End and New beginnings

To the few who are following this blog it is now dis con tin ued. Check out my new blog at http://brewermike.blogspot.com/

*****Christmas List*****

Here it is the offical list in no particular order



Nishigaki Brand Karikichi Gold Long Handle hedge shears – hidatools.com

Silky Brand New Mebae Pruning Saw Gardening Pruning Saw - hidatools.com

Costco membership

AAA membership

Implements for Farming with Horses & Mules (book) – ruralheritage.com

Haying with Horses (book) – smallfarmersjournal.com

Training Work Horses, Training Teamsters (book) – smallfarmersjournal.com

Horse Drawn Tillage Tools (book) – smallfarmersjournal.com

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal (book) – ruralhertiage.com

You can Farm (book) – smallfarmersjournal.com

Medium depth super (knocked down) – Beekind Sebastopol

Medium depth frames (knocked down) – Beekind Sebastopol

Beeswax frame foundation – Beekind Sebastopol

In the afterglow of Birthday love

I find myself in the pleasant afterglow of my 24th birthday. No noctiable changes to report as of yet. There has however when an out pouring of support, love, and friendship from family and friends, It has left me with a bliss in my heart and a frig full of food. As I go forward into my 24th year I am excited about all that could and will be. My colonies of bees in the spring, the pursuit of find and breaking ground on our farm, working for Stuart and his horses, the opportunity and chance of an IDA thorugh farm link, our small kitten. So much is to come and let it.

After A long break

Well I'm back.

It's been a long break since I last wrote. The time between has been filled with good times, challanges, goodbyes, and new beginnings. At the end of August I left Oregon and returned to California. It was the end of my apprenticeship at Horsepower Organics and I felt mixed beening so excited to return to California and my sweetheart Rain but also sad about leaving all that I learned to love and enjoy, the still morning, the quiet work of the horses, and the satisfaction of the work I was completing. The last weeks and days in Oregon were a blur of haying, garden work and horse work. When I returned to California I was reunited with my sweatheart and we moved into my parents house as temporary measure while we looked for housing. Rain started her job working as an enviromental educator at Westminster Woods in the redwood hills of west sonoma county while I started looking for a job in my native sonoma. I was lucky to find a lead with the sonoma compost company and secured a job with them where I am now working full time selling compost and educating the public as I answer there questions. It is an ironic twist that after two years of working as the compost coordinator at UCSC I again when myself working with compost for my living. Rain and I have also been pursuing a farming opportunity at the Ocean Song land trust and have made the permilinary steps and first meetings. Wish us the best as we move forward with this. I have also been taking a Beekeeping class through the local JC and have signed up to recieve two nuclus colonies or nucs this spring which I am excitedly awaiting. Rain and I are also taking a tango class together and having a lot of fun with it. We have also, thanks to Rains hard work and persistance, found a great cottage just outside of the town of Occidental which we will be moving into shortly. And that is that for now as more happens I'll be sure to post.

Nell has her foal

As I walked out of the house this morning at about 5:35 having just slurped down two cups of coffee and devoured two eggs with toast I noticed that Deborah and Lisa were standing near the Champs pen with wrapped attention on something. I decide to investigate. As I walk closer Deborah turn to me slightly "Well she was pregnant". She was referring of course to Nell who was in with the Champ to keep him company. Nell had been a mystery, was she bred, was she not bred. It seemed like she might have a milk vein but it wasn't total convincing. Her utter looked bigger and she was rounder but she had always been a very big horse and had fooled the Maders before. I had thought that she was bred from the first time the idea was introduce. More so because I wanted her, arguably the best and must beautiful brood mare (in my opinion) in the herd, to have a foal then because of anything so trivial as evidence (although when ever I could find some I brought it up). In the pen with Nell was a new stud colt foal and a damn handsome one at that. He has a dark coat much like Starry Night and a blaze very much like the Champs but some what more shade shaped. It was a great start to the morning to watch that little colt suckle at his mama and take those slight unsteady steps. He made for the tenth surviving foal this year (the Maders aim for five "Thanks Champ"). All day as we toiled in the the garden my occasional breaks were spent starring at the colt and remark at how damn fine he was. "He'd made a damn fine stud prospect" David call to Deborah at some point in the morning. I didn't catch the look she gave but he quickly added "For someone else I mean". The more time I spend here the more I want to work with draft horse and the more I want to own a team or two or three of my own. Its been a long and curving that has brought me this far and to this place in life and I hope that I can walk the rest of it behind a team.

