Cabin Work

We don't have an actual ditch out front; but the lawn slopes down to the road and it is difficult to either mow or weed eater that part. What we are doing is planting it with flowers and shrubs that will grow and spread each year. So far, we have irises, the sunchokes, Mexican petunias, and a few daffodils growing out there.
I have some hollyhocks growing in the Aerogarden, and once they get large enough to transplant, I will pot them up for the summer, and then set them out along the slope when it cools off this fall for next year.
Eventually, the whole area should be filled in with different flowering plants, and some that are also tall enough to give us a privacy screen out there, and we should not have to either mow or weedeat once it all fills in better.
That probably isn't a fast option though.

 

Okay, I got lost in my woods. Not hopelessly lost or anything but I came out way past where I had intended to come out. I could have turned back at any time and found my path again but, being a guy, I didn't want to go back the way I had come. I didn't; rather, I came out about a mile and a half from where I had gone in.

The grass didn't need mowing yet because winter didn't want to go away in Maine, and very little is growing yet. I did retrieve the disks from my cameras and changed the batteries. The batteries in two of the five cameras had died at some point during the winter but the others had kept running since I put them there in November.

In the next few days, I'll post some photos from the camera if there's anything interesting.

The woods was very wet from the spring thaw and the fact that it had rained all night last night, so I got pretty wet walking through the woods.

I saw a bear, which was only the third time that I have actually seen one with my eyes out there, although they turn up on camera all the time. I didn't get a picture because he moved to the trees before I even thought of reaching for my camera.

It was a young bear, probably in its second year. It was on top of one of the agricultural tractors that was left in the potato field. At first, I thought it was a potato grower, then I could see that it was bear. Either it was curious, as bears are or, more probably, someone had left a lunch behind.

He backed off of the tractor very slowly, like a cat that had been caught rummaging through a dresser drawer, and then ran for the trees.

This is a hard time of the year for bears. They have come out from hibernation skinny but there isn't much for them to eat. Despite their ferocious reputation, 85% of what they eat is vegetation and very little is growing yet. A significant part of the other 15% of their diet consists of ants and other bugs, and there aren't even very many of them out yet.

This is the time of year that they are the most dangerous, since they are hungry. Even then, black bears are unlikely to attack a person for food.

I left a few bags of apples and some chicken that was on sale.

 

Here's a photo of the camp floor after it was completed.

 

I wish I'd started earlier in my life, but my goal is to get it so that we could live off the land there if we needed to. There are no utilities available within a couple of miles from the land, but we hope to have a well drilled before too long, and some solar panels, but I don't want to depend too much on electricity. There's no point in living in the woods if I'm just going to be sitting behind a computer.

Our land includes a 5 acre potato field, which we currently lease to a potato grower, and half of another 5-acre field. We have a brook with a beaver dam on one end of the property. The beavers have that part of the land pretty wet but it's great for wildlife. We have at least four moose that are on the property pretty regularly, and others that pass through since the land abuts a very large area of undeveloped forest. We have one bear that seems to make our land his base of operations, and others that come in, particularly during mating season. So far, I have seen only one white-tailed deer, but the northern part of Maine is pretty much the northern boundaries of the white-tailed deer habitat. I don't hunt, but I've never had to, so I suppose I could if it were necessary. I can shoot fairly well.

One thing I want to do is to set up a forest garden, that being a concentration on edible perennials, fruit trees and nut trees, so that there is food in the area that doesn't require a garden. Although the wildlife will help themselves to much of that, it brings the wildlife in. As it is, we have wild blueberries, raspberries, and some chokecherry trees, so I know that those things will grow there. I planted a few other species of blueberries that are hardy to the zone but, while the plants are doing well, it's been four years now and they have never flowered or bore fruit. I'm still not sure what's going on there.

The other end of the property includes a cedar swamp, a portion of which is on our land. The word "swamp" is misleading there because, although it's known as a cedar swamp, it's not particularly wet. It's a thick stand of cedar trees with a canopy that doesn't allow a lot of snow to reach the ground during the winter. Moose winter there because they can walk around without being in deep snow, and it's near enough to other parts of the woodland that includes vegetation that they can eat during the winter.

