starlight,
The "uniform green" is where I used Microsoft Paint to cover up the names of streets and streams. (I pulled the picture from Microsoft Earth and the names came with it.) I used too big of a brush...
The dark patch to the right of the field is a pond - 2 or 3 acres in size, I'd guess. It belongs to somebody else, but it's not posted which means that I am allowed to use it. I'll try ice skating there one day if the snow isn't too deep and it's sufficiently cold. (That probably means in December and early January, most years, before the snows come.) It should be an easy hike. I just need to find a route since it's hilly.
In addition to the field, we've got about 3 times that amount of forest. That's why I want a sawmill and an ATV. It would be a waste to just let the trees rot when they fall. Also, I'd like to cut down many of the trees and replace them with chestnuts.
Chestnuts once dominated the forests east of the Mississippi. A blight in the early 20th century wiped them all out. Volunteer chestnuts still sprout all over the place but the blight still kills them when they're saplings. Consequently, they're only found as shrubs and young trees. However, a variant that is 15/16ths American and 1/16th Chinese has been created. It has the Chinese chestnut's resistance to blight.
We think it would be nice to help reinstate chestnut trees to the Northeast. We'll never see them mature, but a few hundred growing on our land will be our small contribution to the world.
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