I have returned for a few more weeks on my current work project. I figured that there was not much I could do in December on the farmstead so I might as well earn enough to get some more animals, gutters, etc debt-free.

Over thanksgiving break I was able to top up my freezer by harvesting a whitetail off of the farm land. Now protein needs are taken care of for 6-7 months while I don’t have an income. The liver will serve as a multivitamin to supplement my diet!

In between the morning and evening hunts, I started laying out the vegetable garden. I used some nice scrap lumber milled right on the farm to level the beds. I covered the turf I want to kill with wet cardboard then backfilled with mature horse manure/bedding compost sourced from a farm I worked on all through high school and college. This is a shortcut I will not take in the future as my goal is to not import any biomass. But the barren soil needed help if I want to produce produce (how is that for confusing english wording?). Unfortunately, the snowstorm beat me to taking pictures! Vegetable garden siting and planning will be in a series of future posts.

Interestingly, I found myself in a totally different mindset that I have ever been while hunting. Due to my forestry minor, I kept mentally noting diseases, dead or otherwise harvestable trees. I’ll touch more on this in a future posts regarding the goals to build soil.

There are lots of stands of Persimmon Trees (Diospyros virginiana). Additionally, there is one massive lone-wolf white oak tree on the property that has a crown with of almost 100 feet and is still abundantly producing fruit. Both tree species are historically excellent feed stocks for pigs and turkeys. I will rearrange my paddock mapping to account for this.

For now, back to this: