Greene View Springs official best tree climber

When the small tornado knocked the closest tulip poplar into the east wall of the house, I trimmed the top out of it and, with Brian's help and a come-along, we pulled it back up and braced it.

It seems to be growing well but I was never able to get the strap down from the top because the branches are too small for me to climb. Enter Lucas...


With a little encouragement, he climbed to the top and disconnected the strap and the protective wrapping. What a guy!

What happened to May?

I just realized I haven't posted for over a month. A lot has happened so I'll just show some pictures taken at various times since April.

Damaged tree

We lost a bunch of trees in the tornado. The large one that hit the new house will be the most missed as it was right in the line of sight from any south-facing window. It had split in two at a vee about 30 feet high, spun 180 degrees and the south half fell north onto the house. The rest of the tree was doomed so it had to go. Here's the view soon after the damage and then after the tree was removed.

Bedroom progress

A lot of drywall has been put up. Here's a view of the master bedroom from the kitchen area.

And here is the same doorway from the inside.

The windows above the bedroom door allow light into the bedroom from the clerestory windows (which are visible in their lower left corners). The door visible through the closet is the pocket door of the bathroom. Drywall hasn't been hung yet on the wall between the closet and the bathroom and the wall on the inside of the bathroom door.

Pond planting

Sandy got a few water lilies for Mother's Day and enlisted Brandon and Matthew to help her place them in the larger pond below the house.

In the back left are a few water iris that were planted earlier from the same source.

Morning surprise

Completely unrelated to the new house, I found this luna moth on a window when I got up the other day.

Since it's not too hard to see during the daytime, it would be easy prey for birds, so I didn't disturb it until that evening. It had moved less than an inch all day.

After dark I coaxed it out the apartment window and it just glided to the ground outside. It hadn't moved for five minutes or so, so I went downstairs to see if it was alive. As I tried to pick it up, it took off and flew away.

I looked them up on the web to find out the adults only live about 8 days. They have no mouths and spend their entire adult lives trying to reproduce.

Lucas digs our septic drain field

The week after the Fourth of July, one of my sons, Ed III, came for a few days with his kids who live in Germany. Lucky for me, because I needed help installing the septic system and it appears Lucas has some skills we didn't know about. After helping drag some trees out of the area, Lucas asked if he could get into the trench. Ta Da!


That was fun enough, but the next thing I knew he was driving the bull dozer with the help of Scott Schroyer of Hash Farms Excavating.


To the right in the picture below you can see how thick the young woods were where the drain field was installed. Literally hundreds of small trees were cut down. I hope to use most of them in various ways, as archways, railings, wattle fences, plant supports, etc.


Initially we had planned to install a system that needed only two 70-foot runs, just a few feet from each other. Before the job started we realized there was not enough room to put in the line with the extra space needed for a perimeter drain as required. It would have run too far south where the terrain drops off quickly, way past the dozer shown above.

A request to install instead three 50-foot runs was denied. No reason was given, so we fell back to a "traditional" drain field. It was less expensive, but as you'll see it ate up an enormous amount of space - about twice what would have been used otherwise. In all we would dig up five 50-foot fingers spaced 8 feet apart and ten more feet on the west and north for a curtain drain.


Further, as the project proceeded we realized the drop-off east of the third finger was also too severe. To deal with this issue the other two fingers were angled to the east, across the trail near the hydrant. This wiped out the last buffer area to the west of that trail. The resulting open space is huge, but the deed is done and the system is ready to use.

Finishing the timber installation

With the last of the load-bearing posts erected, we were ready to lift the final, and heaviest beams into place. The beam being lifted in the first picture is one of the two strongest in the house. It, and the one next to it, with a cross section of 8" x 12", will support 150 square feet of roof which, when loaded with the roof panels and soil, will be approximately 9750 pounds.


For the morning I rented a crane from a company that installs large signs. In a few hours all of the large beams were in place and being secured with temporary plates on their tops.

When all the beams were in place we were ready to erect the last three posts. These three were all placed under long beams which were already supported so they needed to be cut to the proper height. It made more sense to cut them after the beams were up. Trying to get three posts exactly the same height, to the fraction of an inch, so there would be no chance of the middle one acting as a fulcrum if it were a fraction too tall was not likely to be successful.

One of those posts was the second tree to be used in the building, a walnut which had grown nearly where we placed it. The three pictures below show it being picked up from near where I had stripped off its bark. In the next it is being cut to the length needed to slip under the long beam, and the third shows it being tapped into place and secured to the beam and the bottom plate.






Whole trees are stronger than milled ones with the same dimension (diameter of the tree vs shorter dimension of the cross section of the post). So, though the tree looks small under the beam, it is perfectly strong enough in its own right. Once weight is added, it will take some of the weight from the posts on either side.

Finally, all the posts and beams are in place!

Harvest

Though we did plant a vegetable garden this year, and some apple trees in the spring, we haven't done anything in the woods to increase wild food production - mast.

