I'm a I'm a bit jealous! It's beautiful!

Thanks! We have been looking for almost 5 years & just happened upon this place as my mom decided to sell her place in TX & decided to combine forces for a short while, pay debts off & save money up to build her a house right by ours. I have to say, as many contingencies as it relied upon to happen, I can't help but feel like my gramma is up there working some magic. It only took 4 months to sell Mom's house & get this one. Like it was just meant to be. Gramma always wanted my mom to move closer to us after she passed, & always pushed us to keep looking for that dream place we envisioned no matter how long we had to look. I think she'd be tickled pink that we will all be in one place, living the dream together!

I can't wait to start working outside next spring & improving the existing landscaping. Don't know if we'll go all out with a big garden yet, I'd like to have time to research & plan out gardens & an orchard. Since I went back to work, I've satisfied my green thumb with flowers & a small herb garden in our rent house yard. Just having the opportunity & space now that belongs to us has got me so excited! I've never been able to make longterm plans bc we have always rented. If memory serves me correctly, this forum is THE place to research & discuss stuff with lots of feedback from everyone. :)

This is the place for encouragement advice enabling comfort and knowledge. I am glad you are back. I came here in 11 and couldn't have done what I do without everyone here.

Your place looks like a dream come true. I look forward to seeing how you add to it.

Kim

Thanks for sharing!

Looks beautiful!

Welcome back. You have a lovely place. I look forward to seeing updated photos.

Congratulations! Reminds me of my place, except your's lacks the rocks. Want any rocks?! Lol!

George

Thanks everyone! Glad to be back. I will be posting updated photos as we do projects. First project will most likely be pruning back some huge old roses that are kind of out of control in the front yard. They suffered from the black spot leaf drop this year, but previous owners said they usually are gorgeous. I think they need to be pruned back pretty hard, they're sprawling 8+ foot tall monsters that don't look like they've had a good prune in years! You can kind of see them in the very bottom picture of the front of the house. They look like a smallish tree.

Kim, DH will be just thrilled that I have enablers in my gardening adventures, LOL! He always fusses & complains the whole time we are doing landscaping projects, but in his words "does them anyways because he loves me so much *mumbles* & I better appreciate it!" Hehehehe! Funny thing is, once we complete said projects, he enjoys taking care of them almost as much as I do. We had just done big projects of fencing in flowerbeds at our rent house & planting lots of stuff this last spring...now he gets to help me take it all down & replant at our new house. *grin*

George, there are some natural rocks down by the creek. There's some leftover rocks from the house exterior that we're planning to make a fire pit out of some time in the near future. But hey, if you feel the desire to haul me some rocks, I'm sure I could figure out something to do with them! LOL!

Question for any of you that have experience: I plan on digging up elephant ears, several different types of lilies, & my small rose bushes that I planted last spring to take with. I will be replanting the rose bushes for sure. Every time I've tried to store tubers or bulbs before, I have lost nearly all of them to rot. With it being the season that it is, should I try to figure out where I want these at our new place & put them in the ground before winter sets in? I had my lilies in dappled shade here & they never bloomed well for me. Hoping I can find a sunnier spot for them at the new place. Thanks for advice!

Tasha

Congrats and welcome back. I think once you've sunk yourself into this forum it always calls you back. Love the land!!

Tasha,

Welcome back and congratulations on the new place. We adore country living and I suspect you'll love it as much as we do. Your place reminds me a great deal of ours. Most of our acreage is very heavily wooded and very heavily snake-infested, so I have to be very careful when working outdoors in snake season. We've been here since 1999 and I haven't been bitten by a venomous snake yet, but have had a few very scary, very close calls.

I noticed George offered you a few of his millions of rocks. That was so very kind of him. (grin) Our only rocks are in the creekbed area and we've mostly left them there to help prevent the kind of erosion that occurs when we get 5 or 8 or 12" of rain in one day and the whole place tries to wash downstream. My husband always jokes with our neighbors to our east (who have sandier soil than us, and that sand washes down into the creek in shocking amounts with every heavy rainfall) that they can come over and dredge out our creek and reclaim their soil any time they want. I think that after all the rain in 2015 and parts of 2016, we now have several feet of sand covering most of our rocks.

