Fall Color

We've had some warm weather lately, but it's easy to detect a seasonal change is coming by the color of the leaves on the trees. Within a day of taking these photos heavy rains and wind moved into the area and now many of the brightly colored leaves are on the ground. Some views from our cabin property.

A view of our barn property from the cabin property.

A view of our barn showing stacks of firewood ready for the change to cooler weather.

Archery Hunting

The Fall archery season started on October 3rd and allows hunters to take deer and bear with the correct hunting tags. Our son Matt is an archery hunter and came here do some hunting over the 3 day Columbus Day holiday weekend. Matt's plan was to look for an early big buck, but for the last 20 years had gotten the bear tag just in case he would see a bear. This year the bear showed up Saturday in the afternoon. Matt took a shot and hit the bear. The bear traveled just over 100 yards before piling up next to a fallen tree. Matt checked the bear and it wasn't dead yet but figured it would expire by the time I arrived to help remove the bear.

When I arrived, with his son Reed, we went to check on the bear and it was gone! We then tracked it to this new location about 100 yards away. By now daylight was fading in the deep woods and the bear and was still able to move its head. We were able to get within 25 feet of the bear, Matt took another shot and the bear ran into the dark woods, out of sight. We then heard a couple of crashes and assumed the bear would be piled up against another dead tree. We searched for an hour and a half for a blood trail in the darkness with no luck. At this point we decided to wait until day break to look for the blood trail before the forecast 9:00AM rain storm.

The scheduled 9:00AM rain started at 2:00AM and continued all day, delivering almost 1 inch of rain. We hunted all day Sunday in the rain for the bear with no luck. On Monday morning Matt was able to find one bear paw sticking out of a large tree blow-down. The bear was found! The next task was getting the bear out of the blow-down and the steep wooded hillside.

We needed to open a road to the blow-down with my front end loader and then remove some of the blow-down just to get to the bear.

Now lift the bear out with the loader bucket. The bear was tagged and the Game Commission was called to report the kill. With instructions from the Game Commission, we started processing the bear. The Game Commission was here today, Oct. 14th, to check the bear.

Matt and Reed with the bear.

The bear had ear tags in each ear. By using the ear tag numbers we found that this warden was the person that tagged the bear last year. The bear was estimated to be 2.5 years old, with a weight of about 200 pounds.

I have multiple game cameras in this area and got this photo of a bear with ear tags. The game camera photo was taken about 130 yards from where Matt first shot the bear.

Walnuts

The annual bombardment of round green spheres from our black walnut trees has started. Being round, the green nut spheres will roll down hill and collect in locations a short distance from the tree, such as my garden.

The local squirrels will collect and store walnuts for their winter meals. It's nice to have the squirrels help with the walnut removal, but they tend to store all these walnuts in all areas of our barn and then leave the walnut hulls and shells in the barn. To reduce the amount of walnuts stored in the barn I've removed two loader buckets of walnuts, so far. I've hauled these walnut to a brushy field a half mile away and hope to start some black walnut trees in this new location. I'm also removing some of the walnut trees around the barn.

Big Green Caterpillar

I was doing some tree removal near our barn when I found this 3 inch long green caterpillar. After some on-line research I determined it was a Luna moth (Actias luna) caterpillar.

Ring-necked Pheasant

I never know what wildlife I will encounter on our property. I recently noticed something moving through the tall grass at our barn and tried to associate this object with the known local wildlife. It turned out to be a ring-necked pheasant which is not part of our local wildlife.

Ring-necked pheasants are not native to the United States but were introduced as a game bird through state stocking programs. Wild pheasant populations have steadily declined since the 1970s and this pheasant must have been from a local stocking program.

This Year's Sweet Potatoes

With the passing of the fall equinox and a couple of mornings at 34°F, it's time to dig up this year's crop of sweet potatoes. Being a root vegetable, it's hard to tell how a sweet potato crop is doing until the crop is harvested. After digging the first couple of hills, this year's crop looked very good.

Many of the hills had multiple very large sweet potatoes.

Freshly dug sweet potatoes have a very thin/soft skin and need to be cured by placing them in a warm environment for several days. The curing process converts the sweet potato starches into sugars for better flavor and toughens their skins to extend shelf life for months. We've had sweet potatoes keep for over a year.

The sweet potatoes were up to 12 inches long and 5 inches in diameter.

