Friday, July 24, 2015

Longleaf Pine in New York City?

I am glad Dewberry Lands can play a small part in the magnificent importance of this great tree here where we have been blessed to live...

“Everybody in the wood business says the longleaf pine tree was the best wood the Lord ever made,”
There was a great article in the New York Times this week about the Longleaf Pine, and yes I said New York Times.  The quote above is from that article and I have included the link so you can read it for yourself.


Thursday, July 16, 2015

Stream Crossing

This is a before picture of a place where we were having to cross a stream to get to 100 acres of our property.  It was grown-up, muddy, and just about impossible to cross in anything but a tractor and that was not easy.  Also, we do everything possible to keep the water clean and pure so we were looking at ways to improve this situation.
We were able to get a crossing constructed as a joint project between several parties with the design and help of the NRCS.

Here you can see the two rock types that were used to construct the crossing.  The bed for the crossing was dug out to the bed rock then a cloth-like material was laid to help hold the rock in place. The large rock was put in place on the cloth and the smaller gravel/sand was put on the large rock to form a solid stream crossing.  The level of the stream was not changed in any way so fish and other small aquatic organisms have no change in their migration up stream.  Every where the soil was disturbed was planted back in grass, fertilized, limed and mulched with hay.

This is the finished product
with everything back in place.  My granddaughter is proud of this! (Post September 2, 2014)

Just a note: We are planning a workshop on this project for the public in the fall so we can share information about this project with others.


Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Summer Wildlife Food Plots

The last of our summer food plots have been planted.  I finished this acre and a half planting of soybeans and sunn hemp last week.  You know about soybeans but you might not know about Sunn Hemp. 
Sunn Hemp is a new crop we are trying this year in our food plots and as a summer cover crop.  The seed look like small butter-bean seed (above).  Everything I have read about it is positive:  1. It adds up to 5000 pounds of organic matter to the acre.  2. It can add up to 120 pounds of nitrogen to the acre, 10 pounds of phosphorus, and 80 pounds of potash.  3. It grows in a soil pH of 5-7.  4. The plant foliage has about 30% protein.  5. You will not have to add fertilizer to your fall plantings.  6. Deer love it.
This all sounded good to us so we decided to try it this year.
This field has grown to about 4 feet.  It is at our house and we are using it as a cover crop for strawberries.

In this field the tallest plant is about 12 inches.  It is in one of our wildlife openings.  We planted about an acre and a half here and the deer have mowed it down.  This is what most of our plots look like.  We will see what 30% protein will do for our deer herd. 

This plot has done the best.  In the winter we had seven different bucks photographed here.