Habitat Improvement

On Friday I got word that my application to the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) EQIP ( Environmental Quality Incentives Program) program has received preliminary approval.  This program will help to defer the cost of planting about 50 acres of trees around the farm--including a 50-foot riparian buffer along the entire frontage of the river--and replacing about 50 acres of fescue with native warm season grasses and wildflowers.

The trees won't be planted until next Winter, but we're going to try to get the grasses started this Spring.  To do that, we have to spray the fescue with a mix of Roundup and Plateau herbicides in the next few weeks, then use a drill provided by the NRCS to plant the native grass seed during May.

Today, my son and I walked nearly the entire farm to mark the areas where we'll be planting trees and grasses.  In general, trees will go on the steep slopes and along the streams, and grasses will go on the ridge tops.  Our hope is that trees will help protect from soil erosion on the slopes and stream banks and provide habitat for deer and turkey.  The grasses should be a great habitat for turkey, quail, rabbits and other small critters.

Our plan is to plant a mix of Little Bluestem and Side-oats Gramma, along with a variety of wildflowers, in the grass land plots.  The trees will include a mix of hardwoods (white and red oaks, hickories, and walnuts) with a border of shrubby trees like dogwoods, redbuds, and plums.

I'll keep you posted as we begin to pray and plant over the coming weeks.

Barn Done

The crew finished the demolition of the barn on Friday.  Everything is now stacked into neat piles waiting to be put on a truck and moved to the sawmill:

Now begins the processing of the barnwood into flooring and siding for the cabin.

Barn Down!

The demolition crew began work on Monday of this week.  The first order of business was to remove the barn siding, much of which will be recycled into siding and flooring for the cabin.  By the end of the day on Tuesday, the siding was nearly all gone:

On Wednesday morning the guys cut out a few of the cross members.  By midday the barn was ready to come down.  They looped a cable around a couple of studs, hooked the cable to my tractor, and I pulled.  Without much effort at all, everything came crashing down.  (Sorry, no video--I was on the tractor!) All that was left was a flat pile of lumber and roofing:

Over the next couple of days he crew will remove the roofing material and begin sorting out the lumber.  When everything that can be recovered has been, the remainder will be burned.  THAT should be pretty spectacular!  Then the recovered wood will be hauled off to be dried and milled.

Lakes

I love to fish, so one of the things I attracted me to Chaplin Bend Farm was the small lake in the central valley of the lower part of the farm.  Here's a satellite map showing the location of the existing lake:

The dam for the existing lake was not particularly well constructed:  the spillways are inadequate and it has almost no freeboard (dam height above normal water level), so it is easily overtopped.  It appears to have at least one very small leak.  In addition, the dam and shoreline of the lake have been damaged by cattle and muskrats.  But the lake seems to hold water well--I've never seen it anything but full.

In addition to the existing lake, it appears that there are sites higher up the same valley for one or two additional lakes of similar size.  (In theory I could build one huge lake that would fill the entire valley, but cost and government regulations make that unfeasible.)  Here's what I have in mind:

The upper lake would have two embankments: one to the east and one to the south.  We would design that lake so that the overflow would go south into the other lakes rather than east into the river.  The dam for the middle lake would be placed just above the tail-waters for existing lake.  While we're at it, we're planning to repair and raise the existing dam, which will enlarge the existing lake a bit and flood the cattle and muskrat damage along the shoreline.  The overall result should be maybe 6 acres of more-or-less continuous water, which would be terrific!

I've been working with a civil engineer who specializes in dam construction to plan the project.  Yesterday he was on site doing borings to test the structure of the existing dam and to verify that we have sufficient clay in the soil to build the new dams.  Here he is at work on the existing dam :

The borings revealed plenty of clay, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Next week a surveyor is going to survey the entire valley and produce a contour map with one-foot intervals.  We'll use that to help place and size the dams and determine more precisely the size of the lakes.  Also in the next week or so my engineer will do the math on the watershed and water volumes to make sure that there is enough flow to keep the three lakes full.  More on those tasks later.

