At first glance, our land in West Virginia seems rather barren of animal life. There are a few large animals such as deer and wild turkey which you can occasionally see but these are wary animals which avoid people. I once caught a glimpse of a coyote and the locals claim to see bear now and then. I am surprised that squirrels are very rare. Most of the trees are oaks and there are acorns on the ground everywhere so you would think that it would be a sort of squirrel paradise. I can only figure that the locals have hunted the squirrels to near extinction. There are smaller animals, however, which fall into the categories of reptiles, amphibians, and arthropods which presumably are not palatable to the local hunters. So if you look closely, you can find toads, turtles, snakes, frogs, salamanders, crayfish, spiders, beetles, etc. I photograph these creatures when I can and will add to the collection below when I do. I have also included some photos of some of the local plant and fungus life. I am in the process of identifying these species and any input you would like to offer in that direction would be appreciated.
Toads are common but can be hard to see since they are the color of the forest floor.
They come in sizes ranging from about a cm. to about 10 cm.
This one is one of the larger ones I've seen.
Eastern box turtles like this one are very shy.
This caterpillar probably was hoping to find a branch as it reached out.
These tired dogs are not native. They are my daughter's dogs which Nick was watching while she was on vacation.
I don't know what this is the larvae of but the false eye spots are incredible.
Don't eat this one.
Many of the surface rocks are covered with lichen.
These bracket fungi growing on a cut oak log are faintly bioluminescent.
I could not get a photo of their nocturnal light with the equipment I have so you'll have to take my word on it.
The mushrooms are primarily a springtime phenomenon when it is wet enough.
Some of the locals collect and eat the wild mushrooms.
We have to remove a number of trees on the land in order to make room for both the buildings and the roads leading up to them. Near the entrance to the property were two fairly large oak trees (~12" diameter) which had to come out in order for the entry way to be wide enough to provide access for trucks and other equipment. Cutting down the trees was one thing but in this case we also had to remove the stumps in order to have a smooth even road. One way to get rid of an unwanted stump, and the way that I have generally employed in town, is to hire a guy with a stump grinder to reduce the stump to a pile of wood chips and soil. I did not want to use that option here for two reasons. I did not want to spend the money and the rocky soil we have here on our West Virginia hillside would be very hard on even a large and robust stump grinder. The other way to get rid of a stump is to dig it out. We have our Kubota KX91-2 excavator so this is the technique we pursued. It is still a bit of a job with the rocky soil but in a few hours Nick was able to dig the stumps out. One disadvantage of this technique is that at the end of the process you have a very large, unsightly ball of dirt, rock, and wood which can weigh as much as 3000 lbs. which you have to do something with. For now we just pushed them off to the side of the road. In the future we will figure out a way of disposing of them.
First, the periphery of the stump must be dug out. This can be quite difficult in rocky soil.
Eventually, the bottom of the stump can be dislodged from the earth.
Once it's free, the stump can be pulled out of the hole.
The excavator is tough enough to push it out of the way.
The stump can join the collection at the road edge. The front two were added today, the rearmost has been there two years.
Here are videos of the excavator at work removing a stump.
Near the Western edge of our build site was a large oak tree that had to be removed. Old oak trees have a tendency to rot on the inside and the center often becomes a convenient location for large black carpenter ants to make a nest. You can generally tell which trees are rotted and hollow by the way in which the diameter of the tree widens more than normal at the base. As the center of the tree becomes weak, the tree will grow more wood at the base to compensate. Also, the trees tend not to be vertical but often lean quite a bit. The lean makes it tricky to cut these guys down. The easiest thing to do is to just let them fall in the direction of the lean. However, due to the rotted center, the trunks are relatively weak and tend to split and crack before the trunk is completely severed. Consequently, these trees can be rather dangerous to fell so you must be careful. I had cut the front notch about 1/4 of the way through the trunk when I noticed the tree was already starting to lean into the cut. This is unusual. You can generally cut a healthy tree well past the halfway point before any displacement can be noticed. I realized at this point that I had to start the back cut and just let the tree crack and split. I was only about an inch into the back cut when the tree broke its trunk and came crashing to the ground with a large thump. Immediately, thousands of 1 centimeter long carpenter ants came streaming out of both the severed trunk and the remaining stump. I guess I messed with their life style a bit that day.
Here I am starting the front cut.
This is the severed trunk after the tree was down.
You can see the rotted wood in the center and the splitting at the left.
Disrupted carpenter ants scurry to get their exposed eggs to safety.
We knew we would need some earth moving equipment to develop this rugged land. Basically, you have three options - rent, buy new, or buy used. Buying new stuff is always fun but of course expensive. We didn't want to blow our budget before we even had a building, so this option was right out. Renting has a strong appeal; you don't have to worry about maintenance and you can get a variety of different devices. It's not too expensive if you need it for only a short time. If your need is over a long period of time and for an intermittent time frame, then this can raise the overall cost of your project. Buying used can be a good deal. If you find something older but in good condition and at a good price, it can be the cheaper option over renting. This is what we decided to do for a few of the larger pieces of gear. We searched around the internet for a small excavator, a moderate sized front-end loader, and a truck capable of hauling a few tons of stuff. We found a nice Kubota B21 tractor with a front-end loader attachment at Coleman Equipment in southern Ohio. Nick went out one day in April to look at it and was pleased. It was about 15 years old and had obviously done a lot of work but was worth the money and clearly had a lot of work yet in it. There are always small faults on any piece of used equipment. If you need perfect, buy new. If you can fix things, you can save a lot of dough buying used gear. While at Coleman's Nick spotted a used Kubota KX91 excavator (also called a track-hoe). We got a good deal on the two of them and bought them on the spot. Now we just had to get them to West Virginia, 400 miles away. We didn't have the capability of transporting them ourselves, so we hired a guy with a big super duty pickup with a fifth wheel trailer (again, arranged over the internet - man, I love the internet). Later, in May, we found a great truck for sale in Fredricksburg. It is a Ford F450 with a 7.3 liter Diesel and a six speed transmission. It is a real beast. We got a great deal on it because it had an electrical fault which caused the battery to go dead overnight. (Actually, like many Diesels it has two big truck sized batteries which means that it can get quite expensive to replace) Confident that we could repair any mere electrical fault we bought it. For the short term we kept the battery from discharging by disconnecting the lead to the battery every time we shut it down. A few weeks later Nick indeed did find the source of the electrical fault and repaired it. I figure we saved a few thousand bucks on the purchase price because of that problem. It is good to know how to fix things.
The Kubota B21 at Colman Power Equipment in Ohio
The KX91 excavator (aka "Mary Anne")
The two Kubotas loaded and ready to ride to West Virginia
Way back in 1992 Kathryn and I bought 25 undeveloped acres in Morgan County, West Virginia. We didn't have a firm idea what we wanted to do with the land other than to hold it as an investment and occasionally go camping on it. About two years ago, however, we started to think about using the land in a more productive way. I have long wanted to own and operate a fabrication shop where we could perform custom machining and welding. This remained a future goal for some years until my son graduated from college and indicated that he would be very interested in working on such a business. One of the problems with such an endeavor is to find a location where we could do it. We live in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington DC. There are many things to like about Northern Virginia, but I would not really describe it as an area where it is easy to start a small manufacturing business. You need very deep pockets indeed to afford commercial real estate in this area. Also, there are a lot of zoning restrictions in Fairfax County. Basically, Fairfax County and the rest of the Northern Virginia area really just want to be bedroom communities for DC with office parks catering to government contracting and finance. We started to look further west for a suitable location. We looked in the Berryville and Winchester areas but didn't find any industrial bays we could rent or buy that really met our requirements. We gradually came to the conclusion that we should develop our land 120 miles to the west of DC in Morgan County, WV. It is rather further out than we wanted to be, but we already owned the land, and all we had to do was develop it. Develop it from scratch. There was no water, electricity, septic, or even a good road onto the hilly wooded bit of "Almost Heaven" that we own. However, as we are not the type to shy away from a challenge, that is to say we are crazy enough to try, we set about to build our business on land that neither the European pioneers nor the Native Americans felt was worth bothering with. This blog is the story of our attempt to conquer the West Virginia hill country.
