We took 3 hunting trips up to the property this season. We saw the most deer on our first trip in mid-November. The hunt club nearby was running dogs, and they chased a few deer on to the property, but we weren’t prepared for them. One pretty lar
ge 8 point galloped by about 200 yards away, and we were all standing there chatting with our guns unloaded. (Hunting fail) The other two times we went we didn’t see as many deer. We’re going to make some improvements to our hunting practices before the next season. I’m going to put up a couple of tree stands, and we’ll get out to them a little earlier before dawn so we’re set and in place. We did manage to kill one button buck and we also slayed a lot of paper. It’s tough to find places to shoot your rifles, and my friends have a lot more weapons than I realized. I’d like to get a range set up to make it easier and safer to shoot. The AR15 was fun, but my favorite was shooting clay pigeons with my 20 gauge. It was exciting to show the land off to some of our friends. We didn’t have to kill a bunch of deer to have a good time. We were able to sit around the fire, walk through the woods, and simply enjoy nature and each other’s company. Lianne and I are looking forward to doing that more often in the months and years to come.
We also froze our tushies off sleeping in the shed. It got down into the upper 20s and sometime around 4am I forgot what it was like to be comfortable and warm. I had visions of The Heat Miser dancing in my head. It took me 2 days to get back to a normal body temperature. I got a small, propane space heater for another trip, and it didn’t make any difference. The shed is 10’x20′ and has zero insulation. The plan is to use it for storage, but sometimes we sleep in it instead of pitching a tent. That doesn’t work so well in the Winter. I thought about insulating it for our hunting trips, but we want to set up a cabin, so we’re just going to move that purchase to the front of the line. We’re looking at getting a 12’X24′ lofted barn with high quality windows and doors. We’ll insulate it, put up dry wall, put queen beds in the lofts, and set up some basic solar and propane powered niceties to start. Then we can slowly convert it into a livable tiny house so we can stay up there for weeks at a time, particularly during critical growing and beekeeping times.
My brother lugged his tiller up from NC and we used it to till about an acre of cleared blackberry. We want to prevent the blackberries from growing back. Hopefully the tilling will dig up the blackberry roots. It also prepares the soil for wildflower and clover, which we’ll use as ground cover until we can get the orchard going. This will help preserve the soil and give the bees something to work on in the Spring.
One strange thing we noticed was that the land down by the creek bed looks like a major flood tore through it. There is debris everywhere, and white sand is piled up near the creek. We’ve never seen that area flooded, and it would take a lot of water to cover the 8 acres of “wasteland” that surrounds the creek bed. We did get some substantial rain in November, so maybe this is just a periodic occurrence. Part of the reason we got a decent price on the land is that this part of it is unusable for building or planting. The bright side is we’ve got our own beach.
