Tractor heritage, news and features

A cunning plan

Anyone who keeps horses will know what a terrible mess they make on the fields. It’s really no wonder that farmers don’t want them anywhere near their land. Not only are they heavy creatures, but they are heavy creatures that like to gallop around doing the equine equivalent of the ‘handbrake turn’ , churning and ripping up their grazing land as they go. They are also notoriously wasteful grazers, there are a lot of plants they won’t eat, and these then start to thrive at the expense of grass, and if you’re not careful you can end up with a field full of weeds. But then in other ways horses can be quite clean animals, for instance they don’t like to eat where their droppings are, so whichever area they use as their toilet becomes abundant with long, sour unwanted grass.

Within a large farm, land can be ‘rotated’ with other sorts of livestock, or it can be ploughed and used for something else after horses have been on it. That way horses are never on one area long enough to do any damage. However most horsy people simply don’t own enough land to do that, or if they do they just fill the extra space with yet more horses...

I only keep two equines, mine and a borrowed one for company. Unfortunately most horses, being herd animals, are deeply unhappy if they are kept alone, so it usually makes sense to keep two together. One of our little fields ended up so bad last winter with all the galloping around that it almost looked as if it had been ploughed. I wondered whether to actually plough it, but I decided not to, as it would probably make it softer still, and put it out of action for a long time. Instead I decided to see if I could re-seed it without actually ploughing it, thereby using a cunning short cut.

We borrowed an old set of disc harrows, and went over the field a few times to break up the surface a bit more, and then I bought a seed mixture which was supposed to contain plants which were not only beneficial to horses and ponies, but that were also hardy enough to withstand large metal clad feet charging all over them.  

The disc harrows didn’t look like they’d been used since the Boer War, so they needed dragging out from the nettles and giving a bit of attention. But once we’d got them rolling they did the job, and looked quite fitting behind the rusty old David Brown 25. The rust bucket look is right up my street as it happens.

In a bid to save time we mixed the seed in with some fertiliser and spread the lot together, and then we rolled it all, shut the gate and waited. The dry spring meant that the seed seemed to take ages to germinate, but finally it greened up. From the house the field looked greener and lusher than I’d ever seen it. Sadly, on closer inspection it soon became apparent that most of the ‘green’ was actually weeds. I can’t work out whether the abundance of weeds is caused by us chopping up the already present weed roots up with the disc harrows, and making five weeds where there once was one, or whether they are airborne weeds seeds that have landed on the bare soil and germinated. Probably a bit of both.

Either way, I’m now going to have to wander around with a sprayer in my hand spot-spraying them. I don’t like using weed-killers, and most of the time I pull weeds out, or I chop them down, but sometimes, when a place is literally dotted with docks, it becomes necessary to spray. Now I wonder if this is what you get for trying to take cunning short cuts. Still it gave my unreliable little David Brown a bit of work, and the other half was happy as he was in charge of the ‘discing’, and going around and around a field on a machine never fails to put a great big smile on his face.