Tea for the Tillerman
Well, I suppose it's the nature of a blog about gardening. If there's something to blog about, there's no time to do it and when there's time to blog, there's nothing to blog about.
But I'm tired right now and so I'm going to have some tea and blog about my tiredness, mine and that of my drover and my horse.
Last year was not a good one for the strategic crop of hard corn, nearly a total crop failure. In itself that has been no particular hardship since the crop from the year before was so good, we still have corn for bread, tortillas, tamales, and enough seed corn for this years planting. But when it became apparent last year that the corn crop was a loss, the grain field was abandoned so that time and labor could be applied to better end elsewhere.
For several years running the grain field, about one sixth of an acre, had been tended only with hand tools. Each year hoeing and mulching had kept the weeds and sod down to such a level that the next year the work of preparing it was no great cost of labor. But although widely fluctuating temperatures and a sharp drought at the wrong time did in the corn, it only enhanced and encouraged the weeds and grass.
This year it was apparent that hand tools alone would not prepare the grain field for planting in time. We are very loath to use engines on the farm. Instead we decided to plow the ground with the horse. There are two enormous bottom plows conveniently located at the gardens, but they plow much too deeply and the horse, Mr. Himself, had done no substantial work all winter and couldn't be expected to pull such an enormous load by himself on short notice. There was also a much smaller plow, the Vulcan #13, that had been my grandfather's plow and had spent much of the last 30 years as a lawn ornament in my parents' yard. The handles had rotted away and the depth wheel and coulter were completely missing. A new depth wheel was made by welding a 2" steel pipe to a heavy equipment castor and a coulter, the blade that slices the sod before it is turned, isn't really necessary unless the plowman is tilling very heavy sod.
I'd bought new oak handles at last year's draft horse sale, but the handles on this particular plow come off the iron at different angles and their configuration is not readily apparent. I sent out an inquiry on a draft horse discussion list and got back a wonderful collection of restored Vulcan #13 plows along with advice on how to fit the handles and fabricate the braces and stays needed to make the plow workable.
Here you plant corn when "dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear." The very hard freeze of only a few weeks ago had delayed the deciduous trees and so there is still plenty of time to prepare the corn field. With Mr. Himself in tack and Et Ux serving as dover we were ready make an attempt at providing ourselves with corn at no cash expense and the use of no fossil fuels whatever. Yet more than this, I was reminded of the words in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac:
He who by the plow would thrive
Himself must either lead or drive
Plowing is work for everyone involved. After laying open a furrow down the middle of the field, a furrow is opened on either side of the first one, pitching the dirt toward the middle of plowed area. A couple of passes around the field and the horse is stopped in the shade to blow and the plowman and drover take in the quiet punctuated only by a quiet snort and whiffle and the jingle of the harness. Then another time around the field. There's another one of those numerous couplets for remembering this or that about the common tasks around a farm used as a way of guessing how much ground can be plowed:
Six by nine, straight as a line, eleven miles per acre.
One acre for each horse each day is their full fill of labor.
That is, plowing a furrow six inches deep and nine inches wide, the plow would be pulled eleven miles altogether to plow and acre and that's how much you might expect one horse to do in a day.
OK, none of the three of us was in that good shape so we were content to plow our sixth of an acre in one sunny, unhurried afternoon.
Do you remember the lines from an Elton John song Country Comfort?
Down at the well they've got a new machine
The foreman says it cuts man-power by fifteen
Yeah but that ain't natural well so old Clay would say
You see he's a horse-drawn man until his dying day
The price of corn is increasing dramatically as it is being gobbled up to make ethanol for motor fuel in a mirthless and vicious cycle of more mechanization to raise more crops to support more mechanization. Yet our tired trio plods along at a natural pace, content to amble off to our tea and leave a field well plowed in our wake.
But I'm tired right now and so I'm going to have some tea and blog about my tiredness, mine and that of my drover and my horse.
Last year was not a good one for the strategic crop of hard corn, nearly a total crop failure. In itself that has been no particular hardship since the crop from the year before was so good, we still have corn for bread, tortillas, tamales, and enough seed corn for this years planting. But when it became apparent last year that the corn crop was a loss, the grain field was abandoned so that time and labor could be applied to better end elsewhere.
For several years running the grain field, about one sixth of an acre, had been tended only with hand tools. Each year hoeing and mulching had kept the weeds and sod down to such a level that the next year the work of preparing it was no great cost of labor. But although widely fluctuating temperatures and a sharp drought at the wrong time did in the corn, it only enhanced and encouraged the weeds and grass.
