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New member from Nebraska

RepCity_BK

RepCity_BK

New Member
I’ve been reading on this site for some time without actually being a member and I figured it would be worthwhile creating an account to engage in the conversations.

I’m 31 and currently I live and work in Lincoln as a mechanical engineer. I grew up in south central Nebraska in Franklin/Harlan counties. My family has a small 80 acre property with a spring fed creek that runs right through the middle of it that used to be a cattle and pig farm while my grandpa was still farming. The property is now full blown wildlife habitat with a mixture of creek bottom and open fields enrolled in crp. Would like to try and establish some mast trees in a couple of the open fields along the creek. Our area has small pockets of native oaks that luckily were not cut down or died over the years so I assume that some species would be successful. Currently the little timber we have is a mix of ash, elm, and cottonwood.

I love the habitat improvement side of things and look forward to learning from all of the great posters on this site.
 
Welcome, I am sure that you will get some good help here. I saw that you were planning on planting mast trees. Allow me to share good advice...advice that I did NOT heed at first and learned of the validity of the advice when I had to replant every tree that I not once, but twice, after I tried to "get away with it".

Plant only the number of trees that you have time and resource to cage/fence well enough to keep the critters off of them. "Bare" planted trees will very likely lead to failure and ultimately replanting. Other than that, welcome and good luck.
 
Daver said:
Welcome, I am sure that you will get some good help here. I saw that you were planning on planting mast trees. Allow me to share good advice...advice that I did NOT heed at first and learned of the validity of the advice when I had to replant every tree that I not once, but twice, after I tried to "get away with it".

Plant only the number of trees that you have time and resource to cage/fence well enough to keep the critters off of them. "Bare" planted trees will very likely lead to failure and ultimately replanting. Other than that, welcome and good luck.
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Thanks for the advice. I am doing my best to educate myself on how to maximize survival of whatever I end up planting. The mast trees are an idea right now, however I am still trying to determine what is best to do with these old fields. Right now they are in a CRP contract that expires this year. The fields total about 6 acres and lie within the creek bottom on flat ground. There are some springs that start on use so we do have some more marshy areas near these fields already. The deer do not use the fields to bed in much once the weather turns cold so my main goal is to increase the amount of security cover that we provide on our property. The neighbors have large alfalfa, corn, and bean fields. I think that a mixture of shrubs and early successional cover may be easier to establish given that we are in south central Nebraska.

Oaks are more of a cool idea and one that's fun to think about because of the lack of oaks in our area. Other than Bur oak I am not sure what would do well based off of the lack of oaks that we have in our area other than Bur. I fully understand that Oaks are a long term plan that take work. We do have a ridge system that runs along the west side of our property, oaks may take well up in that higher ground where the ridges turn into pasture. I spent this past Saturday reading through a lot of the dbltree threads in the Habitat Corner section of this site. So much great information in those threads that will keep me occupied for days.
 
RepCity_BK said:
Thanks for the advice. I am doing my best to educate myself on how to maximize survival of whatever I end up planting. The mast trees are an idea right now, however I am still trying to determine what is best to do with these old fields. Right now they are in a CRP contract that expires this year. The fields total about 6 acres and lie within the creek bottom on flat ground. There are some springs that start on use so we do have some more marshy areas near these fields already. The deer do not use the fields to bed in much once the weather turns cold so my main goal is to increase the amount of security cover that we provide on our property. The neighbors have large alfalfa, corn, and bean fields. I think that a mixture of shrubs and early successional cover may be easier to establish given that we are in south central Nebraska.

Oaks are more of a cool idea and one that's fun to think about because of the lack of oaks in our area. Other than Bur oak I am not sure what would do well based off of the lack of oaks that we have in our area other than Bur. I fully understand that Oaks are a long term plan that take work. We do have a ridge system that runs along the west side of our property, oaks may take well up in that higher ground where the ridges turn into pasture. I spent this past Saturday reading through a lot of the dbltree threads in the Habitat Corner section of this site. So much great information in those threads that will keep me occupied for days.
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I am not familiar with your area in Nebraska, so take this advice with a grain of salt...but I would be looking into planting chestnuts, and plenty of them. Double check with someone "local" to verify chestnuts are a good choice in your area, but otherwise, I would hit those hard.
 
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