Category: Ancient Ponies Farm

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Garden Shed

Somewhere around the beginning of February, deep in the bowels of winter, there is a feeling of the coming spring.  A quickening.  Maybe it is the light that now lasts past 5:00 pm.  Maybe it is the angle of the light or maybe it is the slight moisture in or direction of the wind.  In spite of yesterdays snow that has turned now to a thick coating of ice, we have a sense of having made it through our first winter.  We managed to keep the horses fed and watered.

We managed to plow the driveway and keep the stove going.  For me, the biggest triumph is how the ponies have thrived.  They seem better than ever with glossy fur and playful relaxed temperments.  Of course we have many days of cold and icy percipitation coming but we are on our way out.

It really looked like this

Zoe and I have been getting ready for spring by reading up on seeds and gardening, ordering trees and bushes (walnut, mulberry, lindon berry, blueberry….) and planning out next Ancient Ponies farm group potluck (next week)

Also, big news, our garden shed arrived two days ago!  It’s beautiful and seems to fit right into the landscape.  Three men worked 5 hours to put it up.  At first it was snowing hard but then, while it was still snowing, the sun came out and then the snow stopped.  It will hold all of our tools, pots, amendments and mower.

Yay!  Here is a picture from across the pasture.   An then a close up.  Cute!

 

 

By the way, our friend Mikko Sage is an amazing photographer.  The photos of the ponies above are his.  We have hired him to be the farm photographer.  He is able to capture the magic here.  I highly recommend his work.

Jasper is such a ham that most of the pony pictures are of him. Here is a picture of the regal Spencer taken by Mikko.

I’ve taken so many pictures of my horses and have never been able to capture their beauty and personalities.
But Mikko has.

To see more Ancient Ponies photos you can click here.

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Porcupines and Permaculture

Did you know that over 1/3 of the carbon added to the atmosphere since 1850 has come from exposing soil to the air through tilling and deforestation? Tilling soil exposes the stored carbon to the atmosphere.  (see this)  Not only does tilling release carbon, contributing to climate change, it also devitalizes soil, creating the need for fertilizers and pesticides.  It is even possible to farm in a large way.  Here is an agribusiness farmer who has been working no till for over 25 years.

Many farmers, like us, are farming without tilling.  No tilling mimicks nature, where there is a natural fertility and growth with regular mulching from leaf fall.  Just dig up some soil in the woods and take a look at it.  The soil will have worms and bugs, smell deeply fragrant and feel moist and crumbly in your hands.  Tilled soil is dense, with little fragrance and without life.    Tilling leads to dead soil.

Today, Zoe and I are driving the Worcester to attend the NOFA winter conference.  (Northeast Organic Farmers Association) We’ll be meeting and talking to other farmers and attending workshops all day.  I’ll write a blog post about our experience soon.

In the mean time, the temperature has gone up more than 70 degrees from a week ago.  From -20 to 59.  Yesterday the rain began and it’s still going.  Most of the snow turned to slush and then ran down hill in rivulets of water.  Because the ground is so deeply frozen, all of the water is running off into our stream.  As I sit here now with the window wide open, I can hear the water crashing through.  This is the highest I’ve seen it so far. This photo is from the day after.  Already the water is a foot lower than yesterday.  It was so high one could have white water kayaked down it.

With the rain, yesterday the air was filled with dense fog.  Clouds blew around like beings all day.

Zoe and I took a walk out in the rain with the dogs.  About a mile from home, unfortunately, Oscar was surprised by a porcupine.

 

If I had seen it first, I could have warned him and he would not have gone for it.  But he saw this one before me and he dove on it.  Zoe and I removed 50 plus quills from his lips, tongue, palate and muzzle with pliars, something I’ve done many times.  Poor guy.

Today the temperature will fall 55 degrees, down to below zero again.  Crazy.

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There’s a Low Below the Low you Know

This is a line from an old Malvina Reynolds song called “there’s a bottom below“.

Yesterday morning it was -11 F when I went out at 6:30 to feed the horses.  That was so so low…but today…Oy Vey!  -12 F.   The cold is bitter, almost mean feeling, like it wants to hurt.  I dragged the hay across the pasture on the sled, breathing deeply.  Now as I sit here writing I can feel the cold in my chest.

The cold seemed to be freezing the little alveoli and capillaries in my lungs.  I have the water on to make some ginger honey tea to warm them up again.  

I’ve been locking the horses in their stalls at night and closing up the barn.  I give them two buckets of water each which are 3/4 gone when I come in the morning with the rest frozen solid.  I have to bring the buckets in to melt so I can fill them again.  It amazes the me that the hydrant in the barn keeps flowing!  I let them out in the day but feed them their hay in their stalls so they can be out of the bitter wind.  We haul the hose down from the house and then back to fill the daytime outside tank with the heater.

This cold feels epic!

However, the pipes in the clinic only froze and didn’t burst, there is a big pile of wood outside to keep our stove fed, we can unplug the freezer that is in the garage and, astoundingly, the ponies are warm under their blankets.  Today, from this low below any low I ever knew, the temperature is going to rise! Life is good.