If you have soil that drains well, I think you could replant the elephant ears and lilies, but whether or not they survive will just depend on the weather we have. My elephant ears and lilies survive most winters in soil that is a well-amended sandy-clayey blend, but an extremely wet winter or early spring can kill them. I've moved the lilies to a tall raised bed to ensure good drainage and that seems to have worked, and the elephant ears have survived for quite a few years now.

I'm in Love County so your winter weather ought to be fairly similar to mine, though your winters likely are slightly colder. Normally, if you dig up your lilies and elephant ears to overwinter only to have them rot in dry storage, then they probably had too much moisture in them. Setting them out on wire racks or something similar and letting them dry out really well before putting them in storage can help prevent the rot, and be sure you are storing them indoors in a cool, dry place, and not outdoors in a shed or garage where they will be subjected to wider temperature and humidity fluctuations. When I overwinter bulbs indoors, I store them in the back, dark, dry corner of my walk-in pantry, which is under the staircase. By putting them at the back of the pantry they stay consistently dark and dry, more so than items stored at the front of the pantry where the door is opened constantly, letting in light and more moist air from the kitchen. If you have an in-ground tornado shelter, that might work well as a place to overwinter bulbs, provided it is dry and not excessively wet/damp/moist. Or, you could hedge your bets by trying to overwinter some in the ground, some indoors in the house in a cool, dry place and some in a tornado shelter just so you can see what works best for you. Much of what I have found works well for me here at our location with our weather and our soil conditions is stuff I had to learn over a period of years by trying first one thing and then another in order to see what worked best and the most consistently.

Dawn

Melissa, thanks! I love it too & am quite certain that my love for it will just grow more & more the longer we are there. I look at it & see endless possibilities. I have so many ideas that I doubt I'll ever in my lifetime complete them all! This forum is awesome because of the community of people in it & you're right...it does call you back. I've thought about it a lot thru the years & have been bubbling about it to DH since I returned.

Dawn, thank you! You were one of my biggest helpers back when I first came here & such an inspiration to me. I hope that one day I have as much time to spend on my place as you do! It's good to be back & see so many familiar faces & new ones too! I had to come back, the support & encouragement here are just incredible. Thanks to everyone for sharing the wealth of knowledge & experiences.

I am a little concerned about the venomous snake thing. Most of our property is open pasture, but being out in the country, I know that's their home turf & will definitely be extra careful. I'm considering investing in a flock of guineas come next spring maybe. There's an existing coop that needs some work, but has several other necessary projects in line in front of it. I've heard they at least make you very aware of a snake around, as well as eating bugs & other pesky stuff, so to me that'd make them worth their weight in gold! We're fortunate that our 7 1/2 year old son has grown up outdoorsy with DH. They've spent so much time fishing on the wildlife refuge here practically since he could walk that he sees snakes a lot of times before we even do. He knows to be watching that ground like a hawk & get the heck away from them! It's my dogs I'm more concerned about, they are kind of idiots LOL. Hope they don't learn the hard way to stay away from snakes.

The floods last year did quite a number on the creeks & rivers in this area too, Dawn! So much sediment washed downstream that they're much shallower & flood much faster now than they ever did before. I'm sure that a good deal of our soil washed down, but I'm planning on leaving all my rocks near the creek where they are to help prevent erosion. Who knows, I may even take George up on some of his rock collection to place down by the creek! LOL! The pond that's on the property seems to have taken a great deal of sediment into it. I think it needs to be dredged out, but we already have plans to improve its banks & make it bigger & deeper one day. We all want to have a large, deeper pond with stocked fish & water lilies. It's a spring fed pond, so I don't know how to even begin going about that project. But that's way on down the road, so I'm not too worried about it yet.

