A summer evening

Pretty much speaks for itself :)

Exploring the new woods

 In preparation for a horse I started to look around for places to walk and ride next to and near our property. Low and behold, from the town's tax maps I found a 10 acre lot right next to us that is landlocked (no road access) and has no house. I did track down, using google, in a rather roundabout way, that it belongs to the people on the other side. So one afternoon I put on my "courageous shoes", grabbed the kid for dimple equity and visited the nice lady to ask for permission. Which was no problem at all, she had't been or seen that part of her property in more than 20 years and her only request was that she could come and see it some day herself... Well, of course!

Unfortunately it's not really suited for horses, even ponies, as it really is a wetland (it's part of a New York State Protected Wetlands Area) and parts of it are too muddy. The dogs and the goat do fine, but eight hundred pounds on four little hooves were apparently too much - he sank to his knees, just about! My heart sank too, I envisioned having to get a crane in to suck him back out...

 

Especially in Spring Simon and I hiked the "Buurman Pad" almost weekly. Lately the weeds have been a little too much for Simon, they grew just about as tall as he is and now he wants his dad to mow it first. With the dry spring parts of it are pretty dried up tho and much easier to hike, when it is wet there are one or two area's with creek like tendencies - I might need to put some bits of boardwalk down here as well.

In de pic above Simon is checking out a hollow tree - a gnome house - while carrying his butterfly catching net and house. We did not catch anything that day but did enjoy all the yellow marsh flowers.

This is the beginning behind the shed - the easy part thru pretty dry woods with not too dense shrubbery. I did misread the tax map, turns out they do not show structures accurately (it's computer generated) and started the hike on our other neighbors land (our property is long and skinny so we have two neighbors on each side) but he did not mind and uses it to walk his dogs whenever he petsits our goats. It took about two weeks of daily afternoon exercise to make a path that takes maybe 15 minutes to walk...

A soap display for a vintage store...

It took some thinking and looking around the house and workshop to see what could be repurposed - about two weeks worth - and in the end came up with quite a nice display, I'd say!

The base is a small 4 foot wide desk (the display could not exceed 4 feet wide) friends of ours were throwing out and I picked up for my sunroom. It looked a lot nicer to store our fruits and veggies in the summer (we ripen peaches and brandywine tomatoes indoors) but now we're back to a regular plastic folding table... The little flat crates with slots are half and third apple crates. I pick them up at yard sales and use the table saw to cut them in slices, then add a solid plank bottom and hardwood slats from pallets (I save nice thin pieces especially with these bins in mind). The two slender boxes in back are from one old wine crate cut in two and set on their side as a shelf. I found a whole bunch of these on trash day a while back but was not the only one - after some arguing about who was first we realized there were so many we ended splitting them up :)

The vertical shelf is a large window with an added frame of really old barn wood, all weathered and full of holes (character I think it's called) I got with a dump load of scrap wood from the Ithaca Re-Use place. Tthey demolish old buildings in town for salvage and will deliver wood that's only good enough for burning around town instead of dumping it at our local landfill, yay! The three foot bin below the table is an old photo display bin my husband built years ago and that was sitting in storage.

All in all a nice display which fits right into the store's vintage look!

Stretching the wood pasture fence

 Finally, after two years a bit of work here and a bit of work there we put our hands together, asked the help of some friends (dutch friend Quirine and the parents of Simon's playmate - all wanted to learn how to install wire fencing anyway) and stretched the new fence! Last spring I had pounded all the posts, a few at a time, which worked ok as it was a wet spring and the ground fairly soft. I pulled a few crooked posts this spring, repounded them and it was a lot harder to get them in! But it was not bad at all to have postponed turns out, during a pretty severe windstorm our (one and only) black walnut uprooted and as it was designated as a corner post it would have taken the whole fence with it! Now I only had to reline a few posts after the tree was chopped down and out of the way...

 

Here hubby Rolf is stretching the woven wire fence. We had to do it in two stretches but could use a tree to hook the ratchet on to each time, which was nice. When we fenced the pasture we had to use the hitch on the Volvo a few times as there were no handy tree trunks around!

Behind the roll of wire is a gate between two close trees, that way we could walk all the way from the barn thru the pasture, thru the back gate, thru the woods pasture out the back door and connect to our swamp boardwalk for a nice stroll...