Reed's 10th Birthday

Grandson Reed is now ten years old and his father made him a special birthday gift to celebrate his first decade. Since Reed is starting to go hunting, his dad made him a hunting knife.

Not only is this Reed's first knife, this is the first knife that his dad ever made.

There was a small gathering to celebrate Reed's birthday. The birthday cake was Reed's favorite, cheesecake.

Fairy Rings

While looking for edible mushrooms I found several "Fairy Rings" in the woods behind our house. A fairy ring, also known as fairy circle, is a naturally occurring ring or arc of mushrooms.

Fairy rings are caused by fungi that feed on decaying organic matter (e.g., tree stumps, logs, leaves or roots) buried in the soil. Growth of fairy ring fungi begins in the center of the ring, expanding outward in a relatively uniform, circular pattern. Fairy rings can grow and reappear at the same location for years. The circle will start off small in size, getting bigger as it gets older.

The fairy rings I found were caused by strict coral mushrooms (Ramaria stricta), also known as upright coral.

West Hill Bears

Checking the game cameras at our West Hill property this weekend. It's not unusual for me to get bear photos with game cameras, but this time a bear cub had ear tags. This game camera is located a short distance from homes and corn fields. The ear tags indicate the bear cub had been trapped, most likely for being a nuisance bear around homes.

The bear cub was traveling with a much larger bear that must have been its mother. Mother bears will travel a home range of 6 to 15 square miles teaching their cubs where to find food sources, such as bird feeders, corn fields and apple orchards.

The Velvet is Off

During the summer I've been documenting the development of a yearling buck's first set of antlers. It was easy to identify this young buck due to a notch on his right ear. As a deer's antlers develop a soft, furry skin, known as velvet, supplies oxygen and nutrients for the antler growth. Here's a photo of the velvet covered antlers from late August.

In late summer/early autumn the blood flow to the velvet stops and causes the velvet to dry and start to peel away. This photo show the velvet cracking and starting to shed.

A day later and all the velvet was shed and the new antlers revealed. This buck has also shed his reddish summer coat and now has his dark brown winter coat.

Walnut Caterpillars

I noticed a large, white, fuzzy mass at the base of a walnut tree at our barn. The fussy mass was a grathering of walnut caterpillars (Datana integerrima) as they molt to shed their exoskeletons and leave behind a dense, fur-like clump of discarded hairy skins.

Some of the walnut caterpillars in the process of molting their hairy exoskeletons.

Firewood

As we move into the fall, the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler. It's time to prepare for the winter heating season by stockpiling firewood. The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) has killed a lot of my trees, so I have a lot of dead trees to convert into firewood. I gather the trees during the year and store them near our barn where I cut them to length for the wood stove and split them with a hydraulic wood splitter.

Once the wood is split, it is stacked on pallets to keep the firewood off the ground and let it air dry.

I transport pallets of firewood to our house as needed using pallet forks on a tractor.

Blue Mushrooms

This summer's changing weather has made foraging wild edible mushrooms difficult. The hot/dry conditions in the early summer slowed or reduced mushroom gathering. The current late summer/early fall rains have restarted some mushrooms and I'm starting to find some nice Indigo milk cap (Lactarius indigo) "Blue Mushrooms". The indigo milk cap is a blue or blue-gray mushroom that exudes a dark blue milk when cut or damaged.

Indigo milk cap mushrooms are edible and we cooked these in butter, along with a couple of chanterelle mushrooms I found.

( Don’t eat any wild mushrooms without first checking with a local expert)

Stressed Out Potatoes

We planted four potato varieties in our garden this year; Russet, Red, White, and Fingerlings. All four varieties did very good, but some of the Russets had strange shapes. This condition is caused by heat and watering stress. We had long stretches of temperatures over 90 degrees Fahrenheit along with extended dry spells which causes the tubers to stop growing. We then had multiple days of soaking rain that started the tubers growing new potatoes from the main tuber to give them a snowman shape.

Spaghetti Sauce

It's almost Labor Day and this year's garden is starting to produce lots of ripe tomatoes ...

The tomatoes are big ...

Our garden produced a lot of garlic ...

Lots of ripe peppers and other ingredients are ready in the garden ...

It's time to make a batch of spaghetti sauce. Canned 17½ quarts of spaghetti sauce from the first batch.