We also keep warm by having friends here.  We had a wonderful Shabbat dinner with John and Sharon on John’s 83rd birthday.  I made Cholent and Zoe made Challah.  I feel so blessed in so many ways.

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I Give Up

This cold continues.  It is a bitter, biting cold.  However, it is interesting to notice that I had the sense of warmth today when it got up to 14 degrees.  I think when it gets to twenty, later this week, it will feel downright balmy.

Before I go on to tell you how I gave in, I want to say something about people who let their dogs lick their faces or even their lips.  You know who you are!  Some of my best friends do this!  Ugh.  I am SO not a germaphobe but this habit is disgusting to me.  Here are my two dogs enjoying their treat of popsicles.  Auto-correct took the second O out!  I really meant POOPsicles.  Frozen poop.  Yum.  And I think horse manure is far from the worst muck that goes in their mouths.

So, “I give up” means that I stopped letting the ponies rough it.  I finally put heavy winter blankets on the ponies.  I had to go buy one for Mr Jasper because I was using layers on him, a wool warming blanket plus a wind-proof rain sheet.  Too many straps for him and probably not warm enough.  I sort of KNOW they would be okay without the blankets given how furry and strudy they are, but I just couldn’t bear it.  I was cold and their heavy blankets make ME feel warmer.  Plus, doesn’t he just look so handsome?!

I also started giving them water.  The stream is not quite frozen over but it’s getting there.  When the edges started to freeze, I figured it was time.   I don’t want them to have to break through ice to get to water.

So, yesterday I set up this water heater in their drinking trough.  It works beautifully!  The water is even a bit warm.   Strangely, they went down to the stream to get water just after I put this in.   I think they like it down there and like breaking the ice with their hooves.  Still this morning a lot of water had been taken up by them through the night.  I feel more hydrated with this in place.

It is so silent and bare here.  I love the silence.  I bask in it.  When the air is bitter like this, I find it hard to imagine the intense life that will blossom up here come spring.

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Bitter Cold

I just got back from doing the morning feed and it’s just 5 am.  It’s pitch black out there and minus 2 degrees F (-20 C).  I went out earlier than usual because this level of cold just worried me.  It is SOOO cold.  It seems counter-intuitive that a warm blooded animal could be okay sleeping out there.  I KNOW they are okay but it just FEELS so not okay….I had to go check them.  It also feels like the water out there could simply not be flowing and un-frozen.

So, I bundled up with my felted wool fisherman knit (I recommend this – buy a fisheman knit at the used clothing store that is way way too big and then wash it in hot water so it felts down.  So warm!) , my sorels, down jacket, hood, hat and mittens.  I got my lantern and crunched my way to the barn.  I had closed up all the doors except their stall doors so there wouldn’t be cross drafts in the barn.  Of course I find them comfortably sleeping in their clean shavings, relaxed and happy, little icicles hanging off of their noses.

I put the bale of hay on the sled and rode it down into the pasture in the bitter blackness.  Yup, the water is still flowing!  Amazing.  How can that be?  I am all prepared for it to freeze with my hyrant in the barn, an unfrozen hose in the house and a water tank heater but if it is flowing in this, my hunch is that I won’t have to use my contraptions.  Having fresh flowing water for them is such a wonderful and labor saving benefit. There is something comforting and satisfying about the earth simply providing for them.

View toward the house and barn from the lower pasture

I didn’t take pictures this morning because it was just too cold to take my mittens off.  These pictures are from the ice storm the day before Christmas and the snow storm on Christmas.  But the cold and dark out there with thousands of spots of light in the sky was exquisate.  What a way to start the day.

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A Fresh Start

Okay, so what do I know about running a farm?   Not much.   I somehow thought that, with the horses having free run, the ability to be in and out of their stalls with a huge pasture available, that their poop would be nicely distributed around the pasture.  I was set up to muck the stalls every day but that was it.  Having them poop outside the stalls was great because the work of mucking was light.  That actually worked for a while but it all changed with the arrival of winter.

Somewhere in November the grass in the pasture disappeared.  Without the grass the horses don’t have much reason to wander around the pasture.  They like to hang out by the barn.  The fact that we put the hay out near the barn was an added attraction to the paddock area.  Then, one day, it kind of dawned on me that the paddock area was looking like a poop-o-rama festival.  And it is only December!  Oy Vey!

Dan Hutt was here getting the foot print ready for the shed on the back of the barn and happened to have some heavy equipment with him so he dragged and shoved and moved that poop in a good pile outside the paddock.  He cleaned it all up!  Yay!

So now we have some new systems in place!  Just in time for all the snow and ice.  First, we pick out the poop from the paddock every day and bring it to the manure pile.  This can easily be done with a plastic sled!  I did this this morning as the ice storm was descending and the manure plops were all shimmery with a coating of slippery ice.  Secondly, we give the horses their hay WAY OUT in the pasture, in different places every time so their droppings are mostly spread around.

