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This is a scan, of a photocopy, of a photo from the bundle of legal documents associated with the purchase of Twig Forest. The triangle formed by the two narrow straight lines and the wider (dirt road) slightly wavy line is Twiggy. I hope the 3rd generation copy quality will be sufficient for you to see a few details.
The road looks nice in this photo, but it is a sand logging road full of dips that fill with water after a good rain. It is a fun, splashy, muddy ride in the Jeep when wet, a bumpy dusty trail when dry.
If you look carefully, you can see lines running through the photo. These are the rows of planted pines that fill almost every square inch of Twiggy. Make no mistake, we may call it a "forest", but it's really a farm with row crops...they just happen to be trees. Very little about this land is "natural". The changes are not irreversible, but substantial.
In contrast with the 10 acres I live on, Twiggy has been altered right down to the soil. The first step of pine tree planting on low piney woods is to create elevated rows about 4 feet wide to get the pines up above any standing water. This has been done over all of Twiggy.
The two wavy lines running across Twiggy look like streams, (I wish). I think you need a change in elevation to get a stream! These seem to be deeply worn logging roads, now over grown, and presently holding water.
The lower left corner of Twiggy is wet. You can see how the survey line grabs just a little of an open boggy spot.
The upper corner is the drier side and somewhere... (I am still getting my bearings on this new land) near the center is a possible campsite.
The surrounding lands are similar topographically and are 20 acres or more. All the land across from Twiggy is in much larger lots. We couldn't afford those...we were financially adventurous to buy Twiggy with kids about to start college, braces, etc.
No pain, no gain.
6 comments:
Cracksman: What, eventually, will you do with this? My understanding is the pines were probably planted for paper mill use. Is that in your plan, or is this just going to be "forest"? It looks like something fun to have.
Hoss,
The trees are about 13 years old. They are for pulp harvest and that can happen anywhere from 15 years up. We bought Twig Forest with my brother as 50% investor. The planted pines have $ value, but the land value was the impetus.
I plan to enjoy being a tree farmer for as long as our little consortium owns this land.
I love, love, love this kind of post with aerial photography. I can imagine my boots tromping on this land. This is a great post! Thanks!
Pablo,
Your boots are welcome here.
Oh gosh - we can triangulate! Very cool photo - I love aerial photography. I would have guessed those squiggly lines in the middle to be streams. The whole area looks quite random, so I guess from the air you don't see the pattern of 4 foot rows?
We attempted to use an aerial photograph when we were attempting to locate the effigy mound - with no success.
Looking forward to more twiggy forest posts.
Zanne,
They show up on a good photo, just not very well on this copy. I love aerial photos too. I actually took a college course in "Remote Sensing".It was all aerial photography interpretation. It was fantastic.
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