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.