I pinch a penny so tight that heads and tails end up on the same side of the coin! Hope the 362 serves you well. I know you'll put it through its paces. A 361 is in my future.
Hey MAF143, great thread. I'm curious as to how your black walnut grove is doing two years out? I have over a dozen nuts in protected pots now, with hopes to transplant a few in the late fall this year when everything goes dormant.
Last time I walked through (early last fall) I only found 6, but that was just through a small area of the 8 acres that got planted. Potted trees that are 2 or 3 years old will stand a MUCH better chance than the nut planting I did. Also almost all of the area I planted is already wooded and these are fill in trees in a mixed hardwood environment as I remove invasives, cull nasties, or harvest fence posts... I'm only hoping for 50 - 200 mature trees out of the 30 gallons of nuts I planted. In an open area with them being pampered and flagged yours should do much better. It's not really a Walnut grove in the area I planted. We do have a few other areas of the farm that are much more populated with Black Walnut. That is where I got the seed nuts from to start with. About 3 acres of the walnut plantings are in an area that have some White Oak and I tend to favor the already established White Oaks over the Walnut anyway just because a bird in the hand is worth 10 in the bush... If some Walnut make it in that area, great, but I'm not going to cull out a potentially nice White Oak to make room for a Walnut sapling that might get run over skidding logs out at some point. I did a bunch of Crop release culling last fall throughout the woods, but not in the walnut planting area. I may rotate through there later this year or probably in '23 to cull again. Our woods is fairly immature at this point and hadn't been managed prior to us getting it so we are just in the beginning stages of getting it going again. Some of it had been pasture and most of it had cattle grazed in it. I know when we got it there was more grapevine, honeysuckle, honey locust and other invasives than the good stuff. I spent 3 years getting rid of the stuff that kills good hardwood stands. The 70 acres of woods next door had probably been managed back from the 1950's through the 80's. I drool when looking across the fence, but the owners there haven't logged for 40 years and they are starting to lose some mature trees that should have been harvested. The daughter remotely owns that homestead now and is more of a tree hugger. I'm sure whoever ends up buying that woods will have it logged. Hopefully by a forester that is looking towards the future and not just the quick buck... Our place is more of a long term venture looking to the future of having some good timber in 20 to 30 years... I'll most likely never see that, but that will be our gift to the future generations. For you Rush fans out there, I'm more of the "white haired uncle" with the fun stuff after they pass the motor laws... I keep saying I'm gonna start a bunch in milk jugs, but it's another one of those "I need more hours" things... I'll get to it when the days grow to 3o hours... LOL
Midwinter had asked for some steer pix... Well, finally here they are. Everyone says not to name them, but I think we'll be safe with "Ribeye" and "T-Bone"... Their new Cow Condo is still under construction and there will be another one just like it built over in the other pasture. You can see the other pasture area on the other side of the walnut grove and row of pines in the first pic. There are 2 pastures each split into 2 paddocks for rotational grazing through the grass growing months and they will always have grain in front of them as well. Well-marbled is the word of the day... I'm not quite sure how all those beer cans got in there. Those steers are still under age!!!
Many kudos to you for being a good steward of the land, helping the wildlife and looking toward the future. We have a few walnut trees, but one in particular, in our yard, that I don't look forward to cleaning up the nuts. We have several small walnut trees, on the edges of our lot, that were planted by squirrels. You need some squirrel helpers!
