Wisconsin farmer Maureen Ash reminisces on the joys and challenges of work, family and animals
This is an excerpt from Maureen Ash’s new memoir Holding the Lines: Horses, Hard Work, Love, and Potatoes, published by AcresUSA (bookstore.acresusa.com).
One of the toys given to Marian when she was a baby was a Fisher-Price farm set. A cow, a pig, a chicken, a horse, a tractor, a little round-faced farmer, and a little red barn with a door that made a moo-ing sound when you opened it. No manure, no dust, no sour milk, no mud. No detritus from the winter’s butchering, such as piles of cow entrails and the gnawed legs of the downed cattle, dragged onto the lawn by the farm family’s dog—as had so often been the case at the farm where I grew up. I wonder at the misinformation Fisher-Price has caused in the minds of children, now grown up, who had one of these sets. Farms should be neat and tidy, the toy teaches, with animals who have no apparent purpose.
When I moved from central Minnesota to Illinois, I was amazed at the tidiness of the farms there. The neatly painted outbuildings were like ships anchored in the vast seas of corn and beans. It was only after some thinking about it that I realized that none of those farms had animals. The land was too valuable to use as pasture. It was to be cropped. And crops are neat, tidy things when grown with plenty of herbicides to keep the weeds down.
Our farm, new as it was, looked very different. The corral fences we were so proud of soon showed the effects of horses leaning on them, chewing on them, even running into them. In Fisher-Price-farm land, the grass grows right up to the barn. In real life, there was only mud or dust near the barn. In spring the horses churned the mud enough to kill the grass, and in summer they stood in the shade, switching their tails and stamping their feet against flies. They tamped the ground bare under the trees, and overhanging limbs were worn smooth with having been used to scratch itchy draft-horse backs.
Our pasture of beautiful, waving grass became cropped short as a golf green in places, and rank with weed growth in others. I’ve read that horses transfer the fertility of a pasture up to 40 percent because they dung in preferred areas and eat in others. Gradually over the years, our main pasture took on an irregular appearance—tall, weedy growth in one area, short clover-y forage in another. We could have prevented this through clipping it, but we had neither time nor equipment for the job. We used the American solution—more land. We made the pasture bigger and fenced new paddocks.
Neither of us had much farming or even gardening experience. We were too old, with too many other irons in the fire, to have become apprentices on a well-run organic farm where we could have learned how to do things the right way. Richard has a deep streak of the contrarian in him anyway—he preferred to “just do it.” For better or worse, this became our unofficial motto. This is not the best way to go, though, and I don’t recommend it.
We might also have advanced faster as farmers had I not insisted that we have a yard, flowerbeds, and even a picket fence around the lawn. I wanted the place to look nice, and I argued that prospective horse buyers and other customers would be in a better mood to spend money if their first impression of our farm was one of a pretty, cared-for yard. The farm women in the rural neighborhood of my childhood had taken pride in their yards, no matter whether they had to fit in the weeding of their flowerbeds after the evening milking or morning calf-pen cleaning. I understood their desire better than ever—I had it, too.
Richard was not inclined to agree, but for Mother’s Day that year he gave me a pickup-load of rough-sawn cottonwood one-by-four boards cut in eight-foot lengths, plus a jigsaw. “Your fence!” he said with a flourish.
I staked out an area in the garage and set to work, cutting the boards in half, then using a large tomato-sauce can to draw a curved line at one end of each half. I used the jigsaw to cut along the curve. I soaked each board in a water-proofing product.
There was never a set time of day when I could work on the project—I just stole moments here and there. Truman enjoyed playing nearby, but Marian didn’t like the sound of the saw. They no longer took naps, which had been hard for me to accept.
Richard was on another work trip when I put in the flowerbeds around the house. I dug out the clay that had been backfilled around the foundation, and I hauled that away in a wheelbarrow. I hitched the trailer to the pickup and drove into town to the local excavator we’d used when building the house. He loaded me up with black dirt, and I hauled that from the trailer, using the wheelbarrow, and dumped it into where the clay had been. You forget how heavy dirt is until you are hurrying around with wheelbarrows full of it, shoveling it out in quick bursts, knowing you only have so much time till you really HAVE to get back to work—to go catch a team and cultivate those potatoes, for instance.
My stack of pickets grew. Richard came home and helped with digging the fencepost holes. He put up cross pieces, and both of us of worked, when we could, to put up the pickets. I could see my vision becoming reality. Because there were no trees near the house, the building had a plunked-down look. The fence was to serve two purposes: to anchor our house on the farm, and to keep the farm away from the house. Inside the fence, I would rule.
