Very good day

I am very excited and wanted to share this with people. Here is a couple pictures of the progress I have made with the 2 Haflingers. A couple months ago these 2 guys did not know each other and I knew close to nothing about driving a team (still don’t but the learning curve is very steep). Tank (on the left side of the hitch) was very “hitchy” and, at 6’4”, I still had a hard time walking fast enough to keep up with him: as soon as you gave him slack in the lines he would keep cranking up the pace. Arnie (Arno) is barely 4yo and was green broke to drive. He was, is, pretty jumpy about things and his and my first experience working together consisted with him dragging me 100’ by his mouth when I tried having him drag a tire down the gravel road. I quickly saw the error in my ways and went to building up from just ground driving in a round pen to eventually dragging that tire all around. Now Arnie is MUCH more comfortable with noise behind him and I think I am better at introducing new noises to him. I worked with Tank to get him to be more responsive to the bit, I think what helped the most was concentrating on communicating with him with only the bit (I read some things in “Farming with Horses” that really helped).
A couple weeks ago I ground drove them together in the round pen and gradually built them up to dragging a tire together. I set them up with a yoke and a butt chain. With the help of Paulette I opened up a panel on the round pen and drove them out into the GREAT BIG WORLD!! All I could think about was how easy Arnie pulled me when he spooked, I had no hope holding these guys if they decided to run. Paulette had a lead rope on Arnie’s halter and we all walked around the outside of the pen and across the field a couple times. The next day we hooked them to the forecart. With Paulette on a lead rope we successfully made a couple laps around the field. It was not a well oiled machine if you know what I mean. Tank was way out front and I could not get him slowed down, Arnie continued to wiggle all over the place, it appeared to me they were as nervouse as I was. Let me say I had so many things in my head I was trying to keep strait; I am sure I was 90% of the problem. How is it that something that most people would see as boring can border on terrifying?
Yesterday i decided I wanted to have them pull the stone boat with the water buckets to the barn, by my self. I ground drove Arnie around a little, hooked the 2 together, with a butt chain and a yoke, ground drove them around, dragged the evener and finally hooked to the stone boat and hauled the water to the barn – we took a couple laps around the field on our way to the barn. They stood really well while being hooked as well as when loading the water buckets, didn’t
spook at the stone boat breaking the ¼” ice crust all the way as we went across the field; what made me smile the most was Tank was staying aligned with Arnie, I felt like he was taking pace control from light pressure of the bit. I have to say I am very pleased and feel like, with work, these 2 will be nice ponies to work with.


















Arnie and Tank tied to the barn waiting for me to unload the water buckets.

White Christmas

It almost didn’t happen but we got snow at the last minute and enjoyed a white Christmas this year. The day before Xmas it snowed just enough so I needed to plow. This was a very travel intensive Christmas for us this year. We all were going to different families on Saturday Sunday or Monday but Today (Tuesday) we will all finally be home and be able to celebrate together. Here is a picture of as close to a one horse open sleigh as we can get at this time.

Paulette and Mack taking tank out for a ride in the snow.

The Team

It was a great weekend. We picked Tank up at Wayne's house on Friday night and both he (Tank) and Arnie were busy all weekend. Paulette, Ben and Emma all rode Tank on Saturday and Paulette had a great trail ride with Arnie on Sunday. Arnie is still not sure about all the scary things in the world and he and I are working on getting him used to them. He took me on a little high speed ride Saturday morning when he got scared trying to pass another horse, a dog and a couple trucks when we were driving in the fore cart down our road. he calmed down and we went right back and drove the road again so he could see that it was no big deal. Arnie is not yet 4 years old and very green, he needs time to learn to trust us and realize the world is not so scary. Tank is another story. tank is 9 years old and has been used to pull a wagon for years. Sunday, after adjusting the harness out to as big as it gets, I worked Tank gradually from ground driving to dragging his trace chains to pulling a tire then to the fore cart finally hooking the snow machine trailer to the cart, putting a couple kids on the trailer and bouncing down the back skidder road. He was Great!! i was so pleased that he took all this in stride. I really wanted to have a horse that I would be able to get right to work with and it looks like Tank is going to be perfect for that.

Next step to Sustainability

One of our biggest farm goals is to run it sustainably. The other big goal is to actually turn a profit. This summer Paulette and I started wondering if using horses, instead of a tractor, could decrease our overhead and get us closer to our goal. Yes I know horses are not cheap and you have to feed them even when you are not using them but they run on something we grow here (grass) and they produce something we need very much (fertilizer) also they will not be "parked" to often so it is not like we will be feeding them for nothing.
Fuel for engines is not getting any cheaper neither are the parts needed to keep them going. We have one tractor and if it continues to get used the way it has been we will be needing to buy a replacement in a couple years. After some research we decided to make this next step

Besides using the horses for work we wanted to be able to ride them as well. Paulette really missed trail riding. While her horse Libby was a really nice dressage horse she was not the kind of horse that could be just ridden around for pleasure. Paulette decided to sell Libby, and buy a working hose that she could just jump on and go for a ride without the worries of riding a high energy warm-blood. After looking at different horses and talking to people about what we want to do we decided on getting a couple Haflingers. Haflingers are a very hardy draft pony. They are a versatile breed that the Amish use regularly and are know to be very easy keepers. during our research we got to know a teamster named Wayne that uses Haflingers and he agreed to sell us a 3 year old named Arnie. Our goal was to have a team but we were having a real hard time finding what we were looking for in our area, Paulette found a few nice looking teams but they were 5 or 6 hundred miles a way.

Arnie came home last weekend and Paulette and I have been working with him almost every day since. It is almost comical as one of use is getting done working with Arnie the other one is standing there with their "stuff" too get the pony and do their thing.




