Field Work and Training Mares

In the last two weeks, I have had the chance to get more experience driving the experienced team of geldings (castrated male horses, if you don't know), Ben and 'Miah, that I have been driving for most of my time here. As I said in my previous post, we used an implement called the disc to cut up and turn under weeds on a half acre piece of ground on which we wanted to plant sweet corn. It took several turns around the field, and I got to do most of those, some without close supervision. The geldings are a good team, very calm and reliable, but they do have one major fault--they try to put their heads down and eat whenever they get near a patch of tasty alfalfa. Even tying their heads back with baling twine looped through their bits and around their hames (see a previous post if you don't know what hames are) does no good to curb this, as the alfalfa reaches chest high on them. That is quite tall considering that their shoulders are above my head. A newbie like me has a hard time getting them to move on when they have reached a patch of alfalfa to eat, though David can just tap them with the reins and click at them to get them to move. There is some kind of subtle difference between how they perceive me and how they perceive him. David says that my "presence" is not authoritative enough yet. Hmm.

After the discing was finally done, I took the harrow out on the field to smooth it and crush even more large clods (this soil, while fertile, tends to clump up into rock-like pieces if it is not pulverized enough). This only took about an hour, as the harrow is a wide piece of equipment that covers a lot of ground quickly. It consists of two sections of metal frame with spikes sticking out of it that drags on the ground, smoothing and pulverizing as it goes. It is one of the simplest and cheapest tools on a farm, and can actually be made from a section or two of chain-link fence (though ours is slightly more sturdy than that).

When that was done, David used a field cultivator to make straight(ish) lines in the soil that we could plant corn seed into. The field cultivator has a few metal bars sticking off of it which drag into the soil and make clean furrows for planting into. This is not actually its original purpose (it was designed to kill weeds), but it works great for it. After the lines were made (which took all of about twenty minutes total), we dropped corn seed into the furrows and shuffled along with our feet to cover the seed. We joked that we were doing the "corn planting duck shuffle" because we had to waddle along dragging our feet to do this. That's farm humor for you, I guess.

We have recently been training two mares to work together as a team. Rose, one of the mares, is one of the largest horses that they have ever had, standing at about 18 hands tall (which means that she is 72 inches tall at the shoulder, not at the head). This makes finding a closely matching team mate for her difficult, as most of the horses here are probably 16 to 17 hands. Despite her height, it is not as difficult to harness her has you might imagine, once you get used to lifting a piece of metal and nylon harness above your head. The other horse that we are driving with her, Flag, is more the normal size.

Both of the horses were first trained individually in the round pen, which teaches them to respect humans, accept a halter, and have a harness and bit put on them. They were then hitched together and driven together. We have been hitching them to a wagon to move loads of firewood around, and they have been a bit nervous, but they are improving quite a lot. It is interesting to see the progress that horses can make is just a week or two--they are certainly adaptable animals.

Week in Review

Unfortunately, despite uploading pictures to my hosts' computer, I still cannot post them here because their internet connection is so slow. However, I will continue to post verbal updates of how things are going here.

This last week, we finished the alfalfa leaf order that we had started working on two or three weeks ago. It did not have to take such a long span of time, but we split up the work because there was no hurry on the order and it was quite small by their standards. A few days ago, Fedex came to pick up our order and send it to Mountain Rose Herbs, one of the two wholesale companies that the farm sells alfalfa leaf to. We loaded 46 sacks of alfalfa onto pallets in the back of the truck, Deborah filled out a billing sheet to pay for shipping, and that was that. It was much more simple than I had imagined.

One of the more tedious parts of the alfalfa leaf production business (such as it is) is the sifting of the leaf and the stems in a grain cleaner. The grain cleaner looks like a giant mesh cone. It rotates around like a rotisserie chicken while someone slowly pours alfalfa leaf into it to sift fine leaves out the bottom and stems out the back. The leaves are scooped up and put into sacks, and the stems are also scooped up to be used as mulch, chicken food (chickens love alfalfa, to my surprise) and sometimes to be re-combined if there is still a lot of leaf left in them. Luckily, we did not have to re-combine the stems this time; we had just enough leaf for the order, but not much more.

It rained from Thursday evening through Sunday, so work was slow during that time. We worked on a horse-drawn mowing machine for part of that time. Mowing machines are more complex than you might imagine, as the blade that cuts the hay actually moves back-and-forth by a series of complex gears that turns the rotational motion of the wheels into a back-and-forth motion on the blade. The blades had to be sharpened, and will continue to be sharpened as we are cutting hay. Apparently, the ideal time to sharpen a mower blade is after only six hours of use. We only have about ten mower blades (all of which have been sharpened at this point), so there will be plenty of sharpening to come. The blades are clamped in place in a vice, then sharpened with a drill with a sander unit attached. It is amazing what sandpaper can do to metal; you can really get a fine point on the blade quickly with the drill-based sharpening unit.

Yesterday and the day before were both sunny, so we got back out to work. The garden is looking amazingly weed free from hand hoeing and the use of the horse-drawn cultivator to kill weeds between the rows. Where I was working last year, weed control was never very good, so I am glad to see that that does not have to be the case. Planting in rows with paths between each row, rather than in beds of clustered plants, is a much more effective way of controlling weeds, at least when using horse-drawn tools. There are many great old cultivators still available from auctions, estate sales, and similar sources.

I spent a large part of yesterday morning using two horses with a small disc, a tool that crushes weeds and clods in the soil in preparation for planting. We are discing about a half-acre to plant more corn, after planting about 3/4 of an acre in corn last week. The patch that I was discing (with some help and supervision from my room-mate Lisa) was very weedy after being plowed in fall and left sitting until early summer, so it will still need a few more passes with the disc and a pass with the harrow (which makes the field smoother and more level) before we can plant.