Our First Horse

“All the pretty horses come running to her. Even the dust devils pray, they’ll catch her eye.” This is one line from the lyrics of a song called “Green and Dumb” by Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers. The song is based on the hit movie and best selling novel (author Cormac McCarthy) by the same name. We find ourselves being drawn to songs about horses and the horse or cowboy lifestyle and this has always been one of our favorites.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can hear the full song below.

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers is one of our favorite bands. Their songs remind us of our southwestern heritage and the romanticized cowboy borderlands in Arizona.

As a horse-person, do you find yourself collecting songs about horses, too? If so, what are your favorites? Have you heard the song above before now?

We have a few other favorites I’ll bring up in later posts.

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If you’re a member of Facebook, please check out the Our First Horse Facebook page. While much of the same content will end of there, we’ll mostly be making shorter, quicker updates there. Don’t worry, we’ll still keeping this blog format but I often feel like sharing some small tidbit and I don’t like filling the blog up with tiny posts, especially because many of you subscribe by email and get an email notice every time we post something. With Facebook we can make those small posts and communicate back and forth with our “fans”. So please check out our page and become a fan!

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When it rains, it pours here in East Tennessee. To make winters even less pleasant, the frequent rain (January is our second rainiest month) is causing us work and making the lives of our horses a little less fun. Even though it was warm Sunday when I shot this little video, I decided to let the horses in to dry off and they seemed to appreciate it. I can’t wait until we have a few dry days to move some dirt. We knew we had some new drainage issues but the big rain storm Sunday made it seem a lot worse. I made this quick 2 minute, 26 second video to show you how muddy our place is right now. Now with voice overs! LOL. Once you get past the first few dizzy seconds, the rest of the video is pretty smooth.

So does your barn and pasture look like this right now, too?

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For the past few years we’ve been passing this junkyard on our way up to the big city for provisions. One day we noticed piles of horse poop so we paid a little more attention next time we went by. Sure enough, there was a horse in there! I have never before seen a “junkyard horse”. I wonder if he bites.

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Hey, it hasn’t been a month yet. I forgot I shot this 21 second video wishing you a Merry Christmas and I don’t want it to go to waste. Mikki found some horse reindeer ears on sale. Turns out the lights work on only one of them but they’re still cute. Our poor horses put up with the brief humiliation. The “ears” affix to their halters. No horses were harmed in the making of this video. We hope you had a great Christmas and that 2010 will be an awesome year for you and the horses you love.

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One of the first things we wanted to or needed to do with our new tractor is to move hay and it’s one of the reasons we used to justify having a tractor. Our round bale experiment was successful and now we feed mostly round hay bales to our horses throughout winter. Until now we’ve been pulling our car hauler full of round bales into our muddy pasture and then pushing a round bale off as needed. Now that we have a four wheel drive tractor, it was time to put it to work. But we needed one more thing: a hay spear. Unfortunately our tractor doesn’t have a quick-disconnect bucket. We could buy a hay spear implement for the arms but it would be a pain to unbolt and remove the bucket each time we needed a bale. While we do plan to convert our arms to use a quick-connect system, it’s a bit of a hassle up front. We’d need to buy a system and then have someone weld a bracket to our bucket. For now, we’ve opted to use a spear that connects to our bucket. We found a nice used setup on Craigslist that attaches in a way that spreads the load across a good portion of the bucket to minimize bending and yesterday we got to test it out. I’ll need some practice but it went well (see pic). At 800 or so pounds, having a bale up high like that makes the tractor a little unsteady. I left the bush hog on the rear for counterweight and lowered the bale when I cleared my trailer.

Once we have it down, I think the process will be smoother using a tractor. Do you have any experiences (good or bad) with a clip-on hay spear?

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