 

First part stretched, Quirine and Rolf enjoy a well deserved cup of coffee. Quirine plans to have goats at some point as well and liked seeing the process of properly installing a wire fence. Not all that difficult, and mostly all about the right equipment, as Simon (Sungiva's dad) demonstrated while securing the fence wire to the T posts "that's what you're supposed to use to twist the connectors?! no wonder it was so darn difficult when I did it..."

Testing out the goat harness

 

Fltr: Rolf with Knickers, Susan holding Murphy, Eileen, Sungiva & Simon in cart, Angelika with Konrad on back and Leila on leash.

A big hit with the two toddlers, and a nice change from "mama, I'm tired, can you carry me..." to "I wanna be in the cart, no, I wanna be!". I don't think either Sungiva or Simon walked very much that day so as a device to burn excess toddler energy it's not as useful, but to get Murphy the pony dog to slow down / stop pulling and use some of that strength usefully it worked fine!

The harness is from a design off the internet and assembled with expert sewing instruction from Eileen. I think it cost about $20 in webbing and buckles. It's sized to a full size goat (and a Murphy). After using it with a dog I know now why dog harnesses are different, as this one is not attached to the cart at the back / butt he can swivel his body around within the shafts and get twisted - goats are not that flexible. I have used it with boer/saanen cross goat Monica and she seemed fine with it - goats need (more) training as a following cart can trigger their flight response - but as she is either pregnant or nursing most of the year she's not ideal. Which is why we designated a buck goat from this year's "crop", wethered him and are training him to walk on a leash, with cart training starting next Spring...

After about halfway he got used to it - plus we were on the way back home - was wagging his tail, grinning his grin, and started to pull away again!

what the heck?!

While my hubbie was getting ready to mow he noticed a strange and muddy hole in the ground... with a large black and red turtle next to it! We have seen turtles on our land before but I never realized they live and  overwinter under our lawn - makes me feel a bit uneasy about driving over it with the volvo now, haha.

Our kid Simon was duly impressed and not getting any closer - you never know what kind of dragon head could come out of that shiny rock!

Spot and Oreo

 I just love this picture of first time mom Gazelle nursing her one week olds. It seemed like such an idyllic and perfect way to start life. And then Gazelle's character kicked in and about a week later she refused to nurse Oreo. It took me about three days or so to figure that one out, not until he started to get unkept and skinny looking and became really pushy for food did I realize she was not letting him nurse.

 

In the picture above Gazelle is getting away from her kids by jumping on the kids sleeping box. She'd hang out there a lot, so much that when she would come down the kids would jump on her to try and get milk making her want to hide from them some more... For a few weeks I would first pin Gazelle down against a wall so they could nurse, which gradually got better in me just restraining her and even later in her eating with her head thru the hay manger (I'd put her bowl in there) and letting them nurse while she ate. I think it took at least six weeks before I suddenly noticed both boys being able to nurse on their own again, and they've been fine since.

As a side note, here are the girls eating goat potato chips - as in crunchy dried leaves! When I pick up bagged leaves in town I put the real light weight ones (a.i dry) with nice leaves like maple separate for the girls to much late winter and early spring. When I feed leaves in leaf season they have no interest in them, but when I feed them when there is snow on the ground and nothing else to find, they are like fast food and get nibbled up fast!

not so much fruit this year...

 This is what happened to one of our 10 year old apple trees last April's snow storm... Rolf is walking around with a big stick to shake the snow out of the trees, but it pretty much was already too late. We lost a lot of limbs, a few fruit tree tops, all the older wood of our 60+ year old lilac bush (the flat thing behind Rolf) and one of our larger dwarf trees completely toppled over. We tried to push it back - this is as far as it goes - and Rolf pruned most of the extra limbs off to give it a change. It still lives and go figure, it's the one with the most apples this year! I think next Spring we'll chainsaw it down and ent a couple of new shoots on it, the roots do seem to work fine and Rolf did do a pruning & enting workshop.

