10-22-09 Visit

I went to the farm today to check on things, my son wanted me to set up a camera on a scrape to see if I could get some good pictures of some bucks. Got that done, got some pictures of the colorful trees, hoed the weeds in the iris garden, cleaned the radiator on the tractor and fished a little. Also downloaded a one weeks worth of pictures from cameras.

Here are some pictures from cameras

Oak grove camera

Pond camera

I moved the two cameras that were at the oak grove and at the pond, both are now on scrapes. One has a scrape dripper on it so it will be refreshed each day. The other one is on a trail that has a couple of scrapes on it. Hopefully we should get some good pictures from both of these.

Here are some pictures of the fall colors

Here are some scrapes

I saw more deer sign at the farm than I have seen all year. They have gotten all the corn out on the neighboring farms and most of the soy beans. The deer will have to eat acorns now so hopefully the larger bucks will start showing up. The persimmon trees should be loaded this year with the rain and as soon as we have a couple more frost they will start dropping and there are a bunch of those on the farm. When they start dropping I will move one of the cameras to that area.

10-15-09

Made a trip to the farm today, went by myself to check things out. We hadn't been there for two weeks. Everything looked good when I got there, I did have to hoe the weeds out of the area behind the barn where we planted the iris's and they are looking good. With the onset of colder weather it will help getting rid of a lot of these weeds.

When I opened the barn door there were two lizards underneath it. The one took off running across the concrete floor, he stopped about 5' out on the floor. I went back to the blazer to get the camera to take some pictures of him. He sat right there and let me take some, I tried to get closer and closer and at one point I realized that the cold from the concrete floor had slowed him down so much he could barely move. It was what you call a fence lizard and here are some pictures of him. When I went to put him back onto the grass I took a picture of the other one that was there.

I next went out and planted the lilly's a neighbor had given me, had quite a few of them and planted them with the phlox up under the loblolly pines.

I then went and down loaded all the pictures from the game cameras. I may have to find another tree to put the one camera on, it seems that when it is windy the movement of the tree trunk will set the camera off and I have a bunch of pictures without any animals in it. You can tell it is the wind as you move from one picture to the next you can see the movement of things in front of the camera. We did have a variety of pictures from each camera, although the one at the pond needed to be moved a little to better catch the animals. One of the pictures from the camera under the oak trees you will really enjoy as the deer stuck its head right down in front of the lens.

These next pictures are from the pond

this picture shows how deep the mineral lick is getting

I next went exploring, I had never gone back into the timber down by fern gully (as we call it). It is amazing all the ferns that are growing on the northern hillside. Now is the time to do this kind of walking and exploring as the snakes will be slowed down and should be trying to get somewhere where they can get some sunshine or get warm. I can't say I found anything unusual or exciting. It was just nice to be back in there, I did scare some deer out, couldn't see how many or what they were, bucks or does. I did find an area where there were several rubs, one of which was on a tree that was 4-6" across. See picture

Next I went fishing, I can now say I have caught the largest catfish out of the south pond, of course I am the only person who has caught a catfish out of the south pond. I wasn't fishing for catfish as I had a bass lure on. He hit it anyway and he ended up being about a 3.5 lb catfish. As you can see from the picture he is almost as long as a machete. The only other thing I caught was a small crappie. The important thing was it was fun.

Sep 26 visit to the farm

We went to the farm yesterday to pick up the trailer to bring back to the house, we have to go to pick up some furniture that belonged to Lois's sister, It is at Lois's nephews house down in Birmingham, Al.

I also needed to take the weed eater to Phil Haskins who lives just down the road from the farm and runs a small engine repair shop there. The weed eater broke the last time I used it, hopefully it is still under warranty, we just bought in the spring. He is an authorized Poulan repairman and is the one that repaired my chainsaw and did a great job on it. So if you are in the area and need work done on small engines see Phil. You will see signs for Haskins small engine repairs.

I also changed out the memory cards on the game cameras, only the one at the mineral licks had pictures on it, the one at the oak grove had nine pictures on it but none had any animals. I have readjusted it so we will see if that makes any difference. Here are some of the pictures from the mineral lick area.