I started the garden that year. Richard felt we should put it where the soil was best, and that probably would have been a good idea. But I wanted it near the house, so I could work on it as I could steal time from other chores. We agreed that the flat place to the south of the house would be most convenient and had fair soil. I knew I could improve the tilth and fertility of the ground, so that’s where the garden went. I plowed it up with Katrina and Jemima, who I knew would not be too upset by the tight quarters, and disced it with them and our new-to-us five-foot disc.
We put in a small orchard to the east of the house and driveway, and we planted raspberry bushes between the house and the garden. The clothesline went opposite the raspberries. The asparagus paralleled the raspberries. I wanted to plant trees around the house, but Richard opposed me so strongly that I backed off on that one. He liked being able to sit outside on a summer evening with no mosquitoes bothering him. Trees would bring them near. I liked not needing screens on our windows until the June bugs came out, so I didn’t put up too much of a fight.
Richard wanted something at an auction that was being held on a weekday, so the kids and I traveled to the sale and he went to work. I bought a reel mower—I remember how optimistic I felt about someday having grass to mow—and a pile of one-by-eight boards that looked good to me. Whether I was able to purchase the item he’d wanted . . . I don’t remember.
I wanted the boards for a playhouse for the kids. Richard bought the two-by-fours necessary for the studding, and I called my dad to ask him to come down and help build the little house. He agreed, and he and Mom showed up early one Saturday morning with Dad’s good hammer.
Richard and Dad had to call me to pull the kids off the job sometimes—they got too interested and were in danger of being hit on the backswing as a nail was pounded in, or bonked with a board being swung into position.
“Here’s where my bed will go,” my dad told Marian, gesturing along the side of the wee house. Marian was startled to think of that—Grandpa’s bed would take up the whole space!
“No!” she exclaimed. “You can’t live here. You have yours own house.”
My dad enjoyed nothing more than having a good tease with his grandchildren. They went back and forth on it, Marian in great earnest, my dad seemingly completely serious.
My mother was enjoying it as much as I was, but she finally broke it up, coming in on Marian’s side. “Grandpa, she’s right. You have your own house. You don’t need to live in hers. Let’s go have some lemonade.”
“Oh, all right,” Dad said, all defeat and sorrow for a moment. And then, brightening, “But you’ll have me over for dinner sometime, right?” Which, of course, was completely agreeable to his granddaughter.
***
We were gaining experience in using our horses and equipment, and we were a couple of years into our rotation. Our rocky, clay-ey soil was beginning to seem arable, what with the minerals we’d added and the carefully considered cover crops we’d plowed into it. The wheat crop went in and would nurse the alfalfa beneath it. We planted barley to see if we could grow it, interseeding that also with a legume.
The new potato planter was the best new-to-us thing we had, in my opinion. Richard bought it at an auction and brought it home on the trailer in triumph. “Now all you have to do is drive the horses,” he said.
It was a hopper on wheels. I sat on a seat that was bolted to a metal strip that rose from the pole. There was a seat behind the hopper. Richard sat on that, monitoring the roller chain that was fitted with metal cups every six or eight inches. The roller chain passed through the hopper, where the metal cup would catch a potato seed piece and deliver it to the furrow that had been opened with discs that ran ahead of the hopper. Discs below Richard’s seat closed the dirt into a pursed hill over the seed pieces.
If every metal cup was filled with a seed piece, the potatoes would be evenly planted at the correct distance apart. But often a cup failed to capture a seed piece. That’s why there was a second seat, where someone, usually Richard, sat with a bucket of seed pieces, ready and quick to fill a passing empty cup.
It had to be refurbished, which Richard did very well, knowing how useful this implement was going to be for us. He made it look sharp—he ground the rust off the hopper sides and painted it green, put a stout wooden pole on it and painted that white, and fitted it with nice, sturdy, deep implement seats so we’d feel more secure as the planter rocked below us.
We put in more potatoes than ever. The planter required that I keep the horses at a slow, slow walk—otherwise the metal cups passed too quickly to be filled. Suffolk horses are known for their fast walk, so this was a challenge. Some horses were simply not useful for this. Jemima could be held back, and Stella, though newly trained and heavily pregnant, was another good pick for the work.
Unless I couldn’t keep the horses from walking too fast, which irritated him and frustrated me, Richard and I enjoyed this new method of planting. It was companionable work to fill the hopper, flip the seat down, and start off down the row. The horses could do the work easily, though on warm days they broke a sweat, and that scent would mix with the late-spring smells of warm soil and sun on new grass.
***
One evening I came home from book club and, before going into our dark house full of my sleeping family, took a flashlight and went up to the barn. Stella was in the foaling stall, udder swollen and possibly waxing—it had been hard to tell that afternoon when I’d put her in there.