This morning I went out to feed just before light.  I put a bale of hay on the sled and then sat on it.  I sled out swiftly down the hill, able to steer by leaning this way or that.  Very convenient and fun!  The ponies are out there now eating their morning bale.  They’ll get another at dusk.  The paddock and stalls are all clean.

We wish everyone the very warmest of holidays and a really really good new year.

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Garden Raising!

We had our garden raising yesterdy.  About 30 friends showed up for various amounts of time.  We all worked, laying cardboard, carting compost, leaf mulch and wood chips around to  create the gardens.  The weather was lucious, not higher than 72 all day with deep blue skies.

The idea of a garden raising came from Broadfork, a group of talented and enthusiastic permaculturists.   Ashley, Evelyn and Llani are a sort of perfect hybrid between farmers and landscape designers.  Most farmers don’t have any concern for landscape design and most landscapers don’t care about growing food.  Broadfork helps people design and install beautiful, functional and abundant gardens.  They helped with measurments and planning as well as working their fannies off all day at the garden raising.  All along, they have been teaching Zoe and I about the basic principles of permaculture as we go.   For a really deep understanding of it, watch the movie Inhabit.

We first laid cardboard.  Cardboard is sort of a miracle for gardening.  The purpose of it is to first kill the grass underneath it.  But much more than that, the cardboard offers a kind of 4 seasons hotel for worms.  As the grass dies, it provides food for worms.  The cover of the cardboard helps keep the worms protected from both cold and heat.  As the worms move in make their home under the cardboard they poop like crazy and also aerate the soil.  The worm poop is just about the best fertilizer there is.  So rather than focusing on putting nutrients into the soil, we let the worms do the bulk of the enhancement.  The soil in our field is rather sandy and poor.
By spring, with the cardboard covered with compost and then layered with leaf mulch, we will have amazing soil by spring.  How cool!

We have lots of plans.  In addition to the 15 fruit trees already here, we will plant many kinds of berries and fruits.  Of course there will be tons of vegetables as well as mushrooms and native flowers to attract bees and butterflies.  Of course we’ll have animals too – chickens, bees and our wonderful horses.
So many wonderful friends came to help.  Thank you!   I felt that everyone who came now has a connection to this place, some ownership of it.  I am so excited to see how this will continue to manifest.  Zoe and I both feel something magical happening but we don’t quite know what it’s all for yet.  We like that sense of the unknown.

We ended the day with a ritual led by Phyllis Labanowski.  Almost everyone had left already.  My friend Anneke had brought a lobelia which we planted in the central herb garden.  The gardens are already blessed and bringing blessings.

 

Zoe said yesterday, after hearing that a friend had come to the gardens when we were not there, “I love when people just come!”  I agree.  We want people to come and participate and hopefully be fed on many levels.

Stay tuned for garden raising part 2.  We still have a lot to do and hope people will feel welcome.

 

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Garden Raising, Hickory Nuts and Cornelian Cherries

Garden Plan

A Garden Raising is when friends and neighbors come to help someone put in a new garden.  We were planning on having our garden raising tomorrow but hurricane Jose is making his way up the coast and will make tomorrow a very rainy day.  We postponed it to Sunday, October 1.  Everyone is welcome.  I’ve posted a picture of the garden plan.  During the day we will be creating the beds that circle the herb garden.  Continue reading “Garden Raising, Hickory Nuts and Cornelian Cherries”

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She’s Home!

Zoe has been in Taiwan for two years. She came home for my niece’s wedding last summer, and we spent a good couple of weeks together, and there is skype. With the twelve hour time difference, we often spoke in my early morning while she ate noodles for dinner. But I’d not hugged her in fourteen months! That is a LONG time.
Now she has returned, my girl. She completed her contract at the school where she taught kindergarten for the last year and now has landed here at Ancient Ponies Farm. Her plan now is to live here for a good while, at least through gardening next summer. She wants to learn to drive the tractor so she can plough snow and move piles of manure. She wants to build our gardens and muck our stalls. Hallelujah is all I can say.
I can hardly express how nice it is to have her here. She’s so interested in everything and enthusiastic. We’ve been cooking up a storm, eating out on our lovely hillside, going for horseback rides and doing chores. Yesterday she went out on Jasper for her first solitary ride ever. How nice for me to see my daughter saddle up a horse and go off into the woods on her own.  Here is a picture of our ride together yesterday evening.

 

Last weekend we left the farm and drove to Philadelphia for my nephew, Emile’s wedding. It’s the first time I had left the place over night since moving in. Erika and Ryan house/dog/horse sat, taking the dogs on long walks and even going riding a bit. The wedding was lovely and such a chance to connect with old friends and family.

My mom and I drove home on the day of the eclipse, with Zoe staying an extra day to hang out with her cousins and aunts. What a feeling for me to be coming home to this place. I had not left so I had not experienced that THIS is what I am coming home to. On the way home, mom and I stopped at my CSA to pick up my share just as the eclipse was peaking. They had set out a wheelbarrow with water in it so we could watch the eclipse in the reflection. With bags of vegetables, I took my mom to her house and then arrived home. Ahhh…..