Team Jackson’s Mountain Meadows Tree Farm

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- Mountain Meadows Tree Farm, in my experience, started back in 1811 when my great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham Buzzard, purchased this property and built a house on the mountain close to where we have our house today.

And over the years, different people purchased the property, but in the 1930s and early 40s, my grandfather put all the pieces back together that were originally part of the Buzzard farm.

And so my parents farmed this property in the 1940s starting.

And so, when Mike and I got married, and we moved back here, my parents had said, "Well, we'll give you part of this property.

What part would you like?" And I always liked the mountain part the best.

It wasn't necessarily the best in terms of agriculture, so I thought I wasn't really depriving my parents of any income by getting this part of the property.

- I'm Mike Jackson here at Mountain Meadows in Bedford County.

We have 120-acre tree farm, which we thoroughly enjoy taking care of and trying to enhance for wildlife.

- We have a number of objectives for our tree farm, but the overriding objectives would be to improve it for wildlife habitat and also to have a sustainable forest.

- Our house is located at the edge of the woods, which makes it an ideal photo blind to photograph the wildlife that we see around here.

I also have photo blinds in the woods, which I not only use for photography, but I also use for hunting.

We look forward to getting venison each year.

We both enjoy venison.

It's a lot better for us, and we are concerned about the chronic wasting disease that's affecting the deer herd around here.

But I always have my deer tested each year to make sure they're safe to eat.

- We acquired the property in 1985 from my parents, and we built our house in 1988.

And then in 2000, we had training through the Pennsylvania forest stewards, and we realized that we couldn't really just enjoy the woods.

We had to manage the woods.

And so we started looking at ways that we could control invasive species and do other things to improve the habitat.

So in 2011, we found out about the Golden Winged Warbler Program.

And that program told us that if we did it right, we could have a healthy young forest.

So that's really when the tree farm concept got started was in 2014, after we had the logging done of 27 acres for a Golden Winged Warbler habitat.

When we acquired this property, we found an area that we could excavate and have a small pond put in.

And so that really made a big difference as far as the wildlife that we saw.

And then we started building on that.

In 2014, we had some vernal pools constructed.

Mike saw how to do it, so he started building them.

So now we have about five shallow installments.

And putting in that water source really was a surprising feature because it attracted so many different animals.

We knew we had a few wood frogs here and there, but now we have thousands of them.

We knew we had spotted salamanders, but now we see them in the spring when they're mating.

We see a lot more birds. We see more deer, wild turkey.

And not only water, but the old adage, "Build it and they will come." Well, we started doing that too.

We found a really skimpy, tiny hackberry with one little berry on it.

And we thought, "Oh, if hackberry will grow on our property, let's plant some more." So we started growing hackberry.

We've planted paw paws because they were growing on the farm at one time.

We've put in a number of species of trees that were either scarce or we didn't see anymore.

And so now we have the pawpaw sphinx, the moth.

We have the hackberry emperor butterfly.

We have found other species of butterflies.

We've planted a lot of milkweeds, and we see more monarchs.

- People that have visited us, refer to us as Team Jackson, because Laura and I work together all the time on these projects, and people can see that connection.

And I often think about other landowners where maybe both of the spouses aren't really into the idea of all this work, but Laura and I really gel and work well together, and it's very satisfying and gratifying to do that.

If people want to learn more about taking care of their own private forest, my advice would be to join a woodland owners group if there's one near you.

Get to know your service forester.

Talk to people that have property that they're managing and try to visit their property.

Ask lots of questions.

- The Game Commission also provides a wildlife diversity biologist, so they can also give you an idea of what might be capable of being done on your property.

Contact your NRCS office and find out what programs they have available.

Penn State Center for Private Forests also has a lot of material on their website.

And then if you can, sign up to be a Pennsylvania forest steward, that's a wonderful training opportunity.

And we've learned so much from the training that we had.

So don't just stay isolated.

Join the group of private forest landowners and you'll learn a lot and get a lot of help.

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