Wildlife biologists term variable seed crops as “mast” from "masticate." Hard mast includes seeds or nuts: acorns, beech nuts, maple seeds. Soft mast is fruit: wild strawberries, blueberries, grapes and apples.

Most of our mast comes in the form of shagbark hickory nuts, acorns, bitternut hickory nuts, walnuts, dogwood seeds, concord grapes and wild berries. We have not harvested any of these. Most are eaten only by wildlife.

We do harvest persimmons. They are noted in numerous earlier posts. Here's what we saw in October after the leaves had fall. Note the hundreds of ripe fruit still on the tree.



Another prolific crop, though one has to work harder to find it, is the hazelnut. Growing all over the Greene View Springs property as a shrub, our hazelnuts seem to fruit irregularly. By that I mean the same plant may have a heavy crop one year but not the next.

The hazelnut shrub - Corylus americana

The nuts grow in husked clusters of 2 or 3 up to about 10

This cluster had five nuts

This one, partially opened, had 3

These came from a single cluster

We probably have 4 dozen hazelnut shrubs on the site. Once one sees a few they are easy to spot from a distance.

August plant pictures

There are so many plants blooming now at Greene View Springs that I could fill a dozen screens. Here are a few that just began blooming and one tree.

Just one of many goldenrod variations.

Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum)

Tick-Trefoil

Bald cyprus
One of two we were given at the county fairgrounds last spring. They were bare root and it took a long time for them to leaf out. Both were planted in the damp soil on the edge of the original pond.

Our hike to work

Here's another of the trails we've built on the Greene View Springs property. This one is used nearly every day for access to the new house site. It runs from near the current gardens just below the barn down into the wooded area below. Along the way you can see some cardboard on the trail. It will eventually be covered with wood chips like can be seen at the start of this clip.

This trail is rather steep once it enters the woods. It almost levels out as it turns nearly due east towards the trail in the earlier post.

Soon the house site can be seen up to the left. Farther along are stacks of trees that have been removed and saved for later use next to the end of the driveway. The clip ends where the earlier clip begins as found in the second video reference in an earlier post.

I'm embedding this video rather than linking to it. Let me know if you like this method better than the links.



One thing the camera can't show is how much cooler it is in the woods.

Let's take a short walk or two

Here are my first tries at taking and uploading videos to YouTube. The first video is a short walk onto the property on the new driveway, from the recently repaved county road to the parking area and then up a short way to the house site. I need to learn to walk without bouncing the camera.

The second is one of many trails on the Greene View Springs property. This one runs from one of the parking areas on the driveway back to the start of the driveway. One of the growing piles of stripped trees can be seen along the way. Here's another:

I hope to use most of the trees we've had to remove. The larger ones might show up in the building's structure as posts or even beams. The others will make fences and wattles for gardening and excluding some of our critter friends. A few might even become parts of a carport planned for the end of the driveway.

Early spring walkabout

Though it was a drizmal day, it wasn't a bad time for a few pictures of spring trying to catch on. Instead of a big long post with each picture described, I thought I'd let Picasa create a collage.

I haven't had time to look up the names of these plants, but I'm going to start an on-line album with plants we've found and I'll be sure they're all named before I put them into it. In the mean time, if you recognize any of these, let me know.



Beginning with the upper left corner and going clockwise, ending in the center, the pictures are a small red bud tree, May apples, mint plants in the creek, flowers farther down stream, new leaves on a young tree, field pussy-toes, more, but different yellow flowers, small shamrock-like leaves, and a large grouping of spreading lichens.

Holes

Over the last week a lot of holes were made. The easiest two were for two bluebird boxes. These are attached to 1/2" electric conduit pipe. The pipe was pounded into the ground with about 6' sticking out. The boxes are mounted as high as possible on these without being too high to open and clean out. This should keep squirrels, raccoons and snakes out of them. Both are oriented so they can be seen from the apartment windows. One can be seen in the first picture below.

On Friday night we went to the weekly auction at Dinkys. I picked up five more apple trees to go with the three from the FFA auction the previous week end. Each of the eight trees is a different variety. Let's hope they each have at least one tree to pollinate them.


We have piled dead rose bush trimmings and cut off grape vines around most of the trees. Soon they will all have their own deer-deterrent brush piles. These will be maintained until the trees are tall enough, and have enough leafing branches, that a few deer munchings won't be a catastrophe.

While I was moving soil from the large pile the county left me to the apple trees I noticed that there was a very large wet area below the driveway. Water was actually seeping from the ground, and it's been more than 2 days since it has rained.

Well if there's that much water running down the hill, thinks I, why not try to catch some of it above the apple trees? So I started digging a depression. I'm not calling it a pond yet, because I may quit digging at any time. It's not much to look at so far, but you can get the idea.


The berm will hold the water and I'll extend it east and west forming a swale that will direct water toward the hole. Maybe our neighborhood tree frogs will find it a better place to lay eggs than they chose last year. If it gets enough water, and I won't know until after a nice rainfall, I may line it with a piece of billboard tarp so it will hold water longer.

