Carolina Anole

The Carolina Anole, or Green Anole, is common in the Southeastern United States, along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast states, from the Carolinas across to Texas. We have these guys all over Gohn Greene Farms. In this photo the anole was showing off his chameleon like ability to change colors from green to brown. Although not a true chameleon (he's actually more closely related to iguanas), he can both change color, and regrow his tail if it is lost during an attack.

The males also have a colorful dewlap, a flap of skin on the underside of the neck. They'll inflate this brink pink dewlap to defend their territory from other encroaching males. When they're not fighting over turf they spend most of their time hunting dinner. They eat mostly crickets, grasshoppers, flies, and the like so they're welcome to stake a claim to just about anywhere on the farm and eat as many bugs as they like!

Paw Paw Seeds

Last fall I bought 20 Pennsylvania Golden / Davis cross paw paw seeds. I kept them in the moist paper towel in a ziploc bag that they were shipped in and placed them in the refrigerator to stratify. They only needed 70-100 days or so but I kept them in a little bit longer than that. After maybe 120 days I took them out and put them in some moistened seedling mix in the same ziploc bag (without the paper towel) and placed them on a shelf to germinate. After two or three weeks they had germinated, as shown above. The seed with the largest taproot is shown, although most of them had roots just barely poking out like the other seed shown. Some hadn't opened up yet, but I planted all 20 with high hopes.

I bought two 10' long corrugated drainage pipes and cut them into foot long lengths. The above picture shows one whole tube and another cut to length. I tied them together securely in groups of four with waxed twine recycled from pine straw bales. I then bundled all 20 tubes loosely with a piece of scrap rope. I filled each tube with organic tree and shrub planting mix and planted each seed about an inch deep. After I watered everything thoroughly and the dirt settled a little bit I had an inch or two of space at the top which I topped very loosely with pine straw.

The whole setup is under a cherry tree by the driveway, not far from access to water. I expect them to come up slowly, first concentrating on their root systems. They'll be in these tubes for at least a year, and may not be planted out until Fall 2018 or maybe even Spring 2019. I don't expect 20 trees to make it to maturity, but I think at least half of them had already germinated before going in the dirt. If I get at least two trees that I can plant near the other two that I have for cross pollination I'll be happy.

Arbor Day Foundation Trees

The Arbor Day Foundation is a wonderful organization, helping to plant trees all over the world and bringing all of the many benefits of trees along with them. As their way of saying thank you for donating to their organization they will ship you about a dozen trees to plant in your yard. The shipping is timed so that the trees arrive to you just in time for planting.

The trees are shipped bare root, you can see them in the white bucket in the above picture. Bare root trees are an extremely cost effective way of shipping trees, but their survival rate isn't as high as those shipped in containers. We had a dozen or so shipped to us last Spring and planted them in the ground the very next day. None of them ever leafed out. 

We weren't expecting a whole lot from free bare root trees, but anything above 0% survival would have been preferred. This past fall we had another dozen shipped to us and on the recommendation of Meredithe's uncle Tim we started them in containers. One of the dozen was a Blue Spruce which, being an evergreen, was easy to see that it had arrived alive. The rest we could have scratched the bark and monitored closely to see if they were still alive, but we just stuck them in these containers and protected them from too much light and wind by placing them along the Southern wall of our shed, back in the woods and hoped for the best.

To our pleasant surprise, they have begun leafing out this Spring. So far I think we have a Dogwood and a Washington Hawthorn. Hopefully more of them will leaf out as the weather continues to warm up this Spring. But even if the others don't make it, at least a 25% survival rate is better than 0%!

Washington Hawthorne

Dogwood

Walnut Bandits!

A couple of months ago I planted 30-40 black walnuts an inch or two down in the soil to stratify for the winter. I thought that covering them with a grate, weighted down by cinder blocks, would be enough to hold off the squirrels. I was wrong. The cinder blocks do, apparently, make a lovely squirrel table. The grate is also easy enough to just tunnel right under and stores walnuts reasonably well... for a squirrel to find and secret away... somewhere else.