Our peaches didn't have much snow damage but the frost that came a little while after did take care of most of the blossoms. I think from the 8 or so trees we have only one fruited. Last week Rolf chopped our whole harvest (minus the ones the toddler ate) and it came to a whopping three quart bags total! And no pears at all. This would have been their first year and they were covered in blooms but the tiny fruit buds all blackened and then fell off... I was so disappointed.

Even our fruit shrubs are doing poorly, not from snow or frost but from lack of rain. The summer raspberries and blackberries only bore one crop quite some weeks (seems like months) ago and the blueberries are sooo tiny it's not quite worth picking them. Our fall bearing raspberries are only now starting to fruit a bit and they only grew to about 3-4 feet tall. Same for a lot of the weeds, our butterfly & hummingbird garden is normally taller than us this time of year and it never quite grew more than chest height. Not much of a maze if you can see the paths :)

Dutch Icelandic Get Away

This June when we went to the Netherlands for a family reunion I also planned a midweek trip to the small island of Vlieland where my mother's family is from. Both to visit my grandparents' burial site as they'd both died since our last trip two years ago and, more importantly, to revisit the Icelandic Horse stable who'd kickstarted my interest in the Icelandic breed.

When I rode with Stal Edda two years ago I had never ridden either Icelandic horses or the tolt before. From my first visit I especially remember the horses to be very, very short - much shorter than the ones I later met here, seemed like - and I was curious to see if they actually were. Everything seems bigger in the States, so why not their horses as well? But nope, it was just my first impression; my memory of my initial "you want me to get on that?" response!

It was nice visiting the stable again with some knowledge of the breed, to realize the way they are housed differently from mainstream barns (no stalls) and appreciate the perfect fit of the Icelandic breed on this rustic island. Vlieland is one of a row of small Islands at the northern end of the Netherlands with on the south side the Wadden Sea (with mudflats) and the north side the North Sea (with sand beaches). The Island is about 9,900 acres, half of which are beaches and sandbanks, with about 1,300 residents and over 130,000 visitors each season. Residents with a commercial need are allowed the use of a car and some of the tourist residences still use horse drawn wagons to haul luggage from and to the ferry. The island has about 3,000 hectares of dunes and 1,000 acres of forest and meadows (with only about 100 acres developed). The stable owns about 25 horses and in summer the ones chosen for rentals are housed in a (dune) sand drylot and work about four hours a day. But when the tourist season is over their vacation starts and they are released onto the property of the Forestry Commission where they are allowed to graze, unfenced, all winter long.

The founder of Stal Edda, Wim Gieles, was stationed on Vlieland thru the Air Force, fell in love with the place and did not want to leave. When in 1982 he opened Stal Edda it was love at first sight with the Icelandic breed and it's compatibility with the island and the stable has been Icelandic Horse exclusive ever since. As Wim is kept busy with other responsibilities (he's on City Council) he found assistance in the shape of Krista Nobel. Krista had just finished an HBO agricultural intership at an Icelancic barn in Groningen, and after a few years ended up taking over ownership of Stal Edda. She can't quite make ends meet from horse rental income alone - she works part time at Hotel Golfzang - and plans to expand the amount of seasonal trail rides and add Icelandic Horse and Tolt riding lessons. She also hopes to certify Stal Edda to be able to offer internships for Secondary Professional Education (MBO) agricultural and equine programs.

Which brings me back to my ride. I had scheduled a one hour trail ride (all that was available that day) and had six MBO students and their teacher as companions! Plus one quiet German, who had come to Vlieland especially for Stal Edda and went for a ride every day he was there. Which initially I thought as unusual - lucky him - but apparently he was not unique in that at all. People come from all over Europe - even all the way from North Sweden by plain, train and boat - for a week of Icelandic Horses at Stal Edda.

After all the kids, teacher, the German and I were paired up with a suitable horse we they were pulled from the dry lot to clean and tack up. The visitors helped every step of the way with expert tutelage and Icelandic Horse specific explanations from the couple of knowledgeable stable helpers. To encourage quality seasonal help the stable offers on island lodging.

