Friday, September 10, 2021

Fall ramblings

 

The yellow in the foreground is goldenrod in bloom growing on the tillable portion.
One of my nephews is playing around with the idea of purchasing some property. They are "looking".

One of the parcels they found is in my neighborhood. It is about forty acres. Ten of the acres are tillable. None of it is high enough for a conventional drain field.

The sugar maple log in the foreground was left by the crew clearing the power right-of-way.

Most of the rest of the property was very aggressively timbered off very recently. Brush will come up thicker than hairs on a dog's back in a year or two but it cannot be called "woods" by any stretch of the imagination.

Five acres is in 20' tall, young forest with American Elm as the primary species.

The seller is asking in the neighborhood of $4500 per acre which seems like a pretty stiff price for the amount of tillable, the drainage and where they left the woods in terms of standing wood. So basically the buyer would be paying $180k plus annual property taxes to have a place to hunt deer.

I shared those thoughts with my nephew, not to trash-talk the property but as a potential tool to beat-down the price. I suspect the seller is desperate for cash, and needs a quick sale otherwise it makes no sense to have timbered off the standing timber when they did.

Bonus fall pictures

The calves are in one of the back paddocks. This is the high-tech watering solution.

Sunflowers at The Country Mill. The Country Mill is an orchard and a destination for parents who want to expose their children to agricuture.

I am baffled by the amount of corn that has already dried down. I wonder if so much acreage was planted that they had to dip into seed of -90 day corn. Or maybe there was a labeling mix-up.

I stumbled across this little oak tree and was puzzled by the heavy acorn load. It looks like Chinquapin Oak (Q. muehlenbergii) which is a shy bearer of small acorns. These acorns were much larger than typical for the species

Image of a branch showing the acorn load. I may have to get some scion wood and see if I can graft it to something around here.

The same road with the Chinquapin Oak(?) also had a large stand of Kentucky Coffeetrees growing up-to and arching over the road. Ideal for seed collecting.


6 comments:

  1. Still summer down here, but we did awken this morning to temps in the high 50s. That is much better and gives us hope that more moderate temps are just around the corner.

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  2. No mast crop here this year due to gypsy moths.
    I would tell him not to buy a property that you have qualifications about. He will surely be disappointed later. Particularly a property that has been high graded. We have way too many invasive species here for that. I see it with a very selective logging job I did. That power line ROW is a deal breaker too. Just saying.

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  3. ERJ, we starting to get signs of Autumn here as well, which is d*mnedly early for this time of year.

    Cash helps of course, but the ROW might be a consideration. My parents have one for the regional power company and while they are always polite, close gates, clean up, etc. it still could be a security concern. On the bright side, we get all the wood we need from their trimming back along power lines and our circuit is usually the first energized in the event of a blackout.

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  4. We would kill for nearby property at $4500 per acre. Even "just to hunt deer" property out here in rural NE Indiana is going for $8000-9000 per acre and climbing every month.

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  5. Her in North Carolina at an altitude of about 725', I've had mature hickory nuts coming down for 3 weeks, ripe persimmons for 2 weeks and the leaves are just beginning to change. We've had a number of nights in the 50s already. I don't have any mature oaks, but the ones nearby are loaded. Corn crops are dried out or nearly so. I need to find some horses and check their coats-I can tell you my cats are shedding like maniacs, and the new is thick.

    I know that there has never been a scientific correlation between "the signs" and reality, but I'm getting a bit twitchy. Son and I are going fishing in WV next week. If the leaves are well turned there, I will be placing some serious firewood orders on my return.

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  6. By looking at the leaves I believe Swamp Oak

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