The soil that we've seen out there is sandy loam, same as the soil we have at our current house, so I'm hoping that things take kindly to being transplanted. We do have a finished basement that is not climate controlled but does have a dehumidifier, so that may be a future plan for me to overwinter things. But just to avoid more chaos in an already chaotic move, I may just transplant stuff & hope for the best. I'm sure that I didn't dry out tubers/bulbs enough last time. It was a wet fall that I "dried" them out & that probably contributed to their demise. If nothing survives my transplant, that'll just give me a good reason to go buy more! Like I actually need a legitimate excuse, haha! DH teases me mercilessly about my plant addiction. It does not help that I help oversee the floral dept at the grocery store I manage so I have access to very cheap rescue plants all the time! Plus I eBay & shop online & buy bulbs almost every spring at Sam's Club & other places. Many of my coworkers are fellow plant-a-holics, so we set up swaps all the time. It's a problem! But there are worse addictions to suffer from, LOL!

As of yet, I haven't had the time to do a complete walk through of the 14 acres, just the fencelines during viewings & inspections. The Big Move is this weekend, so maybe by the end of next week, I'll have the chance to do that. I imagine our winters will be quite similar considering that we're only a few counties apart, Dawn. Not real sure which forecast to believe, first they predicted a very wet cold winter & now they're saying it'll be a warm dry winter. Who knows, only time will tell for sure. I do know that the deer coats this year seem pretty thick already, maybe they know something we don't.

Wish us luck this weekend, y'all! We're moving 2 large houses in 4 days, one from N TX & one from S OK. Hope this all goes smoothly & we can get settled in ASAP!

Tasha

Congratulations. What a lovely place. Best wishes for an easy move.

Tasha, I'm so happy you're back at home here on GW where you belong. We still have a great group of people here.

Good luck with getting the houses moved successfully. That is quite a major undertaking.

I do not see snakes as much in open pastureland as I see them on edges where two types of ecosystem come together---for example, the edges where the woodland meet the grassland, or the edges where our short mowed lawns meet tall unmowed pasture grasses.

Your son will learn to be careful and watchful with regards to snakes. I know that is true because all outdoorsmen learn that important lesson, whether they are 7 years old.....or 27, 47 or 70. For a long time, I thought that all of the old farmer/rancher crowd here carried guns in their pickups 24/7 because of varmints like coyotes and skunks, and they kinda do, but they mostly carry them because of the snakes. In our early years here, all my old farmer/rancher friends (many of them in their 70s and 80s at the time), would stop by to show me the dead snake they'd shot and placed in the back of their pickup trucks. I believe they did it as a warning to me to always be aware and careful, but it also helped me quickly learn to ID the venomous snakes common in our area. For example, all timber rattlers do not look alike and by seeing the ones they'd shot, I learned a lot about the range of colors and patterns that exist among timber rattlers.

Dogs are pretty good about avoiding snakes. I think they are better than cats. When my dogs see a snake, they tend to back away. The idiot cats run to the snakes as if they've found a new toy. We've never had a dog die after being bitten by a snake, though we almost lost one after he went into shock after being bitten on his nose by a timber rattler. Forever after that, for as long as he lived, he wouldn't even get near a black garden hose because it reminded him of being snakebitten. We have lost cats that were bitten, but most of them survived the snakebite as well. Our vet told us that a cat that survives one snakebite usually doesn't survive the second time if it happens to get bitten again, but our cat Spots did survive a second snakebite, and lived another dozen years after the second snakebite.

Guineas are crazy, wild, and loud. We had them for about a decade, but heavy predation in a very bad drought year wiped them out. I loved my guineas all the years we had them, but they roamed far and wide and were hard to keep at home, even on large acreage. Luckily, all our neighbors didn't mind the guineas wandering through their property and appreciated that the guineas ate grasshoppers by the gallon. After we lost all them in that awful drought year, I chose not to replace them. It is a decision I am mostly happy with, except when I see baby guineas in a feed store every spring. Then, I toy with the idea of buying some until I remember how hard they are to keep on our property. I'm getting too old to chase guineas up from the road a dozen times a day.

