Prairie Valley Farm

Well, looks like an October planting won’t be happening either… my parents both just came down with CoVid. Symptoms seem to be manageable, but they definitely won’t be pulling out any equipment to let me borrow anytime soon.

I think I’ll pick up a bottle of herbicide and hack and squirt some honey locust so I’ve got at least some kind of progress this fall. I will go forward with the spring oats plan for the plot in late February, and plant the fire breaks to clover/chicory at that time as well.
 
Hope you’re Parents get well soon and safe.
 
Alright… we just thought me and my parents getting CoVid was the worst of it, but it was just a drop in the bucket compared to what the rest of 2021 had in store for us. After blowing my ankle out in early October and missing 8 weeks of work, a couple deaths in the family, and my wife missing 7 weeks of work for a fracture in her leg….. we are finally back in business with progress on the farm.

My Stepfather and I spent the day clearing and mowing fire breaks around the 10 acre burn unit. The breaks are ready to be disked in a couple weeks, and then all i need is a mild southerly wind that lines up with enough available helping hands.


I did a 50 foot wide mowed break on the downwind break and plan to disk 25 feet of it to mineral soil as the main line of defense against a downwind jump.

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The east flanking break is mowed 30 feet wide and will have 15 feet of disked mineral soil.

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The west flanking break is a tight space tucked between a heavily treed fenceline and an old swale my great grandfather put in. I was worried about it being an effective break, so i built a second break across the fence from it just in case.

This is the smaller break, i was only able to eek out 20-25 feet of mowed, and i will most likely get even less than that disked due to how steep the burm is just past that brush pile.
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And this is the backup break. I mowed this one to 40 feet at the narrowest, and will disk it at probably 20 feet wide.
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And finally the south has a 30 foot mowed break that 15 feet minimum will also be bare soil. I have a patch that goes through a small patch of Burr oaks and that will be leaf blown to bare soil as there is no grass beneath them. The break makes a bit of a zig-zag around that protruding patch of cedars. They sit on a chalk outcrop that was not conducive to putting a fire break through.
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The county extension agent was pleased with my break plan, and my weather conditions plan. Namely: southerly winds 5-12mph, humidity not below 30% and preferably above 40%, at least 5 people on hand for the burn, and hopefully local volunteer fire department on site (for a small fee) to mop up.


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With a burn ban in effect just 4 days before my burn this past weekend, I am at the “praying for rain” stage. I went ahead and disked the breaks in preparation, and there are 3 days with rain in the forecast this week. I’m hoping that will drop the ban so I can burn the next time the winds are right.

We went with an 18 foot bare dirt break on the north (downwind) side with plenty of mowed space either side.
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18 feet on the east side, since that has the closest houses…
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12 feet on the south (upwind) side
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And then the west side has a double break. The first is about 8 feet, but it is on a swale and backed up really close to a heavily treed fence-line. So, we did a 12 foot break on the other side of the fence as a backup.
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There is a BUNCH of fuel in this fire unit. I trimmed about 3 acres of cedar trees over the last year and a half that are still laying in place.
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I have some blackland prairie ground on my place as well. It can be troublesome for planting a lot of species. Cedar, persimmon, and honey locust love it. Grass species of all sorts seem to do well. What is the ph of your soil. Mine is high - 7.5 plus
 
I have some blackland prairie ground on my place as well. It can be troublesome for planting a lot of species. Cedar, persimmon, and honey locust love it. Grass species of all sorts seem to do well. What is the ph of your soil. Mine is high - 7.5 plus

I have two slightly different soil types on the place, both Blackland. The lower lying stuff is more gumbo was running low 7’s a few years ago in our last soil test, but the higher ground was 7.5+


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I have two slightly different soil types on the place, both Blackland. The lower lying stuff is more gumbo was running low 7’s a few years ago in our last soil test, but the higher ground was 7.5+


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My upland open ground was heavily grazed fescue pasture prior to me purchasing it. After I got the fescue killed, little bluestem and yellow indian grass, along with some gamma grass, came in without me planting it. It gets so thick, it chokes out the forbs. I have had to bush hog and lightly disk the NWSG to allow for some forbs to grow. I cant get pine trees, blackberry vines, or any kind of fruit tree in that soil.
 
Your fire breaks look top notch, but after looking at your pics...here's something to consider...

With the dead cedars "in play" near the edge of your burn area, I would recommend also considering the sparks that those might throw when they go "woof". You might possibly get some live stuff high enough up in the air to then "jump" your breaks. I can't be sure of that...but it seems like a possible-maybe looking at your pics.

To play it totally safe, could you push the cedars further into the burn area prior to ignition? At least maybe on your downwind zone? A thought to think. Good luck.
 