This year it was apparent that hand tools alone would not prepare the grain field for planting in time. We are very loath to use engines on the farm. Instead we decided to plow the ground with the horse. There are two enormous bottom plows conveniently located at the gardens, but they plow much too deeply and the horse, Mr. Himself, had done no substantial work all winter and couldn't be expected to pull such an enormous load by himself on short notice. There was also a much smaller plow, the Vulcan #13, that had been my grandfather's plow and had spent much of the last 30 years as a lawn ornament in my parents' yard. The handles had rotted away and the depth wheel and coulter were completely missing. A new depth wheel was made by welding a 2" steel pipe to a heavy equipment castor and a coulter, the blade that slices the sod before it is turned, isn't really necessary unless the plowman is tilling very heavy sod.
I'd bought new oak handles at last year's draft horse sale, but the handles on this particular plow come off the iron at different angles and their configuration is not readily apparent. I sent out an inquiry on a draft horse discussion list and got back a wonderful collection of restored Vulcan #13 plows along with advice on how to fit the handles and fabricate the braces and stays needed to make the plow workable.
Here you plant corn when "dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear." The very hard freeze of only a few weeks ago had delayed the deciduous trees and so there is still plenty of time to prepare the corn field. With Mr. Himself in tack and Et Ux serving as dover we were ready make an attempt at providing ourselves with corn at no cash expense and the use of no fossil fuels whatever. Yet more than this, I was reminded of the words in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac:
He who by the plow would thrive
Himself must either lead or drive
Plowing is work for everyone involved. After laying open a furrow down the middle of the field, a furrow is opened on either side of the first one, pitching the dirt toward the middle of plowed area. A couple of passes around the field and the horse is stopped in the shade to blow and the plowman and drover take in the quiet punctuated only by a quiet snort and whiffle and the jingle of the harness. Then another time around the field. There's another one of those numerous couplets for remembering this or that about the common tasks around a farm used as a way of guessing how much ground can be plowed:
Six by nine, straight as a line, eleven miles per acre.
One acre for each horse each day is their full fill of labor.
That is, plowing a furrow six inches deep and nine inches wide, the plow would be pulled eleven miles altogether to plow and acre and that's how much you might expect one horse to do in a day.
OK, none of the three of us was in that good shape so we were content to plow our sixth of an acre in one sunny, unhurried afternoon.
Do you remember the lines from an Elton John song Country Comfort?
Down at the well they've got a new machine
The foreman says it cuts man-power by fifteen
Yeah but that ain't natural well so old Clay would say
You see he's a horse-drawn man until his dying day
The price of corn is increasing dramatically as it is being gobbled up to make ethanol for motor fuel in a mirthless and vicious cycle of more mechanization to raise more crops to support more mechanization. Yet our tired trio plods along at a natural pace, content to amble off to our tea and leave a field well plowed in our wake.
posted by Eleutheros at 11:31 AM
5 Comments:
Thank you for posting this--it is always fascinating to read your accounts of how a real working homestead is run. In particular I noted your emphasis on the unhurried pace at which the work, though admittedly hard, proceeded. I think that's something most people have lost touch with (and something I know you have commented on before)--most of us have had it drilled into us to finish our work as rapidly as possible, whether to "prove" efficiency, or to clear up more time for leisure activities, or because we have someone standing over us with a clock and an expectation of so much work being done in such amount of time. Perhaps that's part of why so many people look at a homestead and shrink away from the amount of work involved, because they envision the never-ending chores and hard work to be done and can't see themselves working at their usual breakneck pace all day long, every day, without end. It never occurs to them that the work can be approached in any other way.
making fuel from corn may be the finish for working people in our area. all my family work for Tyson foods raising or processing chicken . if corn gets so high chicken can not be grown we will be unemployed.
as I see it one way or another our socity as it now will fail. I don't know how soon but this corn for fuel is just another nail in the coffin.
you grow your corn, do you grow hickory cane corn?
I am in admiration of the good work you have done there with your good horse.
Oceana, you've pointed up the single largest difference between work on the homestead, be it in the fields, kitchen, or the cottage industry shop, and work in Babylon. Looking busy, appearing to be busy, becomes more important than actually getting anything done. The epitome of this was a supervisor when, during my misspent youth, I worked as a speech therapist for HeadStart. When anyone approached this woman's desk, she went into a fury of activity, sighing heavily and affecting an exhausted expression, uselessly shuffling papers from one side of the desk to the other. "I don't know how I'm ever going to get all this done!" When the observer wandered away, she went comatose and sat there like Buddha until the next person wandered by for the next floor show. She never actually did anything.
But on the homestead no one but one's family, one's menagerie, and whatever haints and spirits are hanging about ever see what you are doing. They are alike unimpressed with appearances, so a pause in the work to rest, reflect, or play makes no difference in the outcome of the work, unless it enhances it.
Patsy, yes, it's Hickory Cane (called Hickory King around here but the same thing). It grows very well by organic methods and hand tending, the super-hyper-hybrid corn does not. It is not well understood the extent to which the price of corn affects our whole economy deeply and immediately. Tyson chickens will be unaffordable with a doubling in corn prices. And a doubling is only the beginning.
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