[mitchmaine]

hi. i have a pioneer walking plow and used it the last two days. i bought it in an auction at mt. hope in ohio. i think i’ve had it four or five years.
the only problem i have with it is its weight. its a handfull. underway, its a dream. it can be touchy when you try to correct it because of the weight. never tried it with three, but think the 12″ is plenty of plow for two horses.
the advantages is/are working with pioneer. lots of parts and great service and friendly folk. ’bout all i can think to say on the subject.

good luck with your search, if you ever find a walking plow made by wiard in new york, grab it. i have a small one of those and think its the best plow i’ve ever used.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

in a farm museum in milton, n.h. is a plow that was built by daniel webster. it’s the biggest plow i’ve ever seen. must be twelve feet long, two feet high. must weigh 300 pounds. the moldboard looks like a door. wooded, with iron strips attached. said it required 3 or 4 span of oxen to pull it.
daniel webster lived in the first half of the 1800’s. he was a statesman, lawyer, and probably very successful and he farmed with oxen. maybe horses and oxen didn’t really represent your economic condition? don’t know. just a thought.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

Good morning guys. I have a couple books of old archival photos of early maine with text descriptions. Not tables or statistics at all, but little footnotes with some numbers on how life was behind the photographs.
Leaves you to think, because of fish first and ships later, farming and wood, we were quite prosperous or at least busy feeding the port cities of colonial America. Then the railroads and canals finally made it to the Midwest and the tide turned and we became self sustaining and traded amongst ourselves. So we turned to textiles and let ourselves get fed with the Midwestern food, and now the industry is about gone, but we are still used to buying in our food. That’s a hard habit to break.
I think there are a lot of similarities between northern new England and northern old England. Especially on the ground.
One thing of interest was that in our “hayday” of shipping (which died overnight in the 1890 when Scotland shipyards started building iron ships), one of our biggest imports was the sugar trade with the west indies. Wheat went down and cane came back, and Portland had about a dozen distilleries making rum. Rum was our oil and we ran our workforce on it. Along with smallwages, was an allotment of rum for a days pay. So some things don’t change that much.

Good day to you all, mitch

[mitchmaine]

disced it hard this morning and brought up a little soil and plowing is better now. all horses so going is slow.
you make a good point. somewhere in the fight to get it plowed so i can sow it to rye to cover it for the winter, i discovered many volunteer buckwheat from the mowing and on the crop side just as many bean plants. if i’d just let it alone with just the mowing, the weed and wheat and bean roots would have held it for the winter, and even though they wouldn’t have made it, the new beans and buckwheat were doing their job.

anyway, right or wrong, were halfway through( only a little better than an acre) so mkight as well finish up. toughest acre i ever worked up.

thanks for the help

mitch

[mitchmaine]

thanks for the help, guys. all points taken.
geoff, never had anything that high to plow down. two or three feet mostly. and the harrow would knockit down forward, so to speak, but still rooted to the ground so it would strip out from under the plow and disappear still in the root. cut like it is, it starts to look like small round bales of straw after ten feet.
we used to find bits of chain attached to some plows similar to what your saying , john, least i guess thats what it was for.
right now, i’m going to try and harrow up some soil onto the veg and see if it stays put.
funny thing about that temper, john. thought it might have disappeared by no.
thought i might have seen one of those cultimulchers at i & j. three point hitch, twenty feet long section of 18″ rolling tube with 4″ standing iron bar welded spirally around it. quite a tool. looks expensive.
thanks again, all.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

the horses are really what it “is” for me, too. i get caught up in getting the plowing done so we can spread manure to harrow it in and drill in a crop before the middle of september or else what? the earth don’t end and we haven’t lost the place yet. once in a spell i can get lost in a job and forget the goal for a second and just enjoy the way the horses are going and try to remember what got me here in the first place.
my neighbor asks “so you mow the hay to feed the horses to collect the manure to spread on the field so the grass will grow so you can mow it to feed the horses? when are you done?” he gets it too but can’t let a good jab go once in a while.

