Recent content by JamesHW

Quoted 7k 20 years ago for our approx 80 acres in NY State, 17 corners, heavily wooded, sandy terrain with multiple deep ravines, and some swampy areas.

Sorry the op got robbed by thieving scum bags. Had a friend in a similar situation, meaning valuables locked up on remote property and we came up with the idea of setting up an owl box high on a tree and include a solar panel and hidden camera as one point of surveillance, but never set it up...

Had three of the Fiskars and broke all three, though that was my fault. Fiskars replaced the first two and I never bothered with the third since it worked so well I decimated the plethora of dandelions. What broke it was I was using it to pull trees of heaven saplings that came up due to a crazy...

I’ve been laying out our property in NY w/ a view towards subdividing and have had some success using a drawing program (Procreate) to layer multiple images including aerials (mostly Google Earth), screenshots of LiDAR and wetlands (The National Map) and County maps of properties that the GIS...

New England Gardener, May 20 1865

In the Mid-Atlantic we had a large swarm emerge in 2021, nothing unusual other than the critters everywhere and the sound, no big. Then the oak leaf itch mites (Pyemotes herfsi) started emerging and feeding on the carcasses of the cicadas and suddenly they were everywhere, except you couldn’t...

One hobby for me is analyzing old road maps and overlaying them over images of the modern terrain using various imagery such as aerials and especially Lidar images. Ive found that the Procreate app ($20) on an aging iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil give great utility yet are fairly intuitive to...

I just use some chunk charcoal and one of those chimney coal starters and some newspapers and it works every time. Even if the pile is established you can carve out an alcove for the charcoal. I have an old handle-less shovel I place under the pile then dump the red hot coals on it, (used to...

It was purchased by my great uncle in 1922 (a lawyer in Manhattan who lived in Westchester Co. who purchased the farm summer retreat). My research shows we were the third owners and the family they purchased it from were elderly (two sisters and a brother w/ no kids) who had aged out of farming...

Two photos I recently unearthed from family papers, actually a pile of negatives, that show four barns around 1930 that stood on our NY property. our research shows the house was built by 1855, so the barns were likely 75 years old when the photos were taken. This solves a mystery of a large...

I also hear high frequency sounds a lot of people can’t hear and yes, we had a cheap stereo that I couldn’t stand the noise when it was turned on. Funny thing, I went to a bunch of rock concerts including a couple of days in front of the speakers at Woodstock. Later I worked crowd security in...

Ash trees are rare in our part of Upstate NY, but in Vermont their fighting it and this stood out in this 2019 document Logging danger Trees will start shedding branches within the year, and within 2-3 years have the potential to start snapping. Many noted that trees will only stand for 4-5...

Assemble a Corsi-Rosenthal filter box. an Inexpensive box fan and 4 or 5 MERV13 filters taped together. Last bad smoke we had in our 1,000+ house we fired it up and the smoke smell was gone within a minute.

One vehicle; 2017 VW Touareg w/ 15,500 miles (14,000 on the engine) - 26 mpg highway.

The putative value of our small city house has tripped over 1 million, so discussion on selling has started up. All the houses around us have either been gutted with large houses built on the footprint and most recently they have started even digging up foundations and selling before the new...