September 3, 2016
First time at SMGB — Hi everyone! Thanks for letting me blog, and where to start? That's what I said 9 years ago as I overpaid for this 4.7 acres, heavily wooded, on a hill, with a wore-out double-wide mobile home (20 years a rental) and a rusty garden shed. Oh, where to start? A smart person would have scrapped the DWMH so of course I spent a year rebuilding repairing remodeling renewing the trailer. For breaks I worked outside, checked what's in the woods, what's down the hill, and figured how to use this place.
Let's look at the map first. The redline is the property line. There's a gate at the northwest corner by Fields Rd. (upper left) where the elevation is about 220'. The 300x600' lot runs down to the east and bottoms out around 175'. That makes the slope about 1:12 — down a foot every 12 feet. Storm runoff from the dirt road in the middle of this clay ridge, farmed till the soil ran out, is a problem.
Lady Banks roses on lighter-wood posts. I put this in the front corner where the rose flourishes — canes cover the trellis and jump the fence — despite the depleted soil of thin sand over clay & iron pebbles.There were no fences except the antique farm fence along the east and south borders. Well, 2 or 3 fences put up over the decades and the first was off (the dotted blue lines) running 20’ outside the flagged corner marker. None of the fences down in the SE corner, coming from other properties, meet in the same spot — I call it “no-man’s land” but it’s mostly mine by caring.
I've spent days fixing fences, some old enough to have lighter-wood for posts. Where the posts and fences cut across my surveyed line, I moved them (and dang that rusty barb-wire.) Down at the bottom, I kept the extra 20’ while patching and doubling up old fences. New fencing was installed on the north and west sides and bolstered a few years later after feral hogs invaded and tore it up runnelling thru the leaf litter. One fall I chased 7-8 piglets eating hickory nuts by the trailer down the hill and out a break in the fence, them squealing all the way and me behind yip-yipping and wondering “where’s mama? what if she charges? can I make that tree?"
Dead Live Oak - Grape vines below it had diameters of 4-5 inches going up. They might have smothered this and other trees. The skeleton will stand for decades yet.The woods in the top half was overgrown with grape vines and greenbrier and near impassable. The driveway ran straight down the yard and runoff ate thru 2' of clay making a wide trench. Sand from the dirt road was washing down to the trailer. Now the driveway is S-shaped to force water off into the woods and small berms are set here and there across the hill to direct water away. On the map, H is my home, G is the half-sunny garden and PB is the new polebarn. There's decks and walkways all around. Comfortable, low impact and low cost living.
Garden full of winter greens - cilantro bolting, kale radish arugula lettuce, green onions! That was the year I actually grew parsley in its own bed - bottom left. Now it’s outside the fence where it belongs, feeding Black Swallowtail butterflies.Trees on top of the hill where it's drier: Live & Water Oaks, Loblolly Pine, Sweetgum, Hickory, Southern Magnolia, Red Cedar, Beech, and Black Cherry. Guessing the biggest get 100' tall but it's all in layers, layers of branches, one tree topping the other. Snags abound and some are down like the dead pine I watched fall one Christmas that put 70’ of trunk on the ground. I've cut a dozen big trees around the house (hollow-trunked Water Oaks have to go) and 1 or 2 big trees drop in the woods each year. It's a wild sea of green when the wind blows hard, the way the trees bend, giving just enough, their branches tossed back, tips breaking when needed, culling their weakest.
**writing this Monday with a Tropical Storm due here Thursday, we'll see…
** Hermine forecast as Category 1 sometime after midnight coming right at us.
*** 3 Water Oaks broke off leaving tall snags, 1 top hung up, 1 crushed the south fence. 1 Cherry lost a huge branch and there are 1000s of small limbs and twigs. Scored a mess of Bay leaves.
Hickory budding out