Living Off the Land: Clearing Cedar Trees

It's been such a beautiful spring that it would be criminal to not spend as much time as possible outdoors enjoying it. For me, a big part of enjoying spring is working on projects down at the property.

A project that we've been working on for a couple years is building a bridge across one of the sink holes.

The long, drawn out process went as follows, in year 1 we identified the site and cleared a trail to it. Year 2 was finding the logs to use for the span and dragging them into place, and year 3 was bolting it all together, clearing out the underbrush and putting the cross pieces on.

All our hard work paid off. A sturdy bridge is born. Here's Seth modeling the finished result.

As we finished up, I saw a dead tree that I somehow missed in our initial trail clearing. When I noticed it, I mentioned to Seth "I need to cut that down before a storm comes through and knocks it onto the bridge".

That tree had to have been there for many years, but wouldn't you know it. A storm came though not a day after I said that and snapped the top of the tree, which hit the bridge and broke one of the cross pieces.

Luckily it will be pretty easy to fix. A few feet more to the left though, and it would've been disastrous. Those logs are incredibly heavy.

Another spring project is getting the bees ready for the nectar flow. This involves inspecting the hives, checking on the brood patterns, looking for parasites or disease, etc.

It's always really cool to find the queen. They are shy and fast, so without having them marked, like the one below, it's sometimes tough to spot them. I was able to find the queen in the new hive. A good sign.

One frustrating task this year was having to swap out my 'deep' brood box because the queen keeps going up the hive into the 'shallows'.

I should have swapped them earlier to prevent this but I guess better late than never. The problem is that I have two shallows on the bottom, which will be hard to fix later on.

We're starting to get a lot of wildflower blooms. These unique flowers are Eastern Red Columbine. I've been researching whether bees like them but haven't found anything conclusive.

Here's a field full of bluebells near the hives. They look pretty but I don't think the bees have much use for them. The cone is too deep and its hard to land on.

Another spring project is working on burn piles, trying to get our new cow pasture ready. We definitely want to get this done before the summer heat sets in.

The line between the new grass and what we have left to do

What it looks like after we knock down all the cedars and scraggly trees. Still a lot to clean up. You can see the building burn pile in the background. This used to be so thick that you couldn't even walk through it in the summer time.

The burn piles get so hot that even after two weeks and three big rainstorms, the hot spots in the ash can still start on fire. This little flame popped up after I bulldozed the ash pile from our last burn.