the picture to enlarge it.

We put up a porch swing on one of the oak trees down by the entrance gate, Lois just loves it. She can go down there and relax whenever she wants to. We have two more to put up; one is going down on the dam of the pond by the barn. On our way home from the last trip to the farm we stopped at a flea market and found an old wooden porch swing. I have fixed it up and stained and sealed it and it will go down by the other pond.

We have cleaned up around the barn and it is looking a lot better, check out the before, during and after photos.

Before

During

After

I also started fixing some of the fences, we have had several elm trees that are dead fall onto sections of fence. So I want to make sure the fence is up and in good shape. We also put up numerous “No Trespassing, hunting or fishing” signs at certain spots around the property. Not that it will keep people out but let’s hope so.

Downloaded pictures off the game cameras, the main one on the back side of the property decided to quit working. I installed new batteries into it and it would not work. These were fairly new batteries. So I took the camera down and brought it home with me. Once home I bought brand new batteries and it still wouldn’t work. So it is off to the Moultrie to be worked on. Thank goodness it still had 20 days left on the 1 year warranty. I am usually not lucky like that. We did have some good pictures from the camera, one of the big deer again. I will post these on the other blog site at, http://htfgamecamerapics.blogspot.com/ . Enjoy them.

We also met with the Tennessee Area Forestry Agent. He was meeting with us to let us know that we were all set up in the new Eqip Forest Habitat Program. He had gone to the farm earlier and done a Stewardship program for the farm. It gives us suggestions that we need to do to improve our forests and things to do to help the wildlife. We now have even more work to do but we are excited. We learned a lot from the agent, he was a wealth of information. He also showed me where there was a pecan tree on the property. He said he could not believe how many pecans were on this tree, as we have been in a drought since last year. He also showed me a white oak tree that was just loaded with acorns, unbelievable how many acorns were on this tree. One of the things Lois and I want to do is learn the type of trees and mark them some way so we will know what they are.

I didn’t get to fish this time as we did a lot of work; I cleared some of the area below the dam by the barn. With the wood that was cleaned out I built a brush pile to help the wildlife. This is one of the things that the stewardship programs calls for. We also were given some old duck decoys by a dear friend of ours. We took them to the farm and Lois used some of them to decorate with, we also took some and put them out on the pond by

the barn. Hope you can see them in the pictures

I also took some pictures of the trees on the farm, so enjoy.