The Cabin

I've been working on the design of a cabin for the last couple of years, ever since I bought my previous farm in Henry County, KY.  Now that I've bought Chaplin Bend, the cabin project is moving along quickly.  I hope to break ground before the end of the March 2012.

The cabin will be a weekend retreat for my wife and me.  We hope that from time to time our grown children and friends will join us, but most of the time it will just be the two of us.  So we've designed the cabin to be very comfortable for two but with plenty of places for family and friends to sleep when the join us.  Here's the floor plan:

Chaplin Bend Farm has several great building sites with great views on the upper part of the farm.  It took me several months to decide where to build, but I've finally picked the spot, high on a ridge, protected from view by a slightly higher hill, with a great view to the East, West, and South.  To maximize the view, I've designed the cabin with multiple windows in the Family Room and a wraparound covered porch.

I'll let you know when we get started and will post plenty of photos during the construction process.

Fences

Before I bought Chaplin Bend Farm, it was used as a cattle pasture.  As you might expect, the farm is divided by many hundreds of yards of interior fences.  Fences don't fit my plans for open grasslands and forest, so my intention is to take them out.  I'll be working on that all summer in preparation for tree planting next winter.

The first phase of the project is to remove a few hundred feet of board fence near the barn.  The boards in this fence are 6 inch by 1 inch poplar, from 4 feet to 14 feet long, and will be added to the barn wood to make flooring for the cabin.

I got started on this work last week, removing the face boards and the planks from a few dozen feet of fence.  Not too hard using a crowbar to pry off the facing boards and then hammer and pry off the planks.   A few were hard to get started but eventually came off with a little elbow grease.  A few boards split but none too badly.

I've stacked the boards so that the barn contractor can take them away when he dismantles the barn.  Some are a bit warpped and a few have splits, but I figure we'll get several hundred square feet of flooring from this small amount of fence.

Later I'll come back and pull the posts using my tractor.  I'll either hold on to those for some future project or sell them on Craigslist.

The Barn

Chaplin Bend Farm has three barns:  a modern run-in shed, a middle-aged tobacco barn that is in good shape, and an older wood barn that is leaning pretty badly and needs to come down.

The barn is probably 80 years old, plus or minus a decade.  The siding is mostly poplar with some oak;  the structure inside is mostly oak with some poplar and some modern pine (added in an abortive attempt at repair).  Some of the siding has rotted, but most of it is sound.   Some of the older siding is 20 inches or more wide.  The interior structure is in good shape, but leans because of an inadequate foundation.

My plan is to have the old barn dismantled and to recycle as much of the wood as possible into flooring, siding, and paneling for the cabin I plan to build.  But how to get that done and who to do it?

Googling "barn wood" and "old barn" located some helpful sites, such as www.old-barn-wood.com and www.oldbarnwoodsite.com.  From these I figured out that the typical business model for the industry was "I'll remove your barn for free if I get to keep the wood."  That's great, but not what I wanted, since I wanted to keep most or all of the wood.  I also figured out from these sites that I needed to look for someone close by to do the work.

Not surprisingly, given the number of old barns in Kentucky, there are several companies in the barn wood business nearby.  After talking to several of these, I finally located a guy who offers a "soup to nuts" service:  he'll dismantle the barn, clean up the site, kiln dry the wood and mill it to my specifications.  He came out and took a look at the barn, we negotiated on price and terms for a day or two, and reached an agreement.  He'll dismantle the barn, I'll pay him a certain price per square foot for the finished wood I use, and he'll keep the remainder to use in whatever way he pleases.  Seems like a fair deal to me.

If all goes well with the project, I'll post his name and contact info for anyone who might be interested.

My hope is that the barn will begin to come down next week.  I'll post pictures as it comes down!