Your fire breaks look top notch, but after looking at your pics...here's something to consider...

With the dead cedars "in play" near the edge of your burn area, I would recommend also considering the sparks that those might throw when they go "woof". You might possibly get some live stuff high enough up in the air to then "jump" your breaks. I can't be sure of that...but it seems like a possible-maybe looking at your pics.

To play it totally safe, could you push the cedars further into the burn area prior to ignition? At least maybe on your downwind zone? A thought to think. Good luck.

Ya, the only 2 breaks with cedars close to the line are the south break (upwind, head fire break) and the west break that has a full secondary backup break just across the fence. If the burn ban stays more than a week or so, the cedars on that west break will be moved 30 or so yards minimum into the fire. And, if we get too close to bud break on the trees, I will pull the bulk of the cedars out from under the oaks to protect them from damage. I have a LOT of room in the grassland to lay them, so no sense risking the trees once the buds swell.


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Burn incoming…. Wednesday looks to be the day.

We moved the brush that was against the west fire break further into the burn unit, and cleared around the bases of the oaks to protect them from scorching.

The west side of the burn will be very patchy thanks to the green-up and thin growth from last year.
The farm received 1.75” of rain tonight and narrowly missed a tornado on the ground…. Just 2 hours after we left. So, between the green up and the high fuel moisture, the fire shouldn’t be too hot.

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I didn’t get a good picture of the rest of the fuel load. I forgot after knocking out all the rest of the tasks. 70% of the unit should carry a decent fire, but that west side will be hard.


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Well, the fire was a bit of a struggle. With all the green coming in, and 2” of rain on Monday, we really fought to get the unit to carry a fire. Taller grasses in the west side of the unit were almost non existent, and the low level duff i was relying on burning was replaced with bright green annual ryegrass from the seed bank.

We barely got a blacked break on the west side, and it took 4 passes with a torch to get that. The North break (downwind) was about 80% black with the remaining 20% being light fuel and green already. The east half of the unit burned well minus one thin stream down the middle, and the head fire was absolutely useless. The areas that had leaves were too moist to carry, and the areas that didn’t have leaves were green as well.

I ended up doing alright lighting any cedar that had decent grass grown into it, but all of the skeletons remain.

What ultimately killed me on this burn was the month long fire ban. If we had been able to burn the first day I scheduled a burn (first week of February) we would have had very good results.

Oh well, the patchiness will just make more diversity. I will need to pile all the cedars and burn them as a bonfire since they weren’t even nearly consumed.

This first pic was supposed to be my head fire… more cedars than grass. The hail from the tornado near miss knocked nearly all of the needles off and it didn’t carry at all.

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A small area with good tall native grasses that carried alright.
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Marginal penetration under the oaks.
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The grasses on the east side did the best.
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But the west side did nothing.
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I got up to the farm today to plant the food plot.
The burn is just as green as can be, like it never even happened. You can definitely tell what parts burned and what parts didn’t. The burned areas are MUCH darker green than the areas that didn’t burn. The camera doesn’t pick it up well, but you can easily see the exact pattern of the burn when looking over the grass.

I was able to put in most of the food plot, but it ended up a little smaller than previous years because it was too wet to till. The far west 30 yards or so went unplanted. I would have liked to have planted with the “throw and mow” technique I used the last few years, but after catching CoVid and blowing an ankle out last fall, the field sat fallow for the winter and didn’t have enough growth to mow down a good enough thatch to ensure germination. I ended up at around an acre and a half instead of 2, but I have MUCH more food plot than the area can justify with deer density anyways.
I didn’t have a drag or cultipacker, so I just seeded the full 2 acre rate on the 1.5 acres assuming lower germination.

The plot is Justin Seed Company’s spring deer mix with some vetch and clover that I added in.
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When you don’t have a drone, you improvise…
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The entrance to the plot where I usually plant screening had HORRIBLE pig damage. I would have had to work for several hours with the bucket to repair it, and didn’t have that kind of time, so I just skipped it for another day. Some of the holes are 2 feet plus deep. I only let a tire drop into one once before deciding I would give myself plenty of space to avoid them. It was so deep that once the back tire slid down into it, I had a hard time getting out because the fully lifted tiller was bottomed out behind me.
The below picture is before I ever started tilling, but the camera doesn’t show the depth very well. This area was probably 1/8th of an acre just turned into a moonscape.

