BROKEN OAK HILL(R) Dispatches from the heart of Wisconsin At the Farm/January 2012
A red pine branch, possibly chewed off by a squirrel, peeks through the snow on the trail through the pines.
A white pine seedling, planted and fenced in 2011, barely pokes through the snow. Because of the deer, it doesn't do much good to plant a tree if you don't also protect it from browsing.
A butternut tree, probably 20 to 30 years old, is infected with the canker disease that eventually gets all of this species on our property.
Into a mild winter,
a little snow finally falls
Winter at the farm has always been a bit of a mystery, because we rarely have been up during that time. There were too many challenges.
The first was getting the front gate open, because it was often buried in three or
four feet of heavy snow thrown by the snowplow, usually melted and refrozen. Then getting the house heated up from whatever the outside temperature was. It takes a long time to get a house from 10 degrees to 68 degrees with three little electric space heaters and a propane space heater. You had to hope the plumbing would start up, since the pipe from the well ran along the outside of the house. And when you left, you had to drain the hot water heater and the plumbing system before you could hit the road.
But this year, with the house already heated to 55 degrees, we've been able to get up almost weekly. You walk in, turn up the thermostat and flip a couple of switches in the basement to get the well pump and the water heater going and you're all set. The fact that we have had relatively little snowfall, and that our neighbor Dave Clark has plowed our driveway, twice, has helped make it possible, too.
A chance for a walk in the woods
Most of our trips have still been about getting things done for the house, but one day I put on my new shoeshoes and went for a trek down through the red pine plantation south of the house. Judging from all of the deer trails and tracks, I think we do have too many deer on our little 47-acre plot.
I'm writing this on the last Sunday of January, and there's a good article by the Journal Sentinel's Paul A. Smith in the paper about the deer management hearings going on around the state. I was glad to see the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association was there, and glad to see the comments of Hannah Spraul of the Nature Conservancy, who said the public needs to be made more aware of the damage an oversized herd is having on Wisconsin forests.
She was quoted as saying: "We aren't having oak regeneration. The forests of tomorrow won't look like the forests of toda
y if we don't make some changes."
For this study $125,000 has been budgeted. I heard this past week that the city of Milwaukee has spent almost a million dollars to find out why a stone fell off of city hall. Something seems out of proportion here.
Too many deer are one problem. Too many turkeys may be another, but I haven't seen much written on that topic. On my trip through the woods, though, I was reminded (not that I ever forget) of our other big problem with invasives. It used to be we worried about blackberries and box elder, but those have dropped down a notch on the worry list to make way for garlic mustard and buckthorn - both of which we plan to attack with renewed energy this year.
Other work waits to be done
There is also plenty of work to be done in the woods. On my short walk, I found this downed apple tree that will have to be cut up to reopen the trail so
the tractor and wagon can get through. Thirty or forty yards farther up the trail, a large aspen had fallen, bending over several white birch trees and creating a dangerous snag just above the trail. It will be tricky to deal with, and we may just end up waiting for nature and gravity to take care of the problem.
And there is plenty of other timber stand improvement to be done throughout the woods, thinning unwanted trees out of the pines and cutting trees that are either a bad species of a misshapen in the woods.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
Mostly our focus has still been on the house. I'll leave up a report I filed on our Jan. 5-7 visit, but for 2012 we're going to change our format to just monthly At the Farm reports so we can focus on other things.
Our last visit for January was a big one because we rented a trailer and brought up a sofa, queen bed and two mattresses, an easy chair, a heavy bedroom chest and a side table that we had bought on sale a couple of weeks earlier. We had twice been thwarted in plans to bring them up because of the weather. I don't like pulling a trailer under the best of circumstances, and certainly not in snowstorms.
Anyway, their addition promises to make the house a lot more comfortable. We still hope to add one more queen bed upstairs.
We still remain at a crossroads about the long winter evenings, but we've been taking a digital TV and a DVD player back and forth, so we can at least watch a movie in the evening. Our experiment with a small TV antenna bro
ught in only one channel -- Ion. If it had been a major network that has a morning show and some news, we might have been fine with that for awhile, but we're back to the drawing board on whether to subscribe to cable through the phone company, get a dish, or just put up a roof antenna.
