Drone Photos

I was out testing the new drone today. This was my second attempt to fly a drone and took it up to about 500 feet and took this photo of our cabin property.



A photo of Miner's Pond. I had to stop flying due to high wind warnings from the drone.

Sky Camera

Since I take a lot of photos, why not branch out and get some shots from a different angle. My new camera is a Mavic 2 Pro Quadcopter (drone). Drone technology has evolved to a point where I may be able to fly this camera in the sky. I'm still working on the per-flight check list and training videos before my first flight.



For the camera "geeks", this drone has a 20MP camera, designed by Hasselblad, with 1” CMOS sensor and can shot 4K HDR video.

Planting Walnuts

The day started off with a frosty 30F but soon warmed up to 50F (with no rain), a perfect day to plant some black walnuts. These two buckets contain about 800 black walnuts that I removed the outer hull from.



This section of field is still waterlogged from this year's wet weather. Mary was able to navigate straight rows as I walked behind the tractor and dropped the walnuts in the furrow. After a couple of hours we had planted the 800 walnuts and a few more chestnuts.

Coming Soon... Turkey Season

The fall turkey season starts in 9 days and this flock is enjoying today's sunshine.



I was checking a new drainage project at one of my food plots when I found these birds looking for a meal. After watching the turkeys for about 20 minutes they walked within 20 feet of my truck.

Planting Chestnuts

I managed to collect some chestnuts that the deer and squirrels didn't get and decided to plant the nuts at our cabin property. I modified my 3-point hitch middle buster to plant chestnuts/walnuts by attaching a steel pipe behind the main shank and sub-soiler chisel point. The steel pipe allows me to drop the nuts into a furrow created by the sub-soiler.



It didn't take too long to plant approximately 400 chestnuts in this field. Hopefully the squirrels won't find all the chestnuts I planted and a few trees will grow.

Chestnuts

We have a few Chestnut trees in our lawn and the recent heavy rain has caused the nuts to start dropping. These are Chinese Chestnut trees that we planted and not the American Chestnut trees that were nearly wiped out by chestnut blight 100 years ago. I do have one American Chestnut on our property that is barely surviving. Chinese Chestnut trees are resistant to the blight and people have been back-breeding Chinese chestnuts into American chestnut populations to confer blight resistance.



The Chestnut fruit (nut) is contained in a spiny (very sharp) "burr". The burrs contain one to four nuts and when they reach maturity, the burrs turn yellow-brown and split open in two or four sections to release the nuts. These burrs are so sharp they will penetrate heavy leather gloves.



Some of the Chestnuts I have collected this year. After they have dried I will plant them for wildlife habitat.



Prior to the chestnut blight there were nearly four billion American chestnut trees in North America and a main source of food for wildlife. Some of the local deer looking for chestnuts under the neighbor's tree.