Larsen Poultry Ranch - homesteading journey

[Senile_Texas_Aggie]

Miss @Larsen Poultry Ranch,

I agree with Miss @Baymule -- you do have a beautiful piece of property there! I hope some time you will be able to post more pictures of your beautiful place.

Do you have a powered log splitter or did you have to do all that splitting by hand? You certainly have several nice stacks of firewood. Refresh my senile memory, please -- do you have a fireplace or wood burning stove? I hope you do or you plan to get one soon.

You and your DH have done quite a bit and will be doing a lot more there. Please keep us up-to-date.

Senile Texas Aggie

 

[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

Miss @Larsen Poultry Ranch,

I agree with Miss @Baymule -- you do have a beautiful piece of property there! I hope some time you will be able to post more pictures of your beautiful place.

Do you have a powered log splitter or did you have to do all that splitting by hand? You certainly have several nice stacks of firewood. Refresh my senile memory, please -- do you have a fireplace or wood burning stove? I hope you do or you plan to get one soon.

You and your DH have done quite a bit and will be doing a lot more there. Please keep us up-to-date.

Senile Texas Aggie

Yes, we have a wood burning stove. We've been using it as the heat source for the house as there is evidence rats are/were in the ducting for the furnace. We split the wood with husband's gas powered splitter, no way we could do that much by hand in one morning.

I will try to take some pictures of the property today. The area we stacked the firewood is at the front of the property by the driveway. We plan to plant a lot of trees/shrubs there to block the neighbor's view of our property and produce fruit/berries. I think we might have to take out more of the oaks there.

 

[thistlebloom]

Good work!
Do you know what kind of oaks you have?

 

[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

Good work!
Do you know what kind of oaks you have?

Nope. I need to find an app or website that can tell me. I'll try to post some pictures here too so you all can chip in if you recognize which kinds.

The most common one has small leaves with little sharp edges. I don't like that kind. There's one with big beautiful leaves, I really want to make sure that one stays, or figure out a way to clone it. I'm going to try air layering some trees this winter, and finding acorns to try and start as well.

 

[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

Sunday we had a small burn pile and got rid of all the brush from the trees that were felled, at least from the front area. I am planning to mix the ashes, quail manure/bedding, and leaves to start a compost pile. We also got most of the fence around the rabbit zone installed (hubby did most of it), we ran out of fencing and need to get gates and posts. The one spot we were going to place a gate post has a giant rock about 8 inches under the ground, so we need to either jackhammer it out or figure out a different way to install the post. It's right up against the shed so we don't have much choice in location.

We had to put the fence through the area that has a lot of rocks, and tried digging some out. We discovered we have "iceberg" rocks, some with just a tiny bit sticking out so you stub your toe and trip, but when you dig it out the rock is much larger than you think and now you've removed the rock and have to find some dirt to fill in the hole that you will step in and trip. The rocks were actually really easy to remove, the soil was nice and soft, not super clay like I thought. It was still a bit reddish, so maybe there's just a lot of iron in the soil. It probably helped we were digging 2 days after a nice rain. I think the rocks might be slate, they are definitely not granite.

We dug enough rocks I should be able to start a rock retaining wall. I don't understand why the previous owners didn't move some of these, it took just barely an hour to get a bunch moved, and she had told us she had to get elaborate with the mowing and weed eating to get around these rocks. Now the area is clear and would be easy to mow if we were going to allow it to grow anything.

I forgot to take before pictures, and it was getting dark by the time I thought about taking after pictures.

 

[Senile_Texas_Aggie]

Miss @Larsen Poultry Ranch,

The two experts on this forum (that I know about) in dealing with large rocks are Mr. @Mike CHS and Mr. @Bruce. I have seen a few videos on YouTube on removing large rocks. Here are a couple of them that may help you:

 

[Bruce]

We had to put the fence through the area that has a lot of rocks, and tried digging some out. We discovered we have "iceberg" rocks, some with just a tiny bit sticking out so you stub your toe and trip, but when you dig it out the rock is much larger than you think and now you've removed the rock and have to find some dirt to fill in the hole that you will step in and trip.

Welcome to my life!!!

The rocks were actually really easy to remove, the soil was nice and soft, not super clay like I thought.

Welcome to NOT my life!!!! I haven't found many that are easy to dig out. I've dug some out of the field with the forks on the tractor. There are others, plus a lot of ledge, that are still there. I watched the Micro Blaster video (and found others) when STA posted them a long while back. Unfortunately they are expensive and when I looked into renting one the closest place is in NH and a full day to get there and back. Of course the rental is from the time it leaves the store to the time it gets back so still too expensive.

 

[GardnerHomestead]

Nope. I need to find an app or website that can tell me. I'll try to post some pictures here too so you all can chip in if you recognize which kinds.

The most common one has small leaves with little sharp edges. I don't like that kind. There's one with big beautiful leaves, I really want to make sure that one stays, or figure out a way to clone it. I'm going to try air layering some trees this winter, and finding acorns to try and start as well.

Im not far from you geographically and we have live oak, white oak, and black oaks on our property. Live oak is the pokey leaf. White oak has the bigger leaves, really pretty, my favorite. The live oaks look good all year though the others drop their leaves and each year i wonder if they are dead lol.

 

[Bruce]

Are any of those the "protected" kinds?

 

[Larsen Poultry Ranch]

I found a new website I'm drooling over, they sell cuttings, scion wood, and some started plants. Bonus is they are in CA! And they have some trees I wanted but couldn't find a place to get them as they can't be brought in from out of state. I will probably place an order this weekend. The hard part is going to be choosing which plants to get now, and which ones to wait on.

They have loquats, figs, honey locust, paw paw, carob, mulberry, oaks, and so many other fruit trees. I've been looking for the mulberries and loquats, and had given up on finding the honey locust. The company is Fruit Wood Nursery.