The opportunistic beaver

If you had followed my blog entries this last summer you are aware of the ongoing battles with the resident beaver. I write beaver in the singular form, because my hopes are that only ONE beaver calls the farm home. Anyway, this particular beaver found a way to clog the discharge pipe on one of our ponds. The picture below shows the pipe with the access plate on top of it.

Mystery Boxes - Make a Guess!

These two boxes were delivered to the Farm yesterday. Arik was very excited to see them - their contents will keep him busy, and will also be an exciting new endeavor for the Farm to pursue.

Can you guess what's inside? Leave a comment with your guess! We'll be back in a couple days to tell you all about it...

Chipping Buckthorn

The safest way to load Buckthorn into the chipper!

If you have ever handled Buckthorn you can understand why I load it into the chipper with our mini-excavator. If you have never handled Buckthorn, take note of the second syllable in the invasive's name. The thorns are not to be dismissed. 

In this picture I am chipping some pretty large Buckthorn (~15 feet tall). They were growing on the edge of a woodlot so they grew out as much as up, plus they had multiple stems. After cutting the Buckthorn, I had a few options: let it lay where it fell, make some brush piles or use our chipper to grind up the brush. 

My experience with this shrub-type of Buckthorn is it has to be chipped. Trying to make brush piles out of it once it is this size and shape can be frustrating. After stacking a few shrubs up, the pile tends to fall over, or the shrubs roll off.

I've also learned that Buckthorn can be slow to decay. If I am removing invasives, I like to be able to walk through the area that my work was done in. These large shrubs left to rot, where they stood, would impede foot traffic for sometime. 

A Bucktorn brush pile reduced to chips will be significantly smaller than a brush pile, and the chips can be used on trails. If I don't get around to using the chips, they decompose much faster than if left whole. 

I recognize not everyone has this type of equipment available for their projects. I am interested to hear what you do with Buckthorn once cutting it, so leave a comment. Stay tuned I will also write about how I treat the cut stumps. 

Big Oak Wake

Saturday we laid our Big Oak to rest with quite the party! Friends and family gathered to watch Beaver Tree Service take down the tree in a process that moved astonishingly fast. It took nearly 200 years to grow to that size, yet only a matter of hours to come down. 

A Tribute to the Oak Tree

Lately it seems like walnut trees have been getting all the attention. And it's well deserved - their high timber value and beautiful wood make them a prized species for growers and consumers. We have a good amount of walnut that grows on the farm and one day, we'll do a post about them.

But today I want to give some praise to a different species. Oak.

Not "The Big Oak" (see below!) but a big white oak on Arington Tree Farm.

Oak is a valuable species in many ways. They're native to Wisconsin, meaning they began growing here naturally, without any human intervention. They are a durable, strong species and have withstood the test of time - surviving the prairie fires started by Native Americans and intense grazing by dairy herds.

Pond projects

Last week our friend Richard Wedepohl visited the farm.

Richard, Joe and Arik checking out one of the farm's ponds.

We had some catching up to do on Wisconsin government affairs, but also wanted him to check out a few of our many ponds. Richard spent his career as a waterways engineer with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and really knows his stuff!

Richard gave us some good ideas - methods to clear up algae, how to keep drainage tracts open, and ways we could even establish a "private pond" on the farm. We'll definitely be putting his recommendations to use in the near future. Thanks Richard!

Planting Prep

Today I worked on some fall planting prep.

 

What type of trees you may ask? Not trees but wild flowers. Are they still wild if you plant them? 

Conundrums aside, with the relatively wet October this is a great time to disc. The goal is to add a bit of color to this otherwise monochromatic field of grasses.

Secretly, this is my chance to hangout in a nice clean and heated tractor cab. Now I just have to figure out how to prune trees from in here.