I could walk up to the barn by moonlight, but once inside I switched on the flash and aimed it at the straw, hoping not to disturb Stella more than necessary. Her rear end was toward me, and her head cranked around to face me. I saw the sac with its small package of hooves beginning to emerge from under her tail. I switched on a less-intrusive light I’d clipped to a joist, turned off the flashlight, and sat down on a bale to watch Stella have her filly. We named her Baldur’s Tribute to Jane, in honor of her grandmother. Baldur was our prefix and the name of our farm, chosen in a spate of enthusiasm for Nordic mythology.
Stella proved to be an excellent mother. Janie grew up to be what we’d hoped—a tribute to Jane. That night, I was happy to have arrived for the birth; after tending to the navel and being sure the filly got up and sucked, though, I enjoyed spending the rest of the night in my own bed.
***
We’d found a potato hiller and brought it home to the farm. All it needed was a new pole, which Richard mounted on it, and I hitched a team and went to work in the potato field five days after we’d planted the spuds. The potatoes hadn’t sprouted, but weeds were beginning to green the sides of the low hills. They were tiny and vulnerable at that stage, and I meant to kill them.
The hiller was a set of wheels joined by an axle. I sat on a seat between the wheels, above the axle, and placed my feet in metal stirrups that could move the discs and sweeps, which were attached to the frame of the implement, back and forth as necessary. At the head of the row, I positioned the horses, one on each side of it, and used the lever to lower the discs an inch or so into the ground. Then a click to my team and off we went.
Suffolk horses tend to have a fast walk, which is great for cultivating. Throwing the soil up over the small weeds is part of the strategy. The discs were tipped in, like the ones on the potato planter, but in this case they were larger and more aggressive.
I checked behind me—the row was higher, and the sides of the hill were no longer greenish. Hours later, when I’d finished, the field again looked like magnified corduroy. What a great machine! In later years, I devised modifications to it—my most successful was a set of three leaf rakes. I saw that sometimes the hiller discs didn’t get close enough to the hill to interfere with the tiny weeds. So I mounted the rakes to scratch along the sides and top of the row. As long as I didn’t have to back the team, or turn them sharply, we were fine. I snapped a couple of handles before I perfected a technique that worked with the added hardware.
I hilled the potatoes every five or six days after that, weather permitting. They were well up and leafed out, nearly ready to blossom, when I was doing probably the final cultivation. I always damaged a plant or two when I hilled them—sometimes a horse stepped on a plant by mistake, or we went off track, or a plant was too far to one side and got cut off. But as they grew larger, it became easier to do real damage to more than a plant or two. The plants sprawled over the hills, shading out the weeds, and we counted on that.
This time I noticed potato bugs. I have to hand it to those evil little insects. This land hadn’t had a potato on it for years and years. For twenty years at least it was just grass. But somehow they found us after just three years—our third crop of potatoes.
When I got back down to the house I called Richard at work—it was long distance, so I didn’t do it often—and reported the bad news. Colorado potato beetles can devastate a crop very quickly if they get the chance. “We’ll have to go pick them off,” he said. “There’s nothing else we can do right now.”
I’d been expecting that response, but I had HOPED for a different one. The kids were with our neighbor for the morning; once I had them home and full of lunch, I explained how we were going to spend the afternoon.
It was interesting to them at first, but picking the bugs off and dropping them into a jar of soapy water got old in a hurry. I hadn’t expected anything else. I made them each fill a soup can with bugs before they were allowed to wander off to find more interesting insects and to build a fort in the tall grass at the edge of the woods.
When Richard came home, he joined me. We were lucky—the beetles had not got too far ahead of us. We checked under the leaves for their bright-orange eggs and squashed those. Their younger larvae were still small and not as disgusting as the fat, orange, dotted blobs they would become very soon.
We’d been expecting bugs, at the same time hoping our remote location might delay them. Committed as we were to being organic farmers and not using synthetic chemicals on our land, we had limited options to defend our crop. The most immediate was just picking the bugs off, as we were. Another was Bacillus thuringiensis, Bt as it is most commonly called. That’s a bacterium that grows in soil and which, when ingested by beetle larvae, through a series of digestive manipulations that take place in the larvae’s gut, causes the little beast to stop eating and starve to death.
You would really have to spend some time in a hot potato field, picking those voracious orange larvae off your plants, to take as much delight as I did in the idea of whole swathes of them starving to death.
Eventually we purchased some Bt, first checking to make sure it was approved by the organic certifying agency that we were working with, and mixed it up with water and I used a backpack sprayer to apply it. Later that day the kids and I went up to survey the situation and found the bugs to still be on the plants, but no longer chomping away. We continued to pick the adults, and there were always larvae that escaped my spray efforts. For the most part, however—that season, at least—our potato plants continued to grow in relative health.