I am not sure that chickens or guineas help keep snakes away as most of my snake encounters occur close to the chicken coop, fenced chicken runs or fenced veggie garden. However, they definitely do make a lot of noise to alert you to the presence of the snake. Most of our chickens (and guineas when we had them) also will raise a racket and alert you to the presence of armadillos, skunks, possums, squirrels, coons, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, turtles, lizards, large predatory birds like hawks and kites, and often (sadly) even the falling leaves. Some days, I am exhausted from running outdoors 20 times a day to see why the chickens are having a hysterical fit. Sometimes I do chase off a bobcat or coyote, but more often than not, I can't even figure out why they are gathered up in a tight group, screaming their heads off. For every real danger they alert me to, there's probably 50 alerts that are for stupid stuff like a leaf fell on a chicken's head, or a hawk flew overhead.

Our weather seems like it is becoming less and less predictable, and I am very leery of long-range forecasts. I actually believe we need a good, cold winter because we didn't have one last year, but it seems like winters overall are staying warmer than they did even as recently as 10-20 years ago. I'm completely over all the above-average temperatures we're having, but at least sporadic rain is falling and keeping us safe from wildfires, so far.

About 12-15 years ago, after spending Thanksgiving up here with us, a cousin of mine said "I want what you have", and she was referring to living in the country. I kept encouraging her and her husband to go for it and find their own little bit of heaven in the country. Eventually they bought 10 acres in Tolar, TX, that had one farmhouse on it (which became her mother's house) and they moved 2 doublewide trailers onto it---one for them, and one for their married daughter and her family. All 3 families had sold their homes in the city in order to pool their money to buy the land and put three homes on it. I don't know if any one of them would have done it without the other two, so it was a perfect decision for them. Having all 3 generations on the same piece of property together has made them incredibly happy and I believe it is a decision they've never regretted. They have had a wonderful life there together on that big family property, and have been able to have horses, chickens, dogs, cats, etc. Their choice reminds me a bit of yours in the way that they put multiple homes for multiple generations together on one place. I hope you all will be as happy on your rural property as they have been on theirs.

Be sure to keep us posted on how y'all do with moving the houses this weekend.

Dawn

WOZER, that looks like a lot of property. Welcome back to Oklahoma from someone else that came back. :)

Moni

Congrats! We're almost neighbors. I'm just 17 miles from you, over here near Caddo.

Moni, it is a lot of property. We have our work cut out for us keeping it up, certainly. There are lots of stickers in the pastures & trees to trim & roses to retame & the list goes on & on.

Okie Texan, howdy neighbor! Caddo isn't far at all. Are you indeed a Texan import to this area like we are? Hubby & I grew up in N TX but have been in this area for about 8 yrs & my mom lived in NTX for 30+ yrs. The only true Okie in the family is our son who was born here. Just couldn't take the rat race that metroplex life was becoming more & more, so we hightailed it to the country.

The big part of our moving is over, 4 Uhaul truck loads later. We are still going back & forth every day to our old houses carting carloads at the time. The new place is crammed to the gills with crap, you can hardly even move around.

We're at war with the yellow & black hornets in our gigantic shed/barn that has put storage at a stand still. Been through 4 cans of spray already but they are still up in the lights in the ceiling. Guessing that the previous owners didn't really use the shed much, LOL . I bought 8 more cans to continue the battle. Anyone have any expertise on how to get rid of these things? I just can't deal with them in the shed, I'm mildly allergic & storing stuff out there is an absolute must. And if we are supposed to have a warm winter like last year, they never really will go away.

At the rate all this is going, it seems like we might be unpacked by this time next year. I keep reminding myself that this is the last time I ever have to go through moving hell. It is very peaceful out here, we have great sunrises & sunsets & lots of wildlife that strolls through the property. I'm still here, just super swamped with stuff to do. Plus a full time job on top of everything here. Just wanted to update as promised!