[mitchmaine]

hi brad,
do you remember back about ten years ago, when the weather started effecting the november workshop at low impact forestry? all of a sudden, the weather started getting hard to predict, and we started logging in the rain and mud. and we started doing lif 2 later in the year to get some frost. looks like the new trend is no frost. my grandmother used to say “cheer up, next year will be different”. she never said better or worse just different. good luck out there. stay safe. mitch

[mitchmaine]

don’t know about the 7, but the 9 is right under the axle at the seat post. they might be the same. i have discovered that i’m older than my mower. that was a discouraging discovery

[mitchmaine]

Hey carl,
I Read your note. I’m a little worried for you. It seems a bit early in your teamster life to come up against such a big challenge. Horses and people are a lot alike in that early experiences seem to stay with you for a long time. Its hard enough to try and rid a horse of an earlier memory, another thing for an adult. I wouldn’t like to think that you will always be expecting trouble from your horses. I say this because I had no choice in my own beginnings. Horses were all ex-pullers with lots of problems. They were taught using different methods to GO with the load. And that’s what they did. I would read stories about gentle giants and think what are they talking about. Took me a long time to give up waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I don’t want that for you either. You should be driving quiet horses, and gaining much needed experience so some time in the future you have tools to deal with problem horses. Oh-oh, I feel some advice coming. I wasn’t going to give any, but…..i was just thinking, it might kill two birds (horses), if you boarded out one of your mares for a month or two, mom maybe, get her out of the picture, and hook the young one with rips mare and see how they go. It will be different, better I don’t know but different for sure. An old timer told me once, remember son, you ain’t married to ‘em. My problem was I thought I was. Alright, carry on and best of luck. mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi bill,
could you post a photo of that set of sleds?

[mitchmaine]

carl,
penny boils cider too, and has a recipe for boiled cider pie. kind of a substitute for apple pie. very delicious.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

Hey carl,
I found myself thinking boy if I just had that pair of horses over here I’d….. , and wondered why I was thinking that way, and decided that its about me and feeling comfort in my surroundings. In fact, each time I visualized working with your horses, the exercise was in my stalls or on my barn floor or out in the fields around here. I also thought that each time I give advice to you about your team, its not really fair to you, and not likely to work out for you. My methods, if you want to call them that, were designed on the spot, to try and solve whatever problems I might be facing at the moment. it has taken a long time to develop and I am working on it still.
Like carl Russell and others here, I was kind of on my own at the time, so I had to draw on the memories of old timers living in nursing homes or the back rooms of farmhouses. They too, loved passing on the stories and tips but in the end, I had to solve my own problems. We are all rooting for you.
Start hooking and working your horses every day. Get help harnessing them if you need to. Wear the runners of a scoot a couple times. If it ever snows again, use the deep snow to work them in. when they are good and tired, then start with a program of some kind dealing with their manners. That’s my advice for what its worth.

We are all on your side, mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey carl, glad you had a good day. sounds to me like emma is queen, and probably has her way with princess and the pasture, the feed, and anything else she wants. princess is the subordinate that has to do the dirty work for mom, by kicking the crap out of any other horse that ends up in the herd, including you. MAYBE, (just maybe), you have to jump to the front of the line and work with mom, and if and when you win her loyalty, you are number one and princess falls into her role further down the line. two birds with one stone. sounds easy doesn’t it? when you go in a bar room, smack the biggest guy in there and you never have any problems ever again.
keep up the good work, carry on, mitch

[mitchmaine]

george, did you ever think that if all you drove was good sound horses for thirty years, you’d end up fifty years old and still not know much about horses?
i wonder about that. its good to have a challenge now and then. maybe in the end, its the problem horses that end up teaching us, and we end up learning more from the horses than they do from us.
still wondering,
mitch

[mitchmaine]

i agree carl. it seems to be a sliding scale with the ten years being the “working life”. the amish have them in big hitches by two and they are gone by twelve. men are the same way. most of the working men i grew up with came out of the depression and were in the woods or on the job by twelve. they were old men by the time they were in their forties. you’ve seen them. as a rule, we don’t do that kind of work anymore, but a man has about 40 years of work in him, you can do it all in the first forty years of your life or stretch it out till you’re sixty, but it still catches up with you one of these days.

