[mitchmaine]

thanks stu, appreciate that. mitch

[mitchmaine]

sounds like a great deal. these may not be your last balers, someday if you get a chance, try new holland. they were a little different in that the flywheel wrapped around the drive shaft and was perpendicular to the force of the plungerhead. all the rest were inline with the plungerhead and had alot more tougueplay or sideslap that you didn’t get in the new holland. a small detail, they all work well, but maybe a little easier on your team at the end of the day.

[mitchmaine]

john, another thought is someone has been farming my place for just over two hundred years. he hacked it out of the forest primevil as payment for fighting and surviving the revolutionary war. i’m guessing someone has been working your peice of ground for thousands of years??? perhaps if you picked the brains of some of your neighbor tractor farmers about how they farm it, and then adapting that to your specific needs might be a good plan as well. i found out last night after some reading that you and i probably don’t have the same plant when we think corn? we would be grateful for all the photos and text you can provide on your project. never talked to a farmer from another continent. keep in touch. mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey john, what kind of soils do you have over there? sandy loam or clay? are you over limestone? sounds like with old pasture, it’s full of composted organics of different ages. maybe overripe, or acidic and may need tuning. but thats later. i’d plow just deeper than you roots and put your sod down. scratch on the top, feed that with manure, bonemeal, bloodmeal, lime, whatever it takes to balance your soil and grow your cover crop in that. next spring plow same depth and bring your sod right back up. it’s already rich, but may need some more tuning. figure out what your planting cause potatoes, say, don’t like it to sweet. something else might want it different. and read anything the nordells write. good luck.

[mitchmaine]

hey john, one method of many options might be plowing down your sod and letting your field go fallow for the summer. the advantages would be less expensive in terms of cost for seed for green cover. just harrow it every week or ten days lightly so you are uprooting the weeds and not replanting them. manure or compost it early on and get the weed seeds in that as you go. then mid september, (here anyway), sow it to a winter grain like rye or something to hold your soil til spring. plow that down next april and your good to go.

[mitchmaine]

well said, jason. an absolute truth. we look for patterns in our animals behavior, but they find ours faster.

[mitchmaine]

Hey jen, good going! I like this thread, too. I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but it made me think about my own twitch horse, molly. She and I are like an old married couple now. We don’t talk much. We know each others habits, good and bad, and go about our business. She pulls twice and twice only when stuck. she looks at me with her wifey look as if to say, fix it. So I rehook, or put on a roll, or shorten up, something, and she tries again and off we go. Once, she came up against a pine root, and it caught. She gave it two and quit. I kept trying her, knowing she could do it, but she wasn’t listening. I got frustrated, coiled up her lines on her hames, grabbed her by the halter and said let’s go. She pulled loose, so I turned back, and here she was with both feet off the ground about a foot and her full ton frame on her hind legs pushin” for all she was worth.. holy cow! All of a sudden, dirt, wood, bark, and mud started flying, and off she went about ten feet and stopped. I gathered my wits, collected the reins and off we went to the brow. What was that all about? Another gear? So now I knew. She never told me about it. Anyway, I use it sparingly, and only when needed, but another gear? Just goes to show you, you never really know. But I think she thought that I thought that I knew that she knew she could do it so she just went and did it. Go figure.

[mitchmaine]

mark, trying to send you a photo of this hub. it’s got a 2″ axle and key and has a cast hub attached for the pawl drive to drive the cam.[IMG]spreader hub 2[/IMG][IMG]spreader hub 1[/IMG] cross your fingers, hope this works.

[mitchmaine]

hi jen, just for fun, before you cut that tree, hook up reno and pull 90 degrees to the lay of your tree. he can do that. so then when he knws it will move he should go with it. if not he’s being balky and you have to go to plan “B”.

[mitchmaine]

every once in a while, working in the woods, not often, my horses would get a whiff of moose. they’d start to act up, and i wouldn’t have a clue what was wrong, and try and make them mind. there isn’t a chain or a tree big enough to hold a horse when he actually sees his moose. best plan is to leave at your own pace, if possible. there’s a switch that goes off somewhere between their nose and brain that says “leave”. being a good teamster means knowing when that time is coming (their eyes and ears), and changing the enviornment by leaving with the horses to the safe place. if you want your horses to trust you totally, be trustworthy and don’t put them in places they feel threaatened. you can’t demand that kind of faith, you have to earn it slowly.

[mitchmaine]

bill, jenny and star, best horses i ever had!!! sounds like you know what i mean. you know how a mongrel dog just beats ’em all. wonder if the same don’t work with crossbred horses? thanks for sharing that. mitch

[mitchmaine]

Trouble with woodlots is that they are always so different. One has a field that you can push up all the wood you want. The next takes two days with an excavator just to get off the road and space enough for barely two truckloads. The next might be two lots back from the road across a brook. It’s easier to get a truck to the wood than bring wood to a truck if you can. One system barely fits all. We used to use a set of snatchblocks and pull and pile logs downhill and up against a couple trees if you could so if one got away….my point is you have to adapt to so many different kinds of conditions that simple always seems to work best. I bot a 110 prentice loader and set it up on an int. wheeler back in 1981 when reg. and ins. were much cheaper, and it almost broke me. You can cut wood or you can truck wood but not both. There is an empty machine somewhere costing you money all the time. I truly believe I “kept” more money with the horses than I ever did with machines even though the gross was so hugely different. The woods industry has changed so much over to mechanized logging, that chainsaws are now antiques, and that’s why we have to consider different methods of involving machinery with animals. I’d like to say I had some good advise on this matter, but I don’t so keep talking and I’ll keep listening…..there is a paradox here if you can actually make more money, or keep it anyway, with your animals. Tell me if I am wrong about this.

[mitchmaine]

sorry there, i think its just my “bumbling”way of showing affection. i had a pair of bay mares. morgan percherons. morons? they had some life. 3400# team. Had them so long i stopped learning about horses. they never left this farm, new each peice of equipment, just how to use it. didn’t need me at all. they are buried side by side at the end of our garden. i’m not going to live long enough to get that same relatioship with another pair of hosses. sure do miss them.

[mitchmaine]

you might be able, if it was corn last year, to get away without plowing, and disc in your stubble, broadcast your buckwheat, and cover your seed with your disc set straight. one tool for the job. then when you get to your last crop of buckwheat, wait til it blossoms,plow that down, disc it and plant your winter crop. you might want to find out how your neighbor grew his corn. what he used for herbicides and pesticides, if you were curious.

[mitchmaine]

hey george, jumped a swollen stream today and got out 275 gallons of week (weak?) old sap. theres more there to get but the horses were pretty pooched with the stream and frost coming out of the roads. penny’s boiling now. pulled off a couple gallons yet, not to bad for the age. have you boiled yet? good luck, mitch

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