Visiting the Herd

Today as we worked on stacking hay and sweating when Deborah called from the house. There had been a call from the folks we are renting pasture from that one of the mares, Sidney, had foaled. Deborah insisted that we all take a break from hay and come look at the herd.

No arguments there. We all piled in the car and took a short trip down the road to the pasture. You know I think the herd missed us because no soon did we step into the pasture then we were greeted and nuzzled. Man of man did those horses look good. All were filled out and showed a rick sheen on their Sorrel coats. We walked a bit look at this horse and that horse talking at the conformation or personality or how the two year olds looked so awkward in there half filled out bodies. The foals...oh my were the foals big! They have grown and changed the color of there coats a bit and they look fine it was exciting to see all of them again. Finally we walked about found Sidney and here new foal, a filly and a real beauty. No name for her yet but she has the must interesting blaze and star on here face that looks something like a upside down "!" like you see in spanish. It was a real treat to go and visit the herd, they filled we with such joy just to walk among them. It was a great refresher but that hay wasn't going to put its self away (damn) so we returned to work in the hay shed and in the garden.

That haying... It can be stressful

So goes one of Davids mentors sayings. And it is all so true. The biggest point of stress?? Time. Or more specifically time. "While the growing season will allow for four crops the haying season only allows for three". The main reason is simple. Rain. Being from California this is a bit of a shocker. Its hard if not nearly impossible to think of a time when it rained in the summer. But Oregon is a different place with many nuanced local climates and here in the Pine Valley seeing some rain and thunderstorms is not at all uncommon. 

The crop in question is Alfalfa. Must of the fields that we have here can be cut in one long day or two long ones so long as we can keep at least mowers running. The same field that took one day to mow however might take two or three days to rake into windrows that the baler can pick up and this is only after the hay has had time to dry on the ground for 3 to 4 days before raking and one to none after. Raking takes long for several straight forward reasons. 

One... There is only one rake

Two... There is highly limited time window from raking begin between when the dew is off the leaf to when there is too much leaf shatter from the heat. Typically this is about 5 am to 10 or 11 am on days when there is cloud cover at night and 6 am to 10 or so am on days without such cover.

Three... Making a windrow requires two passes through the field to make one row.

Four... It is hard work and exhausts the horses. 

All that said raking is a fair amount of fun and working in the early morning cool sure beats the heat of the day.

Baling too takes time. The first 20 acres that we mowed yielded 770 bales and took two days of baling to do. The majority of those bales are still in the field and needed to be moved today. We moved some of these bales yesterday so that we could water our garlic crop which shares the low laying area of the same field. Using the horses we moved 70 or bales in two wagon runs. We did about 30 in one run and 40 in the next. Because the bales are very fresh they still have a slight amount of water weigh and the wagon loads come to 1 ton and 1 and 1/2 tons respectively in hay along. in simple terms this is hard work for man and horse. Likely be have a bale stacker that can grab bales from where they lay in the field and make nice neat 70 bale stacks with the tractor. Sadly the thing doesn't fit in the hay shed so it has to be unload next to it and restacked inside. As many of those bales as possible need to come in off the field today.

Why all that rush? Well its that rain. Two to Three days from now we can expect some thunderstorms with rain. Last time we had such storms it was a down pour. At the moment in addition to the 650 some bales left in the field there is about 10 acres of windrowed hay ready for baling with a a small amount of raking to be done in the same field and the associated moving of the bales. There is a 10 to 15 acres field of cut hay that needs to be raked, baled and moved also all in the period of the next two days.

Solution... lots of hard work and long hours and working into the night to get it done.