Spring = Work

There is no shortage of work to do around here. Our property currently looks like the town dump. Tractor implements, hoses, piles of dirt, piles of wood and torn up landscaping beds adorn the property. Its a good thing our house can't be seen from the road, or else I'm sure we'd have confused neighbors dropping off their trash.

I knew owning horses would add significantly to our workload (and detract significantly from our checking account), but I was suffering from severe naivete when we brought them home. The daily "barn chores" are fun. Even though I'm scooping poop, it hardly seems like work to me. Brushing the horses (yep, I do it every day!) is therapeutic. Following through with all of my crazy ideas on horsekeeping, however, is not!

It goes something like this, "Honey, I think we should clear and seed the pasture with a pasture mix and then fence off separate grazing areas so we can do rotational grazing." Then, the next day, "Honey, I think we should just have one big area for the horses to graze." Now its, "Honey, I read about this great idea on-line where we fence a track around the pasture and then mow the grass for hay to feed to the horses." My husband thinks I'm crazy, but he plays along as all good husbands should. As soon as his head stops spinning and I've made up my mind about exactly what we're going to do with the pasture, we head out to the field with tools in hand. At the end of the day, we're tired and covered with dirt and ticks. We're making progress though!

We've decided to configure our pasture fencing to create a track around the pasture. The configuration is based on Jaime Jackson's Paddock Paradise model. The premise of this model is to stimulate the horses to move. Compared to typical pasture life, horses kept in such paddocks have greater movement. This keeps them (and their hooves) in great physical shape, and reduces the likelihood of founder. For a great website showing a paddock paradise already in action, visit this link: http://thenaturalhoof.homestead.com/PaddockParadise.html

Our Paddock Paradise will be located on the neighbor's property. The neighbors generously allowed us the use of their back pasture, provided we clear and fence it. Its a pretty good trade-off, although I think we underestimated the amount of work required for clearing it. I didn't take any "before" photos of the pasture, but believe me when I tell you it was a wall of shrubs. And, of course, every single species of shrub out there was armed to the teeth with thorns. Russian olive, multiflora rose and bayberry created a big, green and brown maze. This maze was only passable by the smallest of creatures and not suitable for horses or people. According to the neighboring farmer, the pasture's most recent inhabitants were sheep and that was over 20 years ago. Below is an aerial photograph showing the pasture (outlined in red).

To date, we've cleared the majority of the shrubs. Clearing initially involved a few hours of my husband pushing brush over with the front loader of our small tractor. That worked, but it made a huge mess and was very time consuming. He then bought a brush hog and powered through the brush in a few hours. We've seeded the disturbed areas and the areas that were devoid of grass due to the brushy overstory. Already small blades of green are poking up all over. Today we finished clearing the northeast corner. Our next step is to start fencing.

The horses will be thrilled with their new arrangement. Since they arrived in October, they've been confined to a small paddock adjacent to the barn. It allows them a little room to run, but they need so much more.