Some Logged Land Pics

This is on the northern border of the property. You can see I-540 off if you look in between the trees. The view is really opening up, and you can see the hills on the other side of the West Fork. I think it's mighty beautiful
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So the loggers are leaving a lot of treetops and small tree too small to make mini-logs than get knocked down by the skid-steer. The price on pulp is really low, and you have to haul pulp all the way down to Ashdown in the southern part of Arkansas. At $2.00/ton, I'd rather have the debris left on the ground where it'll catch soil.
This is at the foot of the property. It's going to make some beautiful pasture. I've sowed orchardgrass and some red clover already. I'm taking it easy on the clover because I don't want bloat to be a worry. Tonight Carla and I are going to go sow wheat and annual ryegrass to try and get some forages started to hold the soil. There's a lot of hickory stumps laying around, and these will throw off massive shoots (copice) for the next couple of years, which will make excellent goat browse.

Rough Green Snake

The rough green snake is a pretty neat critter. It's not particularly big, but as far as snakes go, it can be pretty cute. It's emerald green because it's favorite place to hang out is in the tree tops. In late spring, the females nest in tree cavities, and will use the same spot year after year if it stay unoccupied.
This snake lives off of spiders mostly, but the occasional katydid, dragonfly, or appropriately sized tree frog can be quite the delectable treat. Green snakes are incredibly flexible, a trait that comes in quite useful when your snakey life depends on not plummeting 60 ft out of a hickory tree. You can see in the photo above just how adapted the rough green snake is to tree top life as I transfer it from a stick onto an oak sapling.

Drought Time Fun

Drought Range Chickens
The Stand-Off

Kola, Alfredo, and Zanzi. Note the 3 year-old attached to the stick lurking in the background

What a life

Dozing in the Holler

Zzz...I mean Vroom, vroom, clank, clank & various other dozer, not dozing sounds.

We're logging a bunch of timber off of benches and gentle slopes on our property. Above is the loading area for cut trees. A semi with a full trailer load of logs has to be able to turn around then make it out to our driveway. This'll make a great pasture in a year or so.

I'm wanting to open up some land into more pastures. One section of land I'll be opening will be southeastern facing near the house and will be an ideal place for the goats and future ruminants during the winter time due to proximity to our home and drier ground than the pasture across the creek. It'll also allow me more options when it comes to rotating pastures.

The turkeys will go on this land as well, as it's never had chickens and should be Blackhead free.

I'm using a logger that lives down the road a couple of miles. This job's small, probably only 8 or 9 acres, and he didn't mind doing it as long as we were willing to deal with no set date for logging. See, as he hauls equipment back from a bigger job, we're on the way home, and even though just a small 3 or 4 week job, it'll be worth their time. I've got to know the loggers and the crew pretty well over the past couple of months, and they're honest guys. I've walked the property with them, explained what I wanted, and they seem to be on board.

We're really nervous, for good reason, but they're not into creating moonscapes where forests would be. They'll leave trees 6 inches and below in diameter, so there should be enough light to get forest floor vegetation starting to grow next spring, and we can fine tune by taking out small trees later on. The stumps, especially the hickorys, will send alot of shoots up (copice) that'll make terrific goat forage next year. I'm looking at this as a 5 or so year project. We'll see.

What's Left of the Turkey Flock

I'd have around 50 more turkeys if a disease called Blackhead wouldn't have kicked my rear.

Baby Wasps Got to Eat

Here's a doting motherly wasp on my driveway. You'll notice she's got a spider in tow. Earlier she found this spider and stung it just enough to permanently paralyze it. She'll haul it back to her nest, probably made of mud in some inconvenient place on equipment or in my shop, and lay her eggs on this spider. Since the spider is paralyzed, it'll stay fresh until the wasp larva hatch. Then the babies buffet will begin. Good for the wasps, not so good for the spider. Nature's not all bunnies and rainbows is it?

Pickin' Up PawPaws & Puttin' Em in My...Desk?

"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Way down yonder in the PawPaw patch."

So I work in an old civil war home off the square in the city square in Fayetteville. On MWF, there's a hot dog stand there. Our fruit specialist where I work and I went to grab a dog the other day. He's been doing a lot of work on pawpaw fruit production lately, so we had PawPaws on our minds. He talks about pawpaws, I talk about poultry, the sheep and goat people talk about sheep and goats, the farm energy people talk about farm energy, well, you get the idea.

The fruit below is a ripe PawPaw. The PawPaw is native to the Midwestern/Eastern US. It's actually a member of a mostly tropical fruit family, even though it occurs all the way up into Michigan. The smell of a PawPaw is quite heady, like a mix between a banana & pineapple. You eat the inside which has a consistency somewhere between a ripe cantaloupe and custard and the taste is really fruity, and complex. It's quite an experience. The tree is just as interesting, with big emerald green leaves, obligate to shade as a sapling, and flowers that go after flies with a flower that smells like roadkill instead of flowers that lure pollinators with perfume
While I was getting my hot dog, guy found a pawpaw tree and picked an unripe fruit right off the square. While he was buying his hot dog, full of kraut the way God intended, I walked over to the PawPaw tree and check under it, found a ripe one lying on the ground, and snatched it up. It's the thing that looks like a potato, but it smelled heavenly.
Apparently, there are two pawpaw trees on the square, and I picked the right one while the fruit expert picked the wrong one. Yeah, I'm not gonna let that go soon! To his credit though, he gave me half of the PawPaw as a sort of finder's keeper reward.