Hobby Farm Life

My husband and I knew when we bought our property, it needed a lot of work, especially to make it horse safe. Now that I can walk outside without the threat of freezing my ears off, I'm considering which projects I need to focus on this spring.  My main focus will be working on the pasture. So, let's have a look.

The back part of the pasture

 Right now I have a single strand of hot tape on step in posts.  The pony can and has jumped this line. Most of the time he doesn't care because he's all "OMG GRASS!!!"  There is also barbed wire on the property line along with some wire fencing.  The wire can stay, but I need to get the barbed wire out.  Then the trees.  There are a few cherry trees we had to cut down last fall that are in the pasture area.

The front area.

 Many years ago, someone leased the pasture area and had horses here.  They put up woven wire fence and a strand of barbed wire on top. Since then, that line of trees grew around all the fencing. Last spring I manged to get all that out but pieces still remain in the trees.  I just ordered some electric rope and insulators and will probably start there.  There's a pile of fence boards that need to go up. Also, some IBC totes that I want to use as rain barrels and some other experiments.

Pony in the mist.

 Along with warmer weather comes rain and mud. Max's paddock is a muddy swamp.  Last night he was slipping and spooking himself. He was huffing and puffing when he came to get his grain, but seemed okay. 

2014 in review

This is going to be a difficult post to write,  because I don't feel like Max and I accomplished much of anything.  I tend not to set concrete goals, and 2014 was no exception. There was a goal floating around in my head of getting the boy into shape. But most of them were goals made on the fly when a problem crept up.

Max came home right before Christmas in 2013. One of my goals was just to feel confident riding him out of the paddock and pasture. The pasture still isn't fenced, but the trees that grew along the old fence line provide a sense of security.  I'll have to write another post on the progress we are making on getting our property in shape.  I think I accomplished this goal pretty quickly given the crazy winter we had. 

After the big winter storm in early January 2014. Riding outside of the pasture to go see if the roads had been plowed.

Some other things we've been working on is mud. He hates it.  We have a tiny ditch that drains into our creek that gets muddy. I spent a half hour one day trying to get him to walk through this muddy ditch instead of jumping it.  We finally stopped when he took off cantering towards the pasture and I