Damn man! Talk about gettin some shit done. It didn't help any that I was listening to Born to Be Wild when I opened this thread!

SWEET! I am sooo jealous.

Look at you changin' the Earth around ya!!

Excellent work, my man... Talk about industrious!!

AA

Good work!
So how much did you get done?

Hey Theduardo, since it's a "swamp", do you have any plans about mosquito control.






Joe

To date I have accomplished the following on my property:

I have a trail in the the southeast woods to access the property corner. Previously this was impassible.

Over 500 Vitex trees have been planted last year.

Scraped and smoothed a road with the drag harrow. This allows me to commute to the property and drive on it with a non-4x4 vehicle or truck. Seeing that it is a 2 hour drive to get to the place, being able to drive a diesel VW station wagon back and forth makes it considerably cheaper to get to the property.

With the bulldozer I built a raised berm averaging about 3-4' in height. In all I have over 3500 linear feet of berm. The area scraped out to make this raised wall will now be used to solve my drainage issues. The run-off water being used to create a bottomland hardwood forest. I simply refer it to "The Swamp" although its not really going to be like a Louisiana bayou. It will more likely be areas which are seasonally flooded. Swamp based and water loving fauna and trees are going to be planted.

At my home in the suburbs, I have (500+) 1 gallon plastic planters with various seedlings growing. Of the following varieties:

Black Walnut
Bald Cypress
Black Willow
Green Ash
Red Maple
Willow Oak
Water Oak

My plan is to grow these this year in pots at my house in the 'burbs. Over the year, they will grow a sizable root mass. Then late this Fall I will plant them in the area I cleared. This way the dormant trees will awaken in their new location with the best chance of success. Hopefully with minimal casualties.

Every year I plant to continue growing another 500+ trees in this fashion. Ideally to fill the perimeter of my property with over 2000+ trees.


See, when I was pricing the cost of putting up a fence I figured that it would cost me at least $2000 to put up a t-post and wire one.

The thing is... I really hate fences. Right now, my property is where the local wildlife hang out. I want to keep it that way if possible.

So, instead I decided the best way to solve my security issues was to instead rent a dozer to make the berm. Already its impassible to vehicles other than tracked ones or techincal/obstacle geared 4x4's. Where the road crosses over the berm in the map, I am going to put steel posts and a gate there. Now, with the economy tanking, I can hopefully keep the area meth-heads from stealing my building material when it comes time to put up a house.

Also, I was able to put in the basic berms and walls for a shooting range. Although its is mostly focused for a 25M pistol range and a 50M rifle range, there is a location to shoot at 100M. The shooting berms at this time are only about 10-12 feet tall.

The next earth moving step is going to be renting a backhoe. I need to install some culverts and a septic tank. Also, I plant to use it to add another 4+ feet to my shooting berms





Here is the thing Joe, the mosquitos there are not that bad. And there is year round standing water. Actually my drainage and "swamp" construction is actually helping things some. Because its taking large areas of land which were once saturated, and instead focuses the water into select areas to be managed.

Still, I do not have a major mosquito plan. The thing is, I have to accept that the whole region is going to be wet whatever I do.

i bet the locals think you're insane .

nice work . keep us posted.

frye

Wow. You're the man, dude. I like your plan to keep the land accessible to the area wildlife.

yer gonna git that thang stuck.







actually the locals there seem pretty damn cool...

Looks like everything is coming along pretty good. I was watching the weather reports on TV and getting a little worried. Looked like you got some severe weather down there. I hope you don't get that thing stuck.

During the process I have talked with quite a few of my neighbors.

Yes, I do believe they think I am insane. It did not help when I responded to their "What are you doing?" question with: I am making a backstop for shooting trespassers.

I told them I was just kidding. Then explained the trees.




The Dozer ended up costing about $1800 to rent for the week. What bit me was fuel. The 550 dozer consumed about 30-35 gallons of diesel a day. I spent about $700 in just diesel. Fortunately I met a man named Amos (He is the guy in the dozer photos above on the bottom), who was able to hook me up with a good location to get farm diesel. But it was only around $3.45 a gallon.

So, this project cost about $2500. The thing is, thats about the same as it would have cost me to put in a fence. Granted, when all is said and done, the trees and earthmoving will cost me over $5k+ (over 4-5 years). But I think the long term benefits will be better. Namely managed water flow and a 40+ foot tall green barrier to give me privacy which also can be later harvested and sold for commercial hardwood.




That storm front barely missed me.

But I did get that dozer stuck. And stuck good. You would have been proud of me 88tc in planting a tracked vehicle in a muddy ditch at a 45 degree angle.

Animator was out their helping me get it unstuck for almost 6 hours (tells you the kind of quality person he is). We were unsuccessful. So the next day I contacted a man who stopped and gave me a business card the day before.... Amos. Amos has a dozer business in the area.

So, the next day Amos came out to the land to look at the dozer. he said "Yup. Its stuck."

We then drove to town and he introduced me to many of the locals. Some of which are the farmers mentioned in a different thread. They all laughed, and said that I was not a "real" county resident until I got a heavy vehicle good and stuck into the blackland prairie

The amazing thing is the locals helped me out. Amos got his 18-wheeler and loaded up a track loader. Drove it out to my property, and we were able to pull the dozer out in about 10 minutes.

The amazing thing is he was not going to charge me a dime. "We take care of each other out here." I gave him $100 to put diesel in all the vehicles used. He was happy. So was I.

Man, that's the kind of setting I hope to find myself and my family in one day. I want my kids to grow up where folks treat each other like that.

Very cool Theduardo, very cool.

Too bad I wasn't there with an M88. I would have put that spade down in the mud as an anchor and used the main winch to pull you out. Here is the vehicle I had during my 2nd tour in Iraq. If you look on the front of the vehicle, you can see the end of the winch cable sticking out on top of a roller. Shit, I could have even helped you push dirt around with the spade.

Looks a little wet. But dry ground is worse. My property is mostly sandstone. I guess rental cost are going up everywhere a dozier for a week was 2200.00

Good work Theduardo (Or is it Theduardo here?)

Would love to see the place after a year or two when things start to fill in. I am green with envy, I wish I had the land to do something like that with.