Thanks! I cant wait to be really done with the upgrades, but it's been a lot of fun to plan and think through it. Doesn't hurt either that we caught our first two bass this year in it too.
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C2 Ranch
- Thread starter c2ranch
- Start date
Got a call from our forestry company during family dinner on Saturday saying they were running ahead of schedule, and they'd be burning Sunday morning. That's today, the high temp is 80F a few days before new year, and I've got one more week of deer season left to hunt... You burn when they're ready to burn though, so I got up at o-dark-thirty and drove up.
We had planned to burn 65 acres, but the crew decided to add a fire break across a gulley I hadn't even considered trying to navigate, so it ended up being 70 acres instead. Couldn't get started due to the 90% humidity until about noon, but we had a great burn and got most of what I wanted burned -- for some reason big thickets of greenbriar and that half acre of invasives I spent all the time spraying and killing just hold a lot of humidity and won't burn. *shrug* next time.
Everything was either fairly open pines (think 50-70 DBH per acre), meadow, or thick mixed species bottomlands. We burned during the growing season 18 months ago and each time seems to get more effective.
We had planned to burn 65 acres, but the crew decided to add a fire break across a gulley I hadn't even considered trying to navigate, so it ended up being 70 acres instead. Couldn't get started due to the 90% humidity until about noon, but we had a great burn and got most of what I wanted burned -- for some reason big thickets of greenbriar and that half acre of invasives I spent all the time spraying and killing just hold a lot of humidity and won't burn. *shrug* next time.
Everything was either fairly open pines (think 50-70 DBH per acre), meadow, or thick mixed species bottomlands. We burned during the growing season 18 months ago and each time seems to get more effective.
Life catches up to us! But work on the property continues (it's my only break from "work work").
As we worked on updating our management plan with our local forester, we decided to go ahead and get our tree farm certification. It doesn't cost anything for us given we were already meeting all of the requirements, and we get a fancy sign. No other benefits, but I like fancy signs?
The pond work so far has been amazing, and the work we did to control the flow in, especially re-routing a lot of the water from the red clay county road, adding small detention pools and brush sediment stopped on the main ditch have really paid off from a water clarity perspective. Even after a good rain, and even with lots of the recently constructed banks still being exposed clay - we don't get nearly the sediment we got before. This means we're seeing a lot of great new life that needs more light, and here we can see the explosion in pond weed (I'm a fan, good habitat for the BGs) and the amount of periphyton growing now.
Of course, I had to add a dock, and threw this together with a friend one weekend. That photo was before our recent rains, the water is up to the rear legs now, the water is about 8' right off the front of the dock. That photo above was taken from the end of the dock just off to its right.
We're going to add some decorative/native pond lilies this spring for looks and bass habitat, along with a few decorative but native marginal plants we don't have represented in our current banks: arrowhead and pickerel weed.
Weather's been quite warm, so I topped off the food chain in the pond with 200 more HBGs and another 10 lbs of fathead minnows. Scoped a couple of 8-10" bass cruising the shoreline, which is always a good sign! Can't wait to get out this weekend to throw some hopper patterns on the 3wt for the BGs and some BG patterns on the 8wt for the bass.
We're fortunate to have few hogs on the property most of the time, but I have two big boars coming through delivering absolute destruction to my trails and meadows. I managed to get one of them, a big boy at 165#, and he made some nice & tasty bone-in chops.
Spring is now upon us, with a lot of green up happening in the burned areas. I'm hoping to see excellent growth this weekend.
As we worked on updating our management plan with our local forester, we decided to go ahead and get our tree farm certification. It doesn't cost anything for us given we were already meeting all of the requirements, and we get a fancy sign. No other benefits, but I like fancy signs?
The pond work so far has been amazing, and the work we did to control the flow in, especially re-routing a lot of the water from the red clay county road, adding small detention pools and brush sediment stopped on the main ditch have really paid off from a water clarity perspective. Even after a good rain, and even with lots of the recently constructed banks still being exposed clay - we don't get nearly the sediment we got before. This means we're seeing a lot of great new life that needs more light, and here we can see the explosion in pond weed (I'm a fan, good habitat for the BGs) and the amount of periphyton growing now.
Of course, I had to add a dock, and threw this together with a friend one weekend. That photo was before our recent rains, the water is up to the rear legs now, the water is about 8' right off the front of the dock. That photo above was taken from the end of the dock just off to its right.
We're going to add some decorative/native pond lilies this spring for looks and bass habitat, along with a few decorative but native marginal plants we don't have represented in our current banks: arrowhead and pickerel weed.
Weather's been quite warm, so I topped off the food chain in the pond with 200 more HBGs and another 10 lbs of fathead minnows. Scoped a couple of 8-10" bass cruising the shoreline, which is always a good sign! Can't wait to get out this weekend to throw some hopper patterns on the 3wt for the BGs and some BG patterns on the 8wt for the bass.
We're fortunate to have few hogs on the property most of the time, but I have two big boars coming through delivering absolute destruction to my trails and meadows. I managed to get one of them, a big boy at 165#, and he made some nice & tasty bone-in chops.
Spring is now upon us, with a lot of green up happening in the burned areas. I'm hoping to see excellent growth this weekend.
We have good, but not great (yet) cover for the minnows and fry. We've got substantial pond weed now, a handful of artificial structures (cedar trees in cement tubs, stacked old tires and rims, etc.) and numerous trees cut and let to fall into the pond as cover for the small fish, and a number of big old stumps under water for hunting cover for bass. For overall structure, we've got several flats ranging from 1-3' deep, with sharp drop offs, a few humps in the deeper areas, and lots of long sharp drop-offs for bass to hunt. Most of the pond edges are grown in nicely with plants out to 2' or so, and I see the minnows utilizing those areas a lot.
We still need to add some additional breeding habitat like pallets for the minnows, and gravel beds for the BGs. Not really at a high level of stocking on the small fish at the moment (we only added ten full grown bass last year, and we're still stocking additional young fish) - and between otters, turtles, and birds, we're getting a lot of predation.