[mitchmaine]

hi john, you bring up a good point. I have known a few amish and for a long while, and I also have never talked economics(money) with them. But simple observation tells me there are fundamental differences between us. simply said, success for them is when everyone in the community succeeds. When something needs doing, everyone in their family pitches in. or everyone in the church district pitches in. your barn burns down, and you have a new one in a week. Someone in the community gets sick and they go to the hospital with no health insurance plan. Ten acres of oats gets shocked faster than you bind it. It doesn’t seen to be about the money.
We, on the other hand, can only find success at someone elses failure. We are taught to compete with our community. When we have more tractors or more land and money, we win. But it requires someone else to lose, and that’s where I can’t see us using amish practices successfully because it isn’t about the horses. That’s what I come up with. Others might feel different about it.
It might also sound like I favor one method over the other, but I don’t. I just don’t think they mix well.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey j-l,
there is a lot of college kids around here, trying to get all the blisters they can and five acres to boot. don’t know what it means other than college didn’t do it for them and they are looking for something different, real or whatever. may not last but they are here.
lots of easier ways to make money, so maybe thats not what they are after. who knows,

mitch

[mitchmaine]

so what you are saying john is the only economic advantage to your model, or profit for investors, is by putting people out of work.

take the same 2000 acres and turn it over to 20 farmers. the fertility may actually improve and the same money would sustain twenty families and their help.

same thing happened here in the woods. and the only thing we have to show is clearcuts the size of connecticut. but two guys did it and lots of money was made by someone else who didn’t work. hmmmm………………

glad to have you back.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

hey geoff, like the sound of that harrow, and the price don,t scare me too bad.
but asking a man to drive from idaho to pick up a peice of machinery in illinois that neither of us has ever seen and drag it clear to vermont so we might end up running into each othe 250 miles from here without knowing what the weathers gonna be sounds like asking too many planets to line up or something like that so guess i’ll pass on it, but hope to see you in tunbridge.
we should have a fence post or picnic table assigned somewhere for dap folks to meet at and talk. what do you think?

thanks again, mitch

[mitchmaine]

hi geoff, penny and i made it over last years saturday, and it was one of the best days we ever had. topped it off that afternoon with a loop through barnett to visit threshers water mill, and home in time for chores. if your thinking about parting with the harrow i’d be interested. hop to see you there.

mitch
cleaning spelt for seed today

[mitchmaine]

geoff, nice set of harrows. grab ’em. i have two similar single gangs. one 10 disc 5′ and a twelve disc 6′ set. each go well with a pair of horses in our soil. if you really crank it open, it can be a job for two, and they might not last as long as you wish. but a third horse will take it away. straight out covering seed seems to be no resistance.
spreading s**t today. trying to get our spelt in and packed. rain coming.

mitch

[mitchmaine]

The ox fed us for sure, but civilization rode in on the back of a warhorse. Hun, mongul, cosack, cavalry, they all came in, subdued the rival, and during the short stability, developed a new weapon. Damascus steel, gunpowder. Atom bomb, choose your technology. Persian, roman, English, choose your empire. They all fell because the city consumed the country that supported it. Its not the known world anymore. It’s the whole world this time and I suspect history will repeat herself again. Keep your steers.

[mitchmaine]

john, do you have a photo of that combine to post?

mitch

[mitchmaine]

@dlskidmore 20780 wrote:

I did another walkthrough today. The top of the berm looks pretty bad, but the side of the berm has a decently thick thatch on it, looks much more hopeful.

hey denise, been reading your thread here and it reminded me of an old saying.”add clay to sand and improve your land, add sand to clay and throw it away.” although your “garden” sounds more like a pit.
then i remembered an old public television show out of boston called crockets victory garden. that was 30 years or more ago so forgive my memory, but he went outside the studio into the parking lot (sand and gravel) and covered it with eight inches of peat moss, turned it in, added some lime to bring up his ph, tested the soil and added amendments and grew some great gardens there. there may be some tapes of those old programs somewhere that could be helpful, but like others have said above, you need something that will hold water and be atleast a base for a soil test. good luck with you quest and keep at it. its good reading. mitch

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