It’s the first week at New Beat and what a week it was! Kate and I arrived Monday morning and
helped repair a greenhouse and spread manure in it in preparation for growing
tomatoes and lettuce. We also
started work on the wall tent.
Tuesday we were familiarized with the horse chores, which
include feeding hay, cleaning their water buckets and refilling them, mucking
out their stalls and putting down more bedding/sawdust, and harnessing the
horses. We also both learned to
pick out the horses’ feet. This
involves picking up their feet and using a hoof pick, which is a curled piece
of metal on a handle which allows you to pick any debris and gravel out of
their hooves. It is a very
important piece of horse health maintenance because leaving debris in their
feet can lead to infections and poor conformation/stride; there’s an old saying
“no foot, no horse.”
Afterwards we got to ground drive horses; which is to say we
each had a single horse and drove them around to accommodate them to us and
vice versa and as a warmup to the rest of the season when we will be driving
them with great frequency. I got
to drive Pete, the new black Percheron, while Kate drove Jewel (a blonde
Belgian), Ken and Adrienne’s lead horse.
Pete is still becoming a member of the herd and apparently had been
kicked around, literally, by both Jewel and Molly. He has started to stick up for himself lately but as a
logging horse, is very unfamiliar with most of the farm operations he’s been
involved in so far. Jewel and Pete
were then hooked up to the spring tooth harrow to smooth out a field that Ken plowed
last week with Jewel on the left and Pete on the right. Both Kate and I got some basic
experience driving them around and harrowing the field. When we completed that task, we brought
two walking plows down to Lauren’s field, where we would eventually be plowing
to prepare the soil for her nursery and cover crops. To end Tuesday we worked more on setting up the tent
platform for our wall tent
We all started off Wednesday with hooking up the horses in
order to plow. At first Adrienne
and Ken demonstrated the Pioneer walking plow that they bought from an Amish
family. It is huge, heavy, and in
almost new shape. Watching a plow
turn over soil is mesmerizing; akin to watching waves on the ocean. The driver’s, Ken’s, job is to make
sure the horses walk straight and to keep the furrow horse (the right or off
horse and in this case Pete) right on the land side of the furrow. Ken describes this as keeping the
furrow horse’s left feet on the left edge of the soil of the last furrow.
On my first few passes, I felt like I had just sprinted a
mile. When you watch a walking
plow work, it looks as if you have to keep the tip of the plow pointed into the
ground when in reality the plow, if set correctly and in good shape, will suck
itself into the ground and the horses do most of the work. Your job as the plowman is to make
small adjustments if the horses begin to veer off course and to keep the plow
in the ground if the plow hits a rock.
Hindsight is 20/20 and my hindsight didn’t kick in until the next day. Both Kate and I had struggled a lot
this first day of plowing.
As I alluded before, Pete is unfamiliar with farm work,
which is steady work with breaks once in a while. He was mainly used for logging and when logging, the horses
pull some really heavy loads and therefore must really jolt the load to get it
going initially. Jolting is not
good for things like plowing, harrowing, and cultivating around valuable
plants. The hope is that Pete will
become familiar enough with the work that he will be a steady worker by the
time we have to start cultivating.
He had taken all of us by surprise by taking off for 20 feet or more and
nearly ripping the plow out of the plowman’s hands several times. The plow even almost hit Ken, which
could have been really bad.
Eventually he settled down and Ken and I did a lot of
plowing while Adrienne and Kate cut some poles for the wall tent. By then I was extremely tired despite
feeling comfortable and relatively relaxed behind the plow. At morning’s end I was starving and
bushed. The rest of the day we
spent prepping soil blocks for seedlings and working on the tent platform.
Thursday morning we planted a whole bunch of cauliflower,
peppers, and flowers in the greenhouse.
Before lunch we readied the horses for work. That afternoon we finished the last third of the 1/3 acre we
needed to plow. When I came back
to the plow, it felt as if it was an action I performed hundreds of times
before. There is something to be
said about how your body learns even when you sleep, imprinting what you
learned into muscle memory. I was
better able to help Kate become comfortable on the plow because I was able to
describe the feel of the plow when it’s going well and I had just undergone
that learning process. She was
also a very good observer, and took note of how my body was positioned and how
I stood holding the plow in relation to myself.
We felt extremely accomplished to say the least. It’s probably more accurate to say we
were blissed out. There is a
feeling that is hard to put into words, but it is quite magical when the partnership
between the team, the driver, and the plowman work together well to turn over a
whole lot of sod or cover crop so that you can plant into it in the next few
weeks. Just magic. The rest of the day we thinned
seedlings happily to end a great week.
Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
-Thomas Jefferson
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