Yesterday Wayne called to tell us a friend of his had a nice pony for sale and he could hook it next to one of his horses if we wanted to come over and try him. We agreed and this morning we went to Wayne's to check it out. Short story is we now have the second pony for our team. Tank is the horse on the right.




Paulette has been enjoying working with Arnie and will be seeing how tank rides very soon. This winter I will be using them to pull logs up from the woods for firewood and in the spring we plan on using them for everything from spreading manure, planting a very large market garden, road grading and a lot of trail riding

Some more pictures

Here are some pictures I have taken over the last few months.


We got about 1 1/2 feet of snow from that storm last month.

Ben and Emma made a pumpkin snow man, I guess it was there way of protesting the snow :-)

Here is Morgan holding the flock on a big patch of clover. Sheep can bloat from eating to much clover at a time so I would have Morgan hold the flock in the clover for an hour or so every day until it was well grazed down. Morgan is a great dog. I tell Paulette I would not have sheep if I had to do it without the help of dogs like Morgan, Midge and Dante.

Here is the Lucy's drive road crew. I fenced the flock along the road I maintain to clear back the brush. When they were done I could get in there and cut out the big trunks. This area is completely
open now.

The ewes would get pretty high on the bushes and the little lambs would wiggle inside and get the leaves the ewes could not. Sorry I don't have an after shot, I will try and post one.

This is a very old orchard that never really used pesticides. I have gotten permission to graze the sheep there. It is a really pretty spot with the apple trees and the sheep laying under them eating drops.

I am making the first passes with the brush mower to clear a fence line.

The flock chewed a lot of the old growth down and then I mowed the entire pasture (about 10 acres). The grass came back really nice and I have the ewes back onto it right now (nov 8th).

BT hiding from the sun on a hot July day

Another shot of the sheep in the orchard.

Midge sure likes to have her belly scratched!

I hope everyone is doing well and are all set for winter. I still have plenty of work to do before the snow flies...well flies again. We are really enjoying life up here, this years garden was pretty much a success, the flock is healthy and we will be breeding around 20 ewes this winter so if all goes well we should have around 30 lambs racing around this spring.

This Summer

This has been a busy summer for us. We have been working on lots of projects from working on the house to putting up hay to moving sheep (a lot of moving sheep). So we finally got the permanent certificate of occupancy for the house. There are still things to be done but it is really looking like a home. Paulette has done a great job painting the trim, doors and windows. We still love the solar and I am in the process of wiring a propane stand by generator into the system that will start automatically if the batteries get below a certain voltage. I almost forgot: Paulette’s father, he is a carpenter, built us a deck off the back of the house. It is about 10 x 14 and it has become one of our favorite places to sit at the end of the day. Paulette has also done great job keeping us well fed. Her garden has been doing really well. The feezer is getting full and we are eating a LOT of fresh veggies.

We put up all the hay for the winter, we had an opportunity to get it all done in one week and just went for it. We bought around 300 bales of first cut reed canary grass and 300 bales of second cut reed canary grass. The second cut is really nice and green and should do a nice job keeping the ewes fed though the winter. We finally got “real” rain for the first time in a long time. We were VERY dry up on the hill and the grass stopped growing. I tried adjusting the size of the paddocks and moving the seep faster though them but the forage just was not there. I ended moving the flock to an abandoned field down the road to get them by until we got some rain. It was kind of un-nerving having them out of site. We could hear Dante and Midge at night barking every once in a while. I strip grazed them though fairly quickly so they could eat what they wanted but didn’t force them, I am thinking about getting weight on the market lambs as well as starting to think about getting the ewes back in shape before winter. It may seem like winter is a long way off but for us it will come very fast. Getting weight on the sheep before the winter is a big deal; skinny sheep have fewer lambs and will never gain the weight back over the winter. I heard a saying from a shepherd “a fat sheep going into the winter is like money in the bank”.

I have the sheep trampling in a cover crop of rye, oats and turnips. I am only planting an acre to try it out but this should extend the grazing season for the ewes which will save me money. The big expense for raising sheep is the hay costs over the winter. If I can do things to decrees the time I have to feed hay I can increase the profit I make on lamb sales.

It is really working!

last year I wrote about how I was going to confining the sheep to small paddocks and move them every day or two. Before I moved them I would though out some grass and clover seed so they would trample it in seed they browsed off the leaves, weeds and what little there was for native grasses. The reasoning I had for doing this was to put the nutrients on the ground were the trampled in seed could use it. The sheep would also do a better job cleaning up the brush since they were under pressure from the other sheep to get what they could before someone else did, so they were less picky. Here are a couple pictures of how it is going.
This picture was taken 11-10-2009, it was just after the loggers left. here is the post I wrote about it in http://uponthehillfarm.blogspot.com/2010/02/foster-farm-finds-home.html

















This picture was taken last June. you can see the Timothy coming up, it looks promising! At this point the sheep had been over it 2 times and I had thrown out seed once in the spring. This is a spot that stays moist longer than most of the clear-cut so the grass is doing the best here compared to the entire clear-cut. below is the link to the post. http://uponthehillfarm.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
















This was yesterday May 26th 2011. The Timothy and red clover are so thick I am concerned about letting the sheep have free choice of it since I worry they could bloat. As I said this is a wetter area so the grass is coming in best here but the rest of the clearing is definitely growing grass.




















I am moving the sheep almost every day now. Lambing is almost done and now we will be busy keeping good grass in front of the ewes and lambs. This year we weighed all the lambs when they were born so we will be able to track the pounds gained per day for each lamb which will help us choose which animals to keep for breeding and which go to market. I am not going to say anything that will jinx the situation but so far so good :-)