My goal on Martin Farm is that I would slowly steer it back towards it’s pre Columbian condition that I see as both natural and ideal. I have always wanted to not manage for any individual species but instead to nudge the habitat and ecology to support the broadest group of locally adapted flora and fauna possible. Even as I realize that Longleaf is a keystone species in my region and recently, on my property (as evidenced by the large…
When I started my ten year plan to return my forest back to a woodland savanna, I was intending to go the traditional route to get there. The traditional route circa 2021 would have been to hire a forestry consultant who would come evaluate my land. This person would write a management plant to show the direction I wanted to go and the steps to get me there. In my case, with a high basal area, suppressed oak pine forest,…
My house sits in the corner of a fescue/bermuda pasture. It has provided a nice view for many years. And it has required three mowings each summer to maintain it. So last fall, I decided I wanted to convert about an acre of it back to Longleaf Savanna. But converting pasturelands back to woodlands is more difficult than one might imagine. Pasture grasses are tenacious and require a lot of encouragement to get them to relinquish their territory back to…
2023 is the first year that (nearly) all of the land has been burned. Of the 87 acres on the primary property, All was burned this year except the pasture, the back field area and a small area around the houses. So probably six acres not burned. At least half of what was burned was seeing fire for the first time in 70 or more years ! So I am kind of counting this year as year 1 in the…
Just had a visit from 3 great guys. John and Jim Petranka and Bo Sullivan came to the forest to see if it might be somewhere suitable to set some moth traps to sample the varieties to be found here on the fall line. I was introduced to this bunch of invertebrate veterans by another friend, Todd Pusser who thought they might be interested in the chance to find something a little different than the moths they were finding in…
Our first burn was done on Martin Farm on February 21, 2021. The SPBA put out a call for help and several volunteers came out to help with my burn. We burned the 7 year old planted pine area that I had been very laboriously keeping open through weedeating with a brush blade and mowing with a bushog. Man, I wish I had been doing this for years ! I liked doing it, and I liked the way it changed…