At last, visible progress

After months of investigation, discussion, drawings, more discussion, and a few decisions, we finally had some action.

A few weeks ago the county highway department began cleaning out the ditch along the county road. Then we had a string of snow falls and some really cold weather that halted the progress. Monday, while I was outside, a county dump truck stopped on the state road and backed down the driveway. It was one of the guys coming to say they would like to install our culverts the next day. The ditch was ready on our side of the road.

"Great. Go ahead," I said.

So yesterday the county installed two 18" double-walled plastic culverts. One is at the bottom of the hill where almost all of the surface water drains through as it leaves the property. We had already decided that we would not use the existing opening in the fence there for our primary access because of all the water that is often there. It's too wet and slippery for a few days after it's rained, and it would sometimes be impassible in frozen winter weather, especially with the added problem of having to climb the hill almost immediately after entering the property.

The second culvert was placed about halfway up the hill where we can come onto the property at almost the exact same altitude that we plan to place the parking area. Though the driveway will meander to get there, it will not run up- nor downhill more than a foot or so all the way across to the parking spot.

The county crew was great. They cut down some of the trees that we would have had to cut ourselves and dragged them down the road and onto the property where I can cut them for various uses. The culverts were covered with a gravel-dirt mix and limestone blocks were stacked to protect the ends from erosion. The flow down the ditch along the road can be very strong sometimes.

Here are a few pictures of the installation.


Covering the lower culvert


Removing trees at the driveway


Covering the driveway culvert


Placing limestone end wall

Survey Day

A week ago, four days before the big snow storm, we had a surveyor and his helper come to the property to survey the hoped-for building site and the area surrounding it. The final product will be a contour map of Greene View Springs with more detail in the area we walked. The rest of the property will also be shown using data from aerial photos.

The most important tool of a surveyor is called a "total station," named as such because it incorporates both a distance meter for measuring distances and a "theodolite" for measuring angles. Here Andy has set up his station on the hill north of the pond looking back toward our hoped for home site.

 

It sends a beam of infrared light toward a prism, shown here supported by an extendable pole held by the surveyor, Eric. The light reflects off the prism directly back to the total station, and, by measuring the time it takes to return, the station calculates the distance, direction and vertical angle between the two.

 

The information from the total station is recorded in a data collector for later downloading into a computer in the office.

Eric also directed me as we tried to get "shots" at representative spots on the property. I'm not running in the first picture; I'm tripping over one of our %&#$! grape vines! The second picture shows the prism a little better. The last picture shows just a few of the many large trees we marked so they would be shot and shown on the topographic map, our final product.

   

And while we were having fun thrashing through the woods, Sandy was working so hard she didn't need her jacket, cutting rose bushes I had cut off earlier in the week into small pieces so they can be more easily removed when the weather allows.



Behind that mass of brush is the mouth of our small spring. If the house will fit close enough we'll be able to see the spring from the house's west side.

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.

Autumn Olive

Here's another of the invasive species found at Greene View Springs. Some people call this Russian Olive, but that is a different variety. You can read more about the two on a page from the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and another from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources prepared by the state's Invasive Plant Species Assessment Working Group.

Today I cut down the last of these that have been found to date. This picture shows one of them after pruning all the branches off. There is nothing left to show at all now because they have been sawed off to the ground. The two links above show Autumn Olives still standing.

Shingle Oak - Quercus imbricaria

We have at least eight varieties of oak tree on the property. I think this one, the shingle oak , is the most unusual because it doesn't have the typical oak leaf shape. Click on the picture for a better look.



The books say the wood is easy to split and was once used for roofing shingles, hence the name. Its leaves are always shiny and attractive.

Persimmons - Diospyros virginiana

We have been discussing whether or not to keep a few trees that are close to the house. They are not too large and not too straight and, generally, not the best looking trees in the forest.

Last week as we were considering this question, I looked up at the largest of them and saw a few dozen persimmons in it. "Wow," says I, "this must be a persimmon tree!" And I didn't even need one to drop on my head to figure it out.

Here's what it looks like from about 30 feet away. It's maybe 15 feet tall.



On both sides of it you can see the beginnings of narrow terraces created from stump grindings spread on the slope. They should decay into a solid walkway in a few months, especially if it ever rains here again. (By the end of June we had already gotten an average year's rainfall. In August, less than a quarter inch here.)

And here's what we saw when we first discovered the fruits. One can see at least 10 in this picture.



Here's more than the average person wants to know about persimmons, including a few recipes, and here's the Wikipedia entry.

Now that I know what they look like I'm finding dozens of them growing within 50 yards of the house. Many are small because they have been mowed down in the past and sprouted from the stumps.

I'll try to remember to post a picture of them after they ripen, if something doesn't get to them first.

And don't forget the annual Mitchell, Indiana, Persimmon Festival in nearby Lawrence County on September 20-27, 2008.