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.

10-1-08 Visit

Well we took a day trip to the farm last week, we wanted to install the new electric toilet (yes electric toilet). See the attached pictures. We got there and I hooked up the electrical plug, which is a 20 amp receptacle and circuit, vent line and set up the tent enclosure around it. We then flushed it (it requires no water) and pushed the button to activate it. Loud popping sound and nothing happened. Went out and checked the circuit breaker which had been tripped, this is a bad sign. This toilet runs on 20 amp 120 volts, yeah you got it right, this was a 20 amp 240 volt circuit. Hopefully we may have only done minor damage to the unit after talking to the manufacturer. We will see. Here are some pictures of the toilet.

We also installed to overhead lights in the barn over the seating area and dining area. Instead of the turkey decoy chandeliers we now have a light here.

Lois also got me to mount the porch swing in the seating area. In the following picture we removed the telescope and gate from the wall and put the porch swing there. It looks good there.

All that is left to do is to put in a mirror and small cabinet in the bathroom area. We hopefully will be doing that on the next trip. See ya all then

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.