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Month: November 2006

Protecting Wooden Stall Doors – Part 1

Protecting Wooden Stall Doors – Part 1

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Moonshine is a wood chewer. I think she gets bored and enjoys chewing. I often see her licking the stall doors, the fence, and even the steel gates and every once in a while she seems to take a little nibble. She has plenty of salt licks and we’re working on getting her some horse toys to give her tongue something to do when she’s in the barn (I’ll post about that soon) but for now I needed to protect the wooden doors in her stall. Not only is she slowly destroying them, I’m also afraid she might ingest some wood or at the very least get a splinter in her tongue. There are some products out there to help with this problem such as bitter tasting liquids and steel door coverings. But I had an idea about making a stainless steel or aluminum cover myself for the top piece of wood she’s working on the most. So for part one of this experiment, today I spent a few hours shaping aluminum flashing and securing it to one of her doors to see if it helps. If it works I’ll do a more detailed write-up. I did some preliminary testing to make sure the flashing wasn’t easily torn or cut and made sure to smooth edges and corners and secure all edges.

Here’s what one of her doors looked like before:

Wood stall door before

and after:

Wood stall door after

For an update, see below.

Part 1 – Protecting Wooden Stall Doors (this post)
Part 2 – Stall door protection concept – 6 months later 

1:30 AM Stall Mucking

1:30 AM Stall Mucking

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Moon
Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

Mikki and are night people. We prefer staying up late and getting up later. Fridays are the worst days to try and resist this tendency because most of the time we don’t have to get up early on Saturday. So here we were 10 minutes ago in the middle of the night diligently cleaning horse stalls. And it occurs to me…what the heck are we doing? It’s the middle of the night, most of the eastern time zone is in bed and here we are mucking horse stalls. That’s some kind of crazy. We mentioned to a friend recently if she ever finds she can’t get to sleep around 2 AM and needs some company, head over to our barn. We’re bound to be there. Any other night time stall cleaners out there?

Maybe He Won One of Those Fancy Rose Garlands Once?

Maybe He Won One of Those Fancy Rose Garlands Once?

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RoseWe walked away from the barn the other day and looked back to see my horse with his head all the way over a low part of the pasture fence…eating a rose bush. There are no blooms on this particular bush, so he was just eating the leaves and thorny stems. Why? I don’t know. I did a quick search on the Internet to make sure rosebushes are not poisonous to horses, and it appears that they are not. I’m sure they’re not all that good for them, but apparently won’t hurt them.

Bill’s horse has a thing for wood – she chews on her stall door and the fence – so I told him, my horse thinks he’s a burro and yours thinks she’s a beaver.

That reminds me, we need to discuss bad horse habits. Maybe for the next post!

Picture Proof Moonshine is a Paint

Picture Proof Moonshine is a Paint

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Muddy Moonshine

I introduced my first horse “Moonshine” a few days ago and mentioned she is a registered paint. You can’t tell it by looking at her because she’s almost all black, just like Valentine. Well, I forgot to mention that one of her favorite pastimes is rolling in the mud! Anytime there is any mud to be found, she will surely roll in it and later show up with a coat of mud plaster. So even though when clean she doesn’t look like a paint, she sure does during rainy days.

Not the best picture but you get the point. The clean one is Mikki’s fancy ex-show horse Valentine. The dirty one is my redneck horse, Moonshine:

Muddy horses
Becoming a Horse Person

Becoming a Horse Person

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If you’ve followed this blog from the beginning or skimmed over previous posts, you know that we moved to a small Tennessee town from the big city (Phoenix, Arizona) a year ago. Bill and I both grew up in small towns, but we had lived in cities for a very long time – 20 years for me. That’s long enough to become pretty “citified.” Now, I’m not your typical girl. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, my hair and makeup are not always perfect, and I’m no Martha Stewart around the house. But we had pretty comfortable, civilized lives and our house was a pretty typical city house. But all that has changed.

It started with the acquisition of “barn shoes.” If you have a horse, you have to have barn shoes and barn clothes, because stuff is going to get on them that looks bad, smells bad and probably won’t ever come off.

The next thing you notice is the creeping invasion of “horse stuff” into your life and your house. A new halter will hang on a dining room chair until you remember to take it up to the tack room. Saddle blankets make it to your laundry room. Horse medicines sit out on your kitchen counter. A few weeks ago, I had a bit drying in my dish rack. You don’t notice it happening until it’s too late.

And then the decor you swore would never be seen in your house appears. I just had a birthday (29 again, of course), and a dear friend gave me the most wonderful gift:

Horse Sign

Now, here’s my dilemma. This cool sign doesn’t fit with my current decor. I don’t have a big enough house to have a “horse room.” But I’m not sure the sign would survive the weather in the tack room. So, is a horse-and-pony bedroom set far behind?

Only time will tell. But we’re definitely becoming horse people. And I think that’s a good thing to be.