 It was pretty clear from the start the girls (students) knew their way around horses, but also that the teacher was a bit in high water. I was pretty sure I'd signed up for the advanced beach ride and remembered my ride a couple years back, with some trepidation, the beach canter (barely in control, full out gallop to me) - but we were both assured this was a standard ride, not too fast, with definitely no dangerous all out gallop on the beach (mmm... not to sure how I felt about that as I had hoped to feel my seat improved after riding Icelandics for two years). After all were mounted, with stirrups the right length and girths properly tightened, on we went. First single file thru the dunes and later in semi file over the beach. The scenery was gorgeous, the weather perfect - not too hot, not too cold - and the hard packed low tide beach proved perfect to practice our tolt. And then the spot to turn around came. Lots of ears perked up. Quite some feet began to move around. It was harder and harder to ride a tolt. And then the tour guide gave the signal: it's time to RUN! And run they did! Flat out gallop over the beach, one horse racing the other, churned up sand flying everywhere! My heart starts racing again just writing about it! Boy, was that fun - just what I was hoping for and more than I expected!

  After what seemed like forever the guide steered us into the loose sand, we slowed down, collected all slower riders including the teacher who was looking a little pale around the edges, we had a nice walk in the loose sand near the dunes - and then we were off again. A little slower this second time around, but still pretty fast and energetic. By the time we reached the dune passage back over we all were wearing huge grins.

By the way, I never even saw a waiver...

by Susan Verberg
written for the St.Skutla Group Newsletter and NEIHC Newsletter.

Published in the December 2012 Issue 4 of the Icelandic Horse Quarterly - the official publication of the United States Icelandic Horse Congress and a member association of FEIF.

Stal Edda, Fortweg, Vlieland, the Netherlands
E17.50 for an hour to E155 for a ten hour subscription
www.staledda.nl (in Dutch, use google translate for English)


link to the complete picture album on Picasa
https://picasaweb.google.com/103334119482276223756/StalEdda?locked=true


I used two newspaper articles and vlieland-info.nl for background information.

goslings

Last week we sold our three goslings... which made me so happy! I really was not looking forward to move them onwards to the freezer - tho we love goose meat, of course, who doesn't - these three were our first home bred and home raised gosling fuzzies!

I bought three goslings from McMurray's three years ago, both for meat but also for parasite management (they eat slugs etc that host goat parasites). Unfortunately for the goats, the geese grew up to be a toddler menace, so for sake of keeping the toddler interested in interacting with the goats the geese moved in with the chicken instead. Which turned into a great move as the geese became the flocks bodyguards and have since kicked butt quite a few verifiable times (geese feathers all over yard, a strutting goose male, but no missing chicken). It's only too bad the chicken have not learned to stick close to the geese at all times yet :)

Pretty soon it was clear we had two girls and a boy and named them Josephine, Emily and Kristopher. Kris and Jo became a pair but it was Emily who made nice nests and turned broody. Fortunately for us, and Emily, Josephine committed suicide by drowning in a 5 gallon bucket (really, and they fit like a cork) which is why all our water buckets now have a diagonal piece of wood in the top. After a couple days moping Kristopher moved in with Emily and about three weeks later I let them brood. Maybe that was a little too soon as none of the eggs hatched (but did explode spectacularly). Plus I had moved them to the fenced in goat bachelor's pad, it seemed a nice secluded safe place to brood, except the foxes knew pretty fast the chicken diner had reopened...

The next year I kept the geese with the main flock and after one failed nest - right next to the coop's only entrance - Emily built one in our semi open lean to which I use for meat chickens in summer but is open to the main coop and run the rest of the year. She had a humongous amount of eggs (nine-ish) and ended up hatching three healthy goslings. I did check the nest after she left and found one egg completely developed but it had not hatched, another egg was partially developed, with the rest with no development at all.

We had experienced normal geese behavior, like Kris protecting his wife, which we adults pretty much ignore, we had experienced brooding female and protective male behavior, just don't get close - but two adult geese with goslings is a whole 'nother ball of beeswax!!! I think I still might have a bruise on the back of my leg... from June...

When the goslings had all feathered out and it was clearly time to find them new homes I listed them on craigslist without follow thru results. Luckily for them, I also mentioned I had them available to anyone who might have any interest and one of my milk soap customers at the Farmers Market turned out to be very interested for the same reason we got them in the first place: goat parasite management. So no freezer for them, they'll be pasture mates to four dairy and fiber goats - a prefect ending for my first flock. Thanks!