[mitchmaine]

hey jim,
i remember you and rusty and i remember your patience and persistance. advice is great but sweat is good too and you did it with that horse. my hats off to you and rusty.
i like the looks of your new hoss. best o’ luck. mitch

[mitchmaine]

all we are saying is give peas a chance.

[mitchmaine]

Tim is right. There are a lot of good horses out there. Drop dead broke teams.
My dad had a saying “remember, you ain’t married to them”. Meaning don’t waste your time on a troublemaking horse .
You could get a good pair of horses and have them for twenty years and hook them every day.
but I’m wondering about the experience you might miss out on with these two horses. Sounds like they are trouble, so you can’t screw them up anymore than they already are. You don’t have to worry about that. If you could find some good help and wrap your mind around figuring out a way to keep them from killing you or someone else, hook them to something that required a little effort, (a scoot in deep snow, or a harrow in loose soil were good) and work them til they were so tired they didn’t have energy to screw with you, and do it again tomorrow, and the next day until they showed up so tired, you knew you got them. You might learn more in that week than in the twenty years you had the good broke team. Just don’t get killed.
having some good help is key. somebody who’s seen horses like them before. maybe they aren’t as bad as you might think. good luck with your project

[mitchmaine]

you could try hanging a pail on the end of the tongue and filling it with rocks till it balanced out the cart. then weigh the pail. should be 8 – 10 pounds. take some two inch bar stock by whatever thickness and length it takes to make the weight and bolt it on under you pole. if it takes more than ten pounds you probably need to rebuild your cart and get the seat up over the axle. worth whatever it takes to make it right, especially if you see problems hooking it to something.

[mitchmaine]

hi j-l, those metal swarthboards used to be available at all tractor supply and dealerships. haven’t had to look for one in a long time cause they last pretty well. i remember they did not come with a spring bolt. you probably know that the amish as a rule don’t use them. they put 3-4 pea guards on the pitman end of the bar and they chop through the lodged hay pretty good. i tried it and it seemed to work well but went back to the grassboard. must have been all the alfalfa hay they make not drying well balled up at the end of the swath.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

@blue80 26323 wrote:

I recently read that a furlong is a measurement which originated by the distance a team of horses could plow before needing a break; 660 ft. if I remember correctly…

The furlong (furrow length/long) is an interesting measurement. 660’. Just happens to be 1/8 mile long. Also happens to be 10 chains long.
1 furlong (660’) by 1 chain wide (66’ or 4 rods) is an acre.
If a furlong is the distance a span of cattle will pull a l plow with comfort, then maybe 66 furrows or an acre is the size of a field or a days work with comfort.
It works so well into the math we use every day, like acres, miles, yards and so on, you have to wonder which measurement came first, and my money is on the furlong.

[mitchmaine]

hey andy, not sure about your process, but i try to finish my discing in a different direction from the drilling. as much for me as the horses. they are pretty good at finding the wheel rut of the drill going against the “grain” of the disc pattern, but i’d be lost for sure without it. i also find it hard steering looking down six or eight feet at a time. even following a furrow the horses can put a sweep in plowing. sometimes i have to fix on a tree or something on the edge of the field with my eyes (presumably where i want to end up) and just head for it hoping to end up better off. tricky job no matter how hard you try, but i liked donns comment on passing lines off to a beginner. amen.

[mitchmaine]

Hi oldkat,
So sorry to hear about your neighbor. Especially when he was so young. Its tragic and hard to hear, even though you learn to expect it when people do hard hand work, dawn to dusk, day after day. The old saying here in the woods was that you lost a piece of you each year as long as you wanted to stay. I was thinking that forty years ago, it was more common to hear about farm, woods and fishing accidents and deaths. But of course less kids and families are farm employed and fishing is just about gone and woods workers are in machines now so the numbers improve dramatically. Maybe that is the paradox. When fewer people are involved in tragedy, each one seems more of a loss. Each spring when the water swells over the riverbanks, lost pulpwood ends up down here in merrymeeting bay and the natives would risk the tides for free pulp and extra cash. Fifty five years ago this month, I lost my cousin who drowned doing the same. He was part fish and knew the bay as well as any but it didn’t matter that day, so I’m really sorry to hear about your loss. Wish there was something I could say to make it better, life is tough.

Best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

hello john,
the only thing i got green as your fields is pure envy. don’t hold it against me, our snow is about gone but the edges and the woodlot, so all it is here is dead grass and lots of mud. a foot of muck where the horses trod. but our house garden plot is drying out nicely and may get a plow on it next week. it gets alot of manure after freeze up, so we turn that down and lime it and disc that in and no amendments this yeare. have to get our peas in by patriots day, april 18th, to get peas for the 4th july. thats the news from here.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey geoff,when pulpwood started moving ‘tree length” here which meant 20’ body plus overhang, truckers started changing the bunks on the trucks accordingly. not all, but most. so logs and pulp went length wise on the trucks and that was pretty much the end of tiered wood. and so firewood started moving the same way. hardwood pulp and/or firewood was pushed up in the same pile. after delivery the customer worked up his own pile, but some guys went into the firewood business buying tree length wood and splitting and selling. so along came the processer. a chain feed deck holding a half cord or so feeding a hydraulic saw and splitter run by one man with the wood dropping into a conveyor filling your truck. ups production greatly for only $30,000. some stick with it but its kindof a boring job or must be cause they are always up for sale used and two years old.

[mitchmaine]

Let the horses out this morning, and bear and I walked out across the pasture to the sugarbush. The horses were a little banged up and I sure am beat up, none of my friends return my calls, and penny isn’t looking me in the eye anymore, so I guess our season is over. We have about two armloads of wood left in the shed, and the sap is below two percent. I looked into the first pail and it was half full. So was the next, so I took the pail down and threw the sap out onto the ground and said the devil with you. The dog and I stretched out on a large flat rock in the sun and it sure felt good to do nothin’. But I made the mistake of hanging the pail back up and all I could hear was tunk, tunk, tunk………

nice thread erika, thanks for starting this one. mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi russel, saw the photo of your mower with an old pole in it. the hole drilled horizontal through the pole a couple feet ahead of the casting is the hole that takes the yoke that holds the evener and is hooked by a solid rod back to the cutter bar. from that hole forward it is about 10 1/2 or 11 feet to your neckyoke. the verticle hole just behind it holds a rod that bolts through the cutter bar holding it up for transport.

[mitchmaine]

hey andy, i have a photo here in a old book showing a four post frame with hack knees like a small barn frame of two bents girted into a box. it straddles the rockwall and has a chain hoist in the top of it setting fairly large stones on a wall. there is a stoneboat and a pair of horses bringing in stone on the other side. they had a fairly deep trench full of rock to start with so there is quite a bit of rock in a wall that we don’t see that is very important to it staying put. still looks like incredibly hard work.

[mitchmaine]

how did there get to be a “here” for us all to get too?

i love all the important stories on how we all got here and i don’t want to change the question, but at the same time, i wonder how dap came about, and happened so we would all have a place to get to. thanks to carl and lisa and all the others who created this “place” for us to share our days stories.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

my neighbor has an interesting way of putting up his wood. off and on from september through spring, he goes in his woodlot with a saw and a maul and cuts and splits his wood right on the stump. he and his wife rick it up in a rough pile and move around making little piles here and there. then in august they drive out with his pickup and load it up and pile it in their shed. don’t think he even has a hook. pretty simple and effective. nice dry wood.

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