About me

People often ask how I got started with my black walnut tree farm. When I was a child, I lived with my family on 40 acres: half of which was forest. I remember several times in my youth that so called wildcatters would come by with their chainsaws and logging equipment . All they ever wanted to buy was black walnut trees. So the seed was planted early in my mind that black walnut trees were valuable.

Many years later, when I was in the army serving in Germany, I remember going to visit the Louvre museum in Paris. I recall spending more time, looking at some of the doors between the museum rooms, because they were so ornate with their carving  and fabulous decor, than I spent looking at the art on display.  Also, I visited several of mad king Ludwig castles in Bavaria in southern Germany, and was amazed at all of the wood carvings in many of the rooms. I bought a few wood carving tools and even picked up a piece of pine firewood from a nearby forest  and spent my free time carving simple sculpture art.

With this background, it’s not hard to understand that years later, when I had enough money, I bought some land specifically for the purpose of planting and growing black walnut trees. So in 1992 I bought 23 acres of land and it took just over two years for me to plant 3400 black walnut seedlings. For the first few years I spent most of the time at the farm trying to control the weeds and doing initial pruning on the trees . I dreamed that all of the trees would be the veneer quality logs when they were older. Of course, that’s was exactly what it was - a dream. In reality, only a small percentage of the trees will probably be veneer quality logs.

I always enjoyed tending to the trees at the farm as it was easy to see the rapid growth and the results of my labor year after year. I enrolled in several government programs that paid a small amount to do work, that I should really be doing anyway, such as controlling invasive plants like honeysuckle and thinning the trees, that should be removed so that the remaining trees would have good growth.

A couple of years ago the state forester marked 600 of the trees to be removed in a crop thinning. As I was cutting down those trees I quickly decided that I needed a large barn to air dry the lumber after I had cut the logs into slabs of wood. This is also when I determined that I needed a large bandsaw sawmill to slab the logs. Previously, I had slabbed a small number of trees using an Alaskan chainsaw mill. This process  is very labor intensive plus the chainsaw wastes a lot of wood with its wide kerf. A band saw is much thinner and much more user-friendly, especially considering how many logs I needed to slab into lumber.

I planned to accumulate a large number of wooden sticks to separate the wood slabs for air drying.  I now have several thousand sticks that I still need to run through my thickness planer before they are ready to use.  A by product of this effort was that I realized I had a large amount of thin wood strips that were not useful for very much.  That’s when I decided I could create fire starters by running the wood strips through my chipper/shredder and combine it with reclaimed wax.

It seems that since I retired in 2009, I am now busier than ever.  I am currently working to get my sawmill set up so that the vast amount of sawdust that will be created, will be taken away by a dust collection system.  I’m also getting ready to use an industrial size air compressor to keep the sawmill area relatively clean and therefore safer to work in.

Of course, the end goal is to make and sell wood and useful products.  But I realize that the journey can be enjoyable and rewarding  - and I really like keeping busy and being productive.

Besides tending to various tasks on the tree farm, and slabbing trees on the sawmill, I also spend time in my woodworking shop making various projects.  Currently I am working on one-of-a-kind cutting boards made-to-order. If you would like to follow along on this journey you can stay caught up on Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube.