Our First Horse

Serious title, funny story. It was nice and warm outside yesterday so I thought I’d work on the stalls before dark. I took a load of manure out to the pasture and rolled our wheelbarrow back to the barn where I saw hoof marks in front of the stalls. Interesting. I then noticed what appeared to be a large animal paw print. I couldn’t decide if it looked more like a wolf or a large cat but either way, it was right in front of our horse stalls and that had me worried. Did some predator track a deer to my barn and notice a bigger meal? How do I protect my horses from large predators inside their stalls? Wolves and panthers are very rare in east Tennessee but old-timers and a wildlife official I know here have told me stories of how panthers once roamed this land, less than 100 years ago. Did a few survive? I called Mikki over to see what she thought. After studying the paw prints she said, “It doesn’t quite look like a paw print. It almost looks like a boot print, but smaller.” She’s the smart one, mind you. I inspected my boot and sure enough, the heel matched the “paw print.” Dang, that’s embarrassing. The hoof prints I thought were from a deer? I rested the wheelbarrow in that spot.

Even funnier is what almost happened. I was going to call my wildlife official friend to come take a look. I can only imagine him telling me to head out to the pasture so he could follow the tracks to see where they lead. “Keep your eyes peeled…the tracks stopped right where you’re standing. It’s probably watching us this very minute!” he’d probably say with a chuckle.

No, the only black panther that stalks our horses (and us) is our small black cat, Simon, who loves to dart across the lawn as we finish our night chores. So enjoy a giggle on me and let this be a lesson to us all.

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It’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything, for which I apologize. It was time to upgrade my PC and let’s just say it didn’t go well. 600 miles of driving (we live in the middle of nowhere and have to drive to Atlanta for computer parts) and 30 or so hours later, I’m finally up and running again. But it’s not like our little horse farm has been neglected this whole time, so let me catch up.

I (Bill) am a cold-weather sissy, I’ll admit it. I have been complaining for weeks at all the 30 degree days (Fahrenheit) and 18 degree nights, frozen hoses, frozen buckets, poopsicles and multi-layer clothing. I’m tired of it. It seems global warming hasn’t quite made it to east Tennessee because the last month in particular has been very cold. But then a ray of hope appeared in the way of a weather forecast for relatively warm weather for at least the next week. In fact, sitting here I can see the thermometer and it shows the outside temperature as 73 degrees. We did barn work late last night without all the extra coats. This is nice! Come on spring!

We’re out of pasture hay. Those round bales I mentioned are long gone and I’m afraid the horses are considering eating the moldy parts they bypassed the first time. We’re tossing out square bales for them to eat, which is dwindling our supply. I’m looking forward to the grass growing again. Someone pointed out that horses are supposed to roam and forage for food and not eat as much in winter. Someone else suggested that the opposite is true, that horses need lots of food in winter to store as heat-generating fat (stored in their rump, I hear). Both make sense to me but we’re probably going to look for another round bale or two to hold us over until the grass starts to grow again.

I briefly saddled Moonshine up and hopped on, mostly to test my new saddle. But it’s been too cold to ride and train until now. If the weather is decent this weekend, perhaps we’ll take our horses for a walk.

As we move ahead towards Spring, we’re starting to make a list of things we need to do to get ready for warmer weather and projects we need to get working on. Our list includes:

• Replace barbed wire fence near the barn with a wooden fence. We have the wood for this but we’re going to need a hole digger, preferably powered. This Tennessee clay is very difficult to shovel by hand.
• Come up with a manure management system. I’ve been talking about it for awhile and would like to try the aerated compost approach. More on that soon.
• Bring in a truckload of sand for the pasture barn entrance. It’s a clay and mud mess back there. In the comments of our post “Turning out two horses by yourself“, Becky and Ryan suggested crushed limestone or sand, claiming good results.
• Eradicate thorn bushes in the pasture.
• Test orchard grass in a small section of pasture. I want to temporarily fence off a small section of pasture (about 1/4 acre) to plant some orchard grass. It’ll be a nice treat for the horses when the grass has grown in.
• Treat the wood on the barn. Our barn is mostly wood and I’m guessing we need to occasionally treat it for protection against the weather.
• Fix up the old barn. We’re going to purchase 8-10 round bales at the end of summer and this is where we want to store them. I’d rather fix it up now before the snakes wake up.
• Install more lights in the barn.

I’m sure there will be more projects but that’s a pretty good list for now. What’s on your list? So that’s what’s going on around here this week. More soon!

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I’m told we baby our horses by letting them into the barn each night for a meal and sleep. That may be true but we feel safer knowing they’re not out in the dark pasture, far from sight. I’m more confident in the structural integrity of the barn than I am of the fence, especially given our latest fence incident. Of course when you bring your horses in for the night, you also have to let them out in the morning. Mikki and I are fortunate enough to not have to leave the house for work each day, usually, so letting them out in the morning is pretty simple. With carrots in my back pocket, I head for the fence and Mikki opens the stall doors. This works great, as the presence of treats is made known by my calling out “carrots, come and get em!”. Alas, the lure of carrots is all the motivation they need to move along. But occasionally our routine is altered when Mikki has to leave for a work assignment or when she’s sick. In this case, I head up to the barn alone, open the stall doors one at a time and wait 20 minutes while both horses mosey along, investigating every little piece of hay along the way, sniffing me up and down for snacks. Then, just when I get one out and open the stall for the other, the first horse turns around and wants to check out the other horse’s stall. Great. But after much experimentation, I think I have finally discovered the solution.

It turns out horses are smart but not necessarily brilliant. They seem to really like routine, though. When I go to the barn to let them out, they don’t hear my voice down at the gate. So as simple as it seems, one day I went to the gate first, called out “carrots! Come and get em!” and then ran around to the inside stall doors, opened them one at a time and marveled as both horses made a beeline for the fence. I closed the gates inside the barn, ran back to the fence and finished the routine to their satisfaction (except for the whole “eating of fingers” thing). The next day I figured they would have figured out the trick by now but they didn’t. I’ve tried it five or six times now and it’s worked every time. I’m a visual person so here’s a diagram of our barn to help imagine the scenario:

Now we know we should teach our horses to leave their stalls without treats but it’s so much easier this way and I can’t see any harm in it. Does it look silly running around the barn like that? Yeah. Add this to the list of things that make me feel like a goofy horse owner (Geek light?) but I’m sticking with what works, even in the absence of style.

If you let your horses out each day like us, what’s your routine like?

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We walked up to the barn the other night and the horses were waiting at a section of fence that kind of comes to a “V” right next to the road. It’s kind of tight quarters there and apparently someone felt crowded because there was some kicking and/or shoving. We didn’t see exactly what happened but there was a horse squeak, sudden movement and then a loud bang and voila! Two fence boards were missing, right next to the road. Luckily, we were right there when it happened because the next thing to happen would be for our two horses to step over the one remaining board and out to freedom. Needless to say, we did an emergency fence repair. At this point, whenever a fence repair is needed, we are replacing nails with screws. They stay in much better.

This is kind of a weak section of fence anyway, probably because of the aforementioned tight quarters and the also mentioned proximity to the road. Valentine in particular likes to hang out at the shortest part of the V (as in the photo) and push on the boards. We’ve had to repair the top slat three times. The last time, we added a vertical support and another board on the pasture side. Even with the reinforcements, though, we check that section pretty frequently.

I just want to say two things about this most recent incident: One - it seems to me that when building a fence, the fence slats should be on the “horse” side of the poles, and not the other way around. It’s much harder for the horses to push nails out that way. And two - Bill’s horse Moonshine is a big bully and picks on my poor Valentine all the time. Meanie.

Related posts:

Fence Mending (12/06)
Mending Horse Fences - Update (5/07)

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I know ya’ll up north are probably getting tired of us complaining about the “cold” weather, but you have to understand that we are desert people. We have only been in the Southeast for a little over a year, and it was not this cold here last year. It got pretty cold on a couple of nights, but we have had unrelenting below-freezing weather at night for weeks now. (In case you doubt our idea of cold, please note the photo to the right that shows the current time, date, inside temp of 56.3 and outside temp of 17.6. Ack!!) Yeah, yeah, we don’t have to shovel snow - yet - but the rest of it is getting to be a little old. Scraping ice off the windshield every morning, bundling up to go up to the barn (have you seen A Christmas Story? “I can’t put my arms down!” Ha ha ha!), leaving the water running at night so the pipes don’t freeze, picking ice from all the buckets…and poopsicles. When you pick up a shovelful of poo and drop it in the wheelbarrow and it goes CLUNK! and you’re afraid it’s going to knock a hole in the side of the wheelbarrow. That’s just plain weird. It is kind of pretty, though, with all those ice sparkles on it. (Okay, that’s even more weird.)

Anyway, suffice it to say that we are not used to this kind of weather, and still not equipped for it. Here are some tricks we’ve used to help us (and the horses) survive until spring:

• Get the stall cleaning done early. It’s so much more pleasant to muck out stalls at noon when it’s 40 degrees out than to wait until after dark when it’s 28 or so.
• Dress warm. Even if you feel silly wearing long underwear, two pairs of socks, three shirts and a dorky hat, this is one time when function should take precedence over style. Heck, we even have ski masks for when it’s really cold - you can’t get much goofier than that.
• Good gloves are a must. I personally hate to wear gloves, and my fingers are kind of short, so there’s a little extra glove past the end of my fingers that gets caught in gate latches, but warm fingers are happy fingers!
• If you don’t have bucket warmers, improvise. We often put the “barn buckets” out in the sun when we let the horses out, so the ice will be melted by the time we let them back in. Also, we sometimes fill the buckets with warm water from out bathtub right before we let them in, so they’ll have a few minutes, anyway, of water at a reasonable temp. Alternately, we’ll boil water on the stove and pour some into the cold water to warm it up a bit. It doesn’t keep it from freezing, of course, but it holds it off for a while. Bill discussed some other ideas in Horses and the Frozen Tundra of the South.

So those are some ideas. Just remember, no matter how tempting, do not set anything on fire near your barn or use any sort of radiant heat device in or near the barn. I know it’s cold, but it’s not worth the risk of burning your barn down. Oh, and one more suggestion: think back to what it was like in August when you were mucking out the stall, pouring with sweat and wishing for fall. Remember what that feeling was like and know that those days are coming again.

I can’t wait.

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This week I was looking through pictures from last year, longing for warmer days, when I found pictures of our pasture access gate. It was a rusty mess. We’ve looked at and walked through this gate a million times and couldn’t take the rust anymore. It was ugly, it made my hands red, it made noise and was in danger of disintegrating into a pile of rust. The solution was a simple one.

Our pasture has three gate access points: 1) through our back yard using this small rusty gate, 2) through our barn using a galvanized metal gate (no rust) and 3) via the road going past our place using a large rusty gate, big enough for a truck, tractor, etc. to get through. One summer day, we decided we had enough of the smaller rusty gate and picked up some primer and green Rustoleum at Walmart. The gate (pictured) took 2 cans of primer and 2 cans of paint. We selected green because it matched the color of the grass back then. What a huge difference it made in the appearance of our back yard.

A few thoughts when painting pasture fence and gate stuff:

10 months later, this gate looks about as good as it did when I painted it. Next we’ll do the big rusty gate, though it’s a lower priority since I don’t look at it every day from the house.

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