Living as a wife with my husband was actually a little boring. I was used to having my family around me all the time, given there was only four of us that lived in our house, but my uncle and grandparents lived on the same piece of property. I still miss seeing them all the time.
That first year was hard, learning to live with someone you thought you knew better than anybody, only to be surprised every single day by some weird feature you didn’t know they had. It was a struggle but between my husband and I, we are not quitters and fought through the first rock in the road.
We had a huge barn, each other, and our dog Odin, I guess that means it is time for some animals! We acquired some chickens from a coworker that worked in the same department I did. There is a reason they say chickens are the gate-way animal, because soon after the chickens came two goats. After the goats came horses, then pigs, and then sheep. It was a menagerie before we knew it.
Farming means you need equipment, and a lot of it. Plows, mowers, tedders, rakes, bailers, tractors, and so much more. Needless to say, when I saw my husband buying all this I thought that it was just him having some fun and we didn’t actually need all of this. Well, I was wrong because those first few years buying hay was way more money than getting the equipment and doing it yourself. So I am going to say it here, husband, you were right.
So we had all the proper equipment for a tractor, but we wanted to be different and use draft horses to work the land as well. Here we go again, buying a second round of hay equipment to be used by the horses. Me, being the questionable wife that I am, struggled to understand why we couldn’t just use the tractor equipment for the horses. Turns out that there are differences between horse drawn and tractor pulled machines. The use of hydraulics, PTO shafts and ground driven were all words that I didn’t need to know, until now.