Spring ploughing

We had our spring ploughing done by local teamster and horse logger Derek O’toole of anchor light farm. Our neighbor Dave Frary was also on hand. Dave is a cousin of the last owner here, and his family has farmed on frary road just across the valley since the early days of the settlement. Dave had draft horses all his life and still has a team of minis, and his father and grandfather kept the horses. Daves grandfather was one of the last teamsters in the valley, and its possible their family has been working with horses since the horse came became widespread in europe thousands of years ago. We also had a few younger folks who are interested in working with draft animals. Opportunities like this are the core of my hope for the farm. If we can bridge the generational and skill gap, that gives us the best hope of keeping these techniques alive. The best way to learn is doing real work learning one on one or in a small group with skilled people.

dave and derek discussing line of draft and adjusting the plough comb

We had a good time of it, the belgians made quick work of the ploughing, there was discussion of the proper manner of tillage, how to create table lands and prevent the hillside from going downhill over time, we discussed different ploughs, including the side hill plough which is the most common here in the area, unfortunately mine was not sharpened and cleaned up so we won’t try it till next year.

We disk cultivated to break the furrows and then used the spike tooth harrow, a tool that was in the kit of the early settlers in the valley, the one we used was at least 150 years old from a neighboring farm. I know there was a likely identical one here as I’ve found teeth and pieces of it but the wood is long since rotted away. This one is on its last legs as well and it will be a great opportunity for a workshop in the future to rebuild it from scratch with the same tools it was made with all those years ago-with its previous iteration serving as its own pattern.

A medieval spike tooth harrow. It is an ancient technology that still performs great.

All along we were picking stones, one of the age old tasks of the farm. Coencidentally I’ve also been repairing an old workshop locally and re-doign its stone foundation and I now can look on stone with new eyes, field stones are not a nuisance to be pushed over the hillside, (as I foolishly did my first season here) but a very important and actually difficult to obtain resource on a farm like this. Walls and foundations take a lot of stone and if you can’t find it it is very costly in terms of labor to bring or purchase from elsewhere. you have to have a behavior of slowly accumulating large stones so that you have the when you need them. The old stone pile in the upper field here is eveidence of that, these fieldstone stones will eventually form the new foundation for the corn barn that has been sinking over the years.

Some good news!

Maplewood Farm