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I did video the beehives that arrived a few weeks ago, but it is taking forever to upload to YouTube. So, once that has uploaded, I will post that. I have yet to count the hives, but there are SEVERAL hundred. They ring the edges of 3 different pastures in pallets that have 4 hives. One of the pastures is exclusively 5 frame nuc hives that I am assuming were split this spring. If even half of those do well enough to transfer into full hive boxes, the whole north half of the place will be white boxes.

(Edit: Heard from the bee guy and he said these are pretty much all split hives growing out for either sale or to go into his honey production. He will only leave a small percentage of of the 1,000 or so hives currently on the place.)

The below 2 pictures are just the hives added this week, and this is by far the smallest set on the place.
From our old hand-dug well looking west
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Looking east, remember, each patch of white in this pic is 4 hives.
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The bees have definitely settled down in the last couple of weeks. They were VERY active when they first arrived and were fairly aggressive for domestic bees. I’m guessing that was just stress from being shipped from california almonds back here to Texas. My aunt lives on the property next door and said all the neighbors in the area had called her and asked what the heck was going on, because of literal clouds of bees in the area. Haha.

There will be some productive gardens in the area this year!


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Super nice place
 
That's a lot of bees!
 
Got out to the place today to check on plots and trim shooting lanes on a stand I hung over the new corn feeder. I have named the spot “Swine-amageddon” hoping it leads to getting rid of this sounder I have terrorizing the place.

I guess I didn’t update this thread at all this year, and instead just posted on assorted threads elsewhere in the forum.

I gave up on the main food plot location. Without large equipment and perfect timing, I just couldn’t manage the soggy clay conditions. I decided on two smaller plots on opposite sides of the property. Both were put into drought condition fallow fields using the throw-n-mow method almost a month ago (September 9th), and we only received 2 rains since. First was a week after planting (0.3”), and the second rain was October 2nd (1.5”+). It has only been 4 days since the 1.5” rain, and the place was powdery dry already when I was there today. Not a drop in either creek, and no rain in the 10 day forecast. Nearing 20” short of normal rainfall for the year on the property.

The plots have VERY little germination, and what has germinated is still in the cotyledon stage and starting to yellow. So, I’m assuming a full failure on both plots at this point. I will overtop with rye in 4 weeks if that is the case.

I have a few deer hitting the feeder I set up for pigs, and if my public land hunting doesn’t produce venison, I may be tempted to take one of the does to fill the freezer.
Here are the plots after planting.
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The tree stand is in the east plot, 65 yards from the feeder. I ended up with the base of my stand at about 34 feet. Nosebleed section!
The pic below is the view after cutting limbs… don’t worry, I still have lots of back cover with trees on a ridge behind me. This is the state of the “food plots” as of today…. VERY little green.
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I did harvest a bunch of Mexican Plums off of my Aunt’s place (next door) for seed. They are from a tree that is nearing 80 years old that was planted next to my Great Grandmother’s house. It most definitely went into her preserves and cooking in it’s early life. I pulled seeds out of the soft, rotten plums and will let the rest rot a bit before cole ring the seeds from them as well.
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I checked in on my line persimmon tree on the property, and it is LOADED! I will have to stick a camera on it for later in the winter.
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I also found my first Chinkapin oak on the property!!! First I’ve ever seen in the county. I was conflicted on planting them on the place. Although they are listed as native, I had never seen one in the area growing up and hesitated to add something that wasn’t hyper local. That gives me 2 white oak species (Chinkapin and Burr) to be able to plant on the place.
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I think that is about it for this update… Tapatalk has changed some and I can’t seem to post a video that shows as a thumbnail, but if I can figure that out, I’ve got a couple pig videos to post.


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One sow and her most recent litter, which are about weaning age.

This large sounder has 5 adult sows, and when all are together with their offspring, the group is over 40 pigs in total. The neighbor totaled a car on a few pigs a month ago on the road that borders our North side.
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Had a REALLY nice 10-point show up around midnight last night. First time seeing him on the place, and first buck that would legally make antler restriction. (13” inside spread)

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Acorns are starting to drop here in north Texas, so I went to a local park and collected some acorns.

I ended up with 3lbs worth (after float testing) of Bur Oak acorns that are pretty unique for what I’m used to. They drop free from the caps instead of being stuck in them, and are about half the size of normal Bur acorns.
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Compared to a normal Bur Oak I am used to
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Then, I found the most gorgeous Chinkapin Oak acorns dropping and collected (after float testing) 15 LBS!!!
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That should be an excellent start to direct seeding this winter after we burn that pasture. I will be using a bulb planter for the acorns instead of discing in, so that I do minimal damage to the native grasses I’m trying to get going.


Ultimate goal in this area is oak savannah densities, but I will be planting MUCH denser assuming a high failure rate.


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That is the biggest acorn I think I've ever seen!
 
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