Of course we could just re-adopt Dad's original tree farm policy: No TV. But even he eventually wavered on that, and in the pre-digital era we could bring in two to four stations with just some rabbit ears and a little aluminum foil.
Cleaning up this aspen deadfall in the coming weeks could be a challenge.
a little snow finally falls
Winter at the farm has always been a bit of a mystery, because we rarely have been up during that time. There were too many challenges.
The first was getting the front gate open, because it was often buried in three or
four feet of heavy snow thrown by the snowplow, usually melted and refrozen. Then getting the house heated up from whatever the outside temperature was. It takes a long time to get a house from 10 degrees to 68 degrees with three little electric space heaters and a propane space heater. You had to hope the plumbing would start up, since the pipe from the well ran along the outside of the house. And when you left, you had to drain the hot water heater and the plumbing system before you could hit the road.But this year, with the house already heated to 55 degrees, we've been able to get up almost weekly. You walk in, turn up the thermostat and flip a couple of switches in the basement to get the well pump and the water heater going and you're all set. The fact that we have had relatively little snowfall, and that our neighbor Dave Clark has plowed our driveway, twice, has helped make it possible, too.
A chance for a walk in the woods
Most of our trips have still been about getting things done for the house, but one day I put on my new shoeshoes and went for a trek down through the red pine plantation south of the house. Judging from all of the deer trails and tracks, I think we do have too many deer on our little 47-acre plot.
I'm writing this on the last Sunday of January, and there's a good article by the Journal Sentinel's Paul A. Smith in the paper about the deer management hearings going on around the state. I was glad to see the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association was there, and glad to see the comments of Hannah Spraul of the Nature Conservancy, who said the public needs to be made more aware of the damage an oversized herd is having on Wisconsin forests.
She was quoted as saying: "We aren't having oak regeneration. The forests of tomorrow won't look like the forests of toda
y if we don't make some changes." For this study $125,000 has been budgeted. I heard this past week that the city of Milwaukee has spent almost a million dollars to find out why a stone fell off of city hall. Something seems out of proportion here.
Too many deer are one problem. Too many turkeys may be another, but I haven't seen much written on that topic. On my trip through the woods, though, I was reminded (not that I ever forget) of our other big problem with invasives. It used to be we worried about blackberries and box elder, but those have dropped down a notch on the worry list to make way for garlic mustard and buckthorn - both of which we plan to attack with renewed energy this year.
Other work waits to be done
There is also plenty of work to be done in the woods. On my short walk, I found this downed apple tree that will have to be cut up to reopen the trail so
the tractor and wagon can get through. Thirty or forty yards farther up the trail, a large aspen had fallen, bending over several white birch trees and creating a dangerous snag just above the trail. It will be tricky to deal with, and we may just end up waiting for nature and gravity to take care of the problem. And there is plenty of other timber stand improvement to be done throughout the woods, thinning unwanted trees out of the pines and cutting trees that are either a bad species of a misshapen in the woods.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
Mostly our focus has still been on the house. I'll leave up a report I filed on our Jan. 5-7 visit, but for 2012 we're going to change our format to just monthly At the Farm reports so we can focus on other things.
Our last visit for January was a big one because we rented a trailer and brought up a sofa, queen bed and two mattresses, an easy chair, a heavy bedroom chest and a side table that we had bought on sale a couple of weeks earlier. We had twice been thwarted in plans to bring them up because of the weather. I don't like pulling a trailer under the best of circumstances, and certainly not in snowstorms.
Anyway, their addition promises to make the house a lot more comfortable. We still hope to add one more queen bed upstairs.
We still remain at a crossroads about the long winter evenings, but we've been taking a digital TV and a DVD player back and forth, so we can at least watch a movie in the evening. Our experiment with a small TV antenna bro
ught in only one channel -- Ion. If it had been a major network that has a morning show and some news, we might have been fine with that for awhile, but we're back to the drawing board on whether to subscribe to cable through the phone company, get a dish, or just put up a roof antenna. Of course we could just re-adopt Dad's original tree farm policy: No TV. But even he eventually wavered on that, and in the pre-digital era we could bring in two to four stations with just some rabbit ears and a little aluminum foil.
Cleaning up this aspen deadfall in the coming weeks could be a challenge. 