By Zoë Bradbury
June 17, 2008
I’m long overdue in introducing Barney and Maude, the two Belgians who arrived on the farm in April. They are quite the couple: tireless farmworkers and completely inseparable.
Barney is the sensitive one — tall, lanky, and pigeon-toed, with a bleach-blond rockstar hairdo. Maude is mouthy and affectionate, with a personality as big as her battering ram physique. She cracks me up on a daily basis.
Each of them weighs over a ton, and they have feet the size of dinner plates. Meet my team of draft horses.
To be honest, I didn’t really intend to haul home four thousand pounds of Amish-trained horsepower in the first three months of starting my own farm. There was plenty else to tend to, but fate had its way with me.
It’s a long story that apparently started 26 years ago when I disappeared from the house as a two-year-old. My mom searched frantically for me, fearing the worst — that I’d fallen down the compost toilet. I hadn’t. Where she finally found me, though, was almost as worried: I was sitting in the dirt corral amidst the hooves of four heavy horses, entranced.
She managed to extract me unscathed, but it foreshadowed the lifetime of horse adventures and misadventures that I was destined for. By the time I was five I had two shelves cluttered with dozens of plastic molded horses, and by nine I had a little Arab mare stabled in the barn. I rode her all over the countryside, exploring old logging roads, galloping along the beach, and swimming bareback on her in the river. She was the heart of my childhood.
But kids grow up and get jobs and go to college. And childhood mares get old and stay behind in the barn. For me, as it became more and more apparent that I wanted to farm, I found myself reckoning with the reality that despite my love for horses, I wouldn’t have time to ride one — especially in the summer when the weather is good.
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[...] invitation to all you college students to skip out on Cancún next year and come spend a week on my horse-powered vegetable farm in southwestern Oregon instead. Not only will you go home with a genuine farmer tan, you might just [...]