There is still standing corn in most of the fields around the farm and we think that all the larger bucks are hiding out in the fields. The standing corn gives the deer an extra place to hide. Last year the fields had soybeans in them and the deer couldn't hide in those.

I did do a little fishing and caught one small bass and a bluegill that was bigger than my hand. He was one of the largest ones I have ever caught. Turned him loose.

I did some hoeing around the iris's at the end of the barn, planted some bulbs up by the lob lolly pines. I also started up Jessie the pickup truck and took her for a spin out on the highway. She fired right up. Still no signs of any oil leaks underneath her.

We forgot the camera again, hopefully we will be back week after next. See ya then.

To the farm

On Thursday I made my way over to the farm by myself, Lois was out of town so I got up at and was out of the house by 5:18 am. It had been raining in the Nashville area for the last 2 days and I hoped it rained at the farm. If it was raining there when I got there so be it I would just do some fishing. When I got there it wasn't raining although it had rained some the day before so I didn't have to do any watering of plants. I did take some pictures of the areas that I sprayed with the brush killer last week. It is starting to work.

Next I decided to do some weed eating around some of the plants as the weeds are trying to take over. I got some of them done when the weed eater broke. So I am going to have to get that fixed.

Next I loaded up the chainsaw, some fencing material and headed for the back of the farm as I knew that there were 2 spots there that trees/limbs had knocked down the fence. I got there and got the trees off the fence. I ended up fixing the fence in 5 spots, I still have to get about 5 fence posts to

fix it better. I then moved along the west side of the property where two different trees had fallen down, one was almost on the fence. It was a twenty foot tall elm tree. The other tree had the fence attached to it, it was a 30 foot tall cedar tree. I got started on the elm tree and had it cut up in no time, it probably took another 1 1/2 hrs to finish the cedar tree. It was hard work but I was glad when it was done.

Once I was done with that I went back to the barn and loaded up my rifle and a target. I went to the area down below the south pond. I then went to an area that was about 100 yds from the target and sited in the rifle. I hadn't done this in over 20 yrs. It was a lot of fun.

Next I went to the barn and loaded up the memory discs for the game cameras. When I got the camera by the mineral holes I had to take some pictures of these holes. It is amazing how deep these holes have gotten as you will see from the pictures. The holes are 8 - 10 inches deep and now the deer have dug them out another 6 inch's deeper as you will see in the pics.

I was a little disappointed by the game camera at the south pond, as it didn't have any pictures on it. The camera that I put in the oak grove had 4 pictures on it, only one of an deer, the other three were at night and you could see nothing. I found out that after looking at the camera that it is aimed at a slight angle up. I need to get it so it is level.

While I was checking the cameras I noticed these yellow flowers blooming in different spots so I took some pictures of these and you will see how pretty they are.

Also while I was looking at the flowers I noticed the pine trees that I had trimmed around. These trees had grown over a foot since the spring, the two that I took pictures were now taller than me.

Here are the some pictures from the cameras

The Farm

We went to the farm on Tuesday, Sep 8, just to check things out. We had some more iris's to plant to finish out what we had started two weeks ago. We were happy to see that the ones we had planted had already started to grow. They really looked good. So we got those planted. I decided to spray the fence row starting at the front gate. Here is what it looked like.

As you can see we definitely needed to do something. Some of the bigger trees I am going to have to cut down. Anyway I will be keeping you informed on how the spraying went.

Next I watered as many of the trees and plants as I could, some of the azaleas have died, I guess we haven't had any rain there in more than a couple of weeks. Hopefully I got to most of them in time. The apple trees really looked good.

Next I mounted the one game camera by the pond again and mounted the other up in the oak tree grove above the pond. I put this one about 1' off the ground. we'll see what kind of pictures we get. If we don't get any I am going to move it to the pecan tree.

We then downloaded the pictures from the other game camera. I think you will enjoy a few of the pictures.

The little one

Two new bucks that I haven't seen before

Mom and baby