[mitchmaine]

Sappi in skowhegon is doing ok, but they aren’t letting any new guys in. verso in jay is down to one load of pulp a month and none for oct. and november. They paid pretty good money for spruce and fir, but its all softwood now. rumford is taking one load of softwood to every four of hardwood pulp, but no pine. The chip crews are on quotas. And log prices are down $50 on pine but still buying. So it’s the stumpage that takes the hit.
Back in the 60’s, they still had boxwood and bolt mills around sawing box shook, and trapstock and shoe last, pallats and pulpwood too. The sky was the limit and you could cut anything you wanted. Never seen it this bad.
I’m worried about leaving topwood behind. Especially with the animals. It doesn’t rot down like the limbwood or hardwood tops, and I’m worried about having to wade thru that crap next go around. Gonna be a long hard winter.good luck out there……….mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi donn,
good points. i agree. we make new hay tools every day, and stress quality but wonder if it isn’t more about making lots of hay. if i invested enough money, i “might” be able to drop my whole farm on that one good day, and have it all under cover and made well. but that would require more money than i have to make a very small amount of cash. doesn’t make sense.
i think we all have access to the same tools at the same moment in time, but come up against our own particular problems brought on by local weather and that sort of thing.
sixty years ago, here in coastal maine, if you had the latest machinery, it would include a six foot scycle bar mower, a dump or side delivery rake and a loose hay loader or a motorized baler. no tedders at that time or crimpers. so after a day or two of laying in a swath, you raked your hay into a windrow and let the air get under it. the next day you might bale it or rake it over one more time for a little bit more making and then bale it.
100 years ago, you would still have the same tools minus the baler, and your tractor was a team of horses, and you were making your own fuel (so to speak). my grandmother would tell me about watching a dozen men scything out a field when she was small (1880’s). but that was an unusual thing to see at that time. everyone turned out to help mow everyone elses fields and you were left to pitch it into cocks for the nights and scattered out for the days to make and so on until it could be pitched on a cart and put up in the barn. coastal or saltwater farms also had the summer fogs to deal with. they would roll in off the sea and set on your hay till the fog burned off. did not help making good hay.
i remember that it was common in the 50’s for farmers to plant beets squash and turnip and store them in the barn for cows, and i remember the worst tasting molasses that came in barrels and was mixed in boiling water and poured on hay to get the cows to eat the hay.
i am surrounded with farmers cutting and wrapping spring hay, so first cut bales are really second cut, and second cut is third cutting and every crop is only a foot tall and not headed out. and as usual, i am the antique in the neighborhood. every peice of equipment i get is already outdated technology. i have done this for a long while and still struggle with making good hay. i hope this discussion opens up some good ideas about making hay.
i had a horse get out the other night and had his way around the barn for a while, and there were three or four nice bales of first cut on the barn floor and a bale of oat straw that he broke open and fed from. hardly touched the “better” hay. what do you make of that? and the deer are finally coming out into the fields and they are feeding in the bottom of the swales on grass i try a bushhog. i don’t get it
how did the dapnet fair go? best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

they used to handmow salt marshes here in coastal maine. it was probably the first open land. but the horses wore bog shoes. you only seem to find them in farm museums anymore. a 9-10 in. square of wood with a set of clamps that held them to the foot.

[mitchmaine]

hi jared,
its one of those things you have to develop a language for. look at lots of horses and build up a memory of how teeth look over time. i don’t think i do it well and neither do most vets. its a funny science. the amish call a 12 year old horse smooth mouth because the grinding surface if the front six teeth top and bottom (12 teeth) lose their cups. the cross section of the tooth goes from squarish when they are young to roundish when they get around 10 -12 and triangular in older horses. there is a groove in the teeth a brown color, and starts showing up around 9-10 working its way down. if its halfway down, your horse is over 12. if its all the way down the tooth he might be 18-20. if the groove is all the way down a triangular tooth, bad sign, but don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

[mitchmaine]

hey evan,
sept. 15 was always the cutoff date up here for fall seeding. you are condiderably further south and frost dates seem to be changing lately, so maybe you’d get another 3-4 weeks on that.
two acres isn’t too much to broadcast of you don’t have a drill, but drilling is quicker. if we broadcast, covering them with a disc straightened out works good.
8 lb. timothy and 2 lb. red clover and 3 bu. oats per acre, the oats bring them along and die. the grass will be ready when the ground is hard.
not sure rolling ever helped germination (for us anyway). i’ve done both and couldn’t see much difference.
ever try seeding your pathways with a covercrop or pasture mix? that stuff would already be established and spreadout enough after harvest to make pasture. maybe. good luck there and let us know what you did and how it worked.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

mine used to catch if you used it early in the morning, it was on the northside of the barn and always in shade. we had a rusty couple sections of 11″ stove pipe off the evaporator, that we stuck down over the hydrant, hung a 60 watt bulb in and covered with a horse blanket. never stuck after that

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