Nuts!

Early this morning I moved four used freight palettes to the tent site to get the panels off the ground. I just screw the OSB panels to the palettes and block them up to be level. Raising them keeps them from rotting on the damp ground and provides some habitat for mice, amphibians and other critters. I built a platform for a wooden bench nearby, also.

The walk back to the house is through some of the larger trees on the property, and that's where I took this generic shot through the woods looking east.


Nearby were a few shagbark hickory trees (Carya ovata). Their nuts are tasty and about as hard to remove from their shells as a walnut.


I arranged a few nuts in their husks with a half of a husk and husk quarters opened by some critter and a single nut that was left behind, probably because it has a small hole drilled through it and was not worth opening.

My first large snake sighting

Today as I was spreading wood chips, when returning uphill for another load, I came across a snake lying halfway onto the trail. I didn't have my camera (isn't that always the case?) and, by the time I got past it, it had slithered into the undergrowth.

I have been searching the web and the best guess I have is it was a prairie kingsnake. The description states, "The Prairie Kingsnake is found in western Indiana." It also states, "The species is considered uncommon within the state," so I could be wrong, but I have searched through about 25 snake species on the web and this is the closest one to what I saw.

Maybe next time I'll be ready with the camera. It's hard to carry it around when shoveling and spreading chips.

Where chips come from

An earlier entry contains a few pictures showing how we are building our trails. I thought I'd show how those wood chips make their way to the property.

There are a few sites that have chips available, but the closest, cheapest (free) and easiest is the City of Bloomfield's sewage treatment plant property on the south west corner of Bloomfield, about 8 miles away. The guys there load the chips into our trailer for me. After it's loaded I pull half of the tarp over the top, strap it down and drive off.



When I get back to our place I back the trailer onto a simple ramp I built near the edge of the driveway where the soil was piled up higher than the original profile to support the leveling of the driveway's cross section. The steep drop off and the ramp bring the back of the trailer a few inches higher than the garden cart's sides.



With that altitude advantage I can push most of the chips into the cart with only minor shoveling. Then it's turn the cart south and hang on as gravity does its thing. Each trailer load fills the cart eight times.

Today it was hot and sunny so there were lots of breaks in the work, and, now that the paths near the barn have all the chips they need, all the trails left to cover are down hill, so each cart-load takes a bit longer than the last.

By the way, do you like the 50's fins on the trailer? They're leftover pieces from the siding at the peak of the barn. It looks a lot like my first car. It had a black roof and no reverse gear. I had to park it in diagonal spaces facing uphill only, but that's another story.