The rest of the land, from what I was told, was potato fields up until about thirty years ago when it was allowed to grow up into a woodland, so it's a new woods, and it still includes several small clearings where saplings grow, and that is what makes up a large part of a moose's diet, as well as the deer. These are also clearings where I can plant fruit trees and the like, although I would have to protect the trees with a fence until they are large enough to avoid being eaten. I wouldn't mind if they ate the fruit, but not the whole tree.

I would love to be able to plant currants but they are illegal in Maine because of a belief that they can carry a disease that can spread to to white pine trees.

Saturday while I was there, I got lost a couple of times. Not hopelessly lost, as in needing anyone to come find me, but after I collected the disks and changed the batteries in the camera at one clearing, I wasn't paying much attention while I was walking back, as I was daydreaming about one thing or another, and I realized that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. Not wanting to go back the way I came (it's a guy thing, I think), I just walked in a direction that seemed like it should take me back to the road. I found a much larger clearing than the one my camera was in, a clearing that I hadn't yet come across in my wanderings through my land. If I can find it again, I'll set some cameras up there too.

After leaving that clearing, I walked back into the woods, following an animal trail. Given a choice of trails, I chose one where I could see another clearing up ahead. When I got near there, I could see a camera in a tree. It was the one that I had started out from, and I had walked in a circle. So I think I can find it again.

Another camera, I had set up along an animal trail in a wetter part of the woods. Everything was wet Saturday, because of the snow melt and the rain we had on Friday, but this was a fairly wet area when I set the camera out last September. I had marked the trail to the camera, having once spent many hours trying to find a camera, so I followed the marked trees to my camera. I didn't want to go back that way because it was very wet, so I thought I'd look for a drier route.

I followed what appeared to have been a trail made by farm equipment many years ago, as I could see two wide-set tracks. The tracks themselves had turned into a stream, with flowing water, but the area in between the tracks was fairly dry, so I followed that. After walking quite a long ways, I realized that it wasn't going in the direction I had intended to go in but since it was an easy path to follow, I knew that I could always go back the way I came if I needed to. Eventually, it came out to the road, but a mile and a half or two miles away, on neighboring property.

I still haven't explored all of my property. The trees and the underbrush are so thick that it's hard walk through much of it and the end of the property with the beaver dam, the beavers change the landscape so much from one year to another, that it's hard for me to get my bearings.

 

When our daughter brought our grandchildren up here, as it turned out, less than two weeks before she died, I would have thought they'd have been fascinated by Maine, having grown up in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Baltimore, Maryland. Yet, during the drive up north, despite the mountains, rivers, and even a couple of moose, they barely lifted their heads from their cellphones or video games. Once we got to the land, our nephew did enjoy walking through the woods with me while I set out my cameras, but our niece went back to the car and waited.

 

A few years ago, one of my cameras caught a photo of someone hunting on my land, although it's posted. I put the photo up on Facebook asking if anyone knew who he was. No one told me, but I've never had a problem with that again. Another time, one of my cameras captured a couple of people on ATVs on my land. It's posted "no hunting" rather than "no trespassing," although under Maine law, someone is still trespassing if they don't have expressed permission to be on the land, and the state could confiscate their ATVs. That seemed kind of mean though, and could only lead to bad relations, so I let that go. I just put up a "no trespassing" sign along the trail that they were on.

 

When I lived in Missouri, the property had three nice ponds on it, and I used to fish in all three of them. Most of the people around there also had ponds on their properties, and that is where their livestock cooled down and drank. it was not unusual at all to see cattle standing or lying down in the ponds.
The rain would fill the ponds up sometimes almost to overflowing.
I think the difference in regulation might be whether the pond affected a natural water flow, like a creek running across the property.
Most of these ponds were just holes drug into the ground where the rainwater could run into them and fill the ponds up, so they didn't affect any natural creeks or springs.
As long as a person was just making a hole and letting it fill up with rainwater, there should not be a problem with having to have special permits.