I didn't lift the grate and inspect the damage, I just grabbed a few rocks from the driveway and reinforced the sides. I'm hoping that they only absconded with a few walnuts and the rest are still awaiting Spring. I covered the rocks with a little extra dirt, covered it all in pine straw and kept it moving. Maybe they just thought a few should live somewhere else and I'll find a surprise walnut tree somewhere in a couple of years? OR maybe squirrel season doesn't end until February 28th and they'll taste of walnuts. I'll keep you posted.

Clearing Space for the House

We decided to place the house at nearly the highest point of the property. The site is just to the North of the garden and, more importantly, just North of a few wild cherry trees, an elm, and some as yet unidentifiable nut trees. They may be pecans planted by the previous owner, but we aren't quite 100% sure what they are. There are a few pines in that area to the South of the house and 5 remaining pines where the house will sit. There are maybe 20 or so more pines in the area that are a little too close for comfort. The 5 pines will definitely have to come down, and at least some of the others in the area. Most of the underbrush was privet, easy to remove, but tedious. After 10 or 15 hours split over two days I cleared the privet, as shown in the next picture.

Next I tagged the trees that would need to be removed and used some lumber I removed from the old chicken coop to mark the corners. The currently expected house footprint is 35' by 45', with a 15' by 25' screened in front porch. The front porch will hopefully be where the chicken coop currently sits along the Southern wall, with the possibility of adding a second porch on the Western side of the house in the future. All of these pictures are taken from the Southeast, basically from the front porch, looking at the front of the house.

This final picture is the most recent, and from a little farther back to show the chicken coop removal fully underway. If you refer back to last weeks post, The Chicken Coop Rescue (...again), you can see the drastic difference between what the space looked like before and after this stage of the clearing process. Once big pines start coming down the area will undergo another drastic transformation, letting in much more sunlight. The larger hardwoods to the South will be kept to shade the house in the Summer, but let the sunlight in during the cooler winter months.

The Chicken Coop Rescue (...again)

Sorry ya'll! I accidentally deleted a blog post from July of 2015! I was looking back at the old chicken coop, because I just tore it down, and I wanted to refer you back to the above pictures... that I just deleted.

In the original post I showed y'all where I had cleared the fallen pine straw and leaves with trees growing out of them off of the top of the old coop. I also used tree trunks to prop up the roof to aid in drainage. It worked pretty well for the last year and a half. I used the old coop to keep tools dry and as a rain shelter for pop up rain showers. These days we have a new shed in which to store our tools and hide in from the rain. The old chicken coop isn't as useful as it was and is located where we want to put our front porch on our new farmhouse we hope to build. 

When relocating the old pictures from the original post I stumbled upon the bottom picture which shows the coop from an even better angle for comparison. My new blog post coming out later this week will feature the wooded area behind the chicken coop in this picture. So, again, sorry for deleting history, here are those pictures I wanted to show you, and stay tuned... we're clearing a space for the house!

One Small Step For A Man

OK, so it's not exactly a giant leap for mankind, but this little step has been very helpful. Located along the old fence line between the shed and the home site, I had been wanting to improve that step for weeks. There was a little rise there from where the driveway had sunken over time. I had been going up and down over this rise tripping and cursing while switching out tools to clear the space for the house. I eventually decided to put the cart before the horse and improve the step before continuing the tripping and cursing cycle. I had the piece of wood from improving a closet in an old apartment and the rebar was found on the property.

I took a shovel and a level and made a nice level step. There was one tree root, maybe 1-2" in diameter, from the pine to the left of the step as you head up the hill, but it wasn't too difficult to remove and the pine should recover just fine. After I removed the root and leveled the area I simply plopped the wood down and drove in two pieces of rebar to hold it in place. The piece on the left isn't as flush as I would like but it does the trick. I imagine I'll eventually replace the step, or at least reposition that piece of rebar but at least I can traverse the path from the shed to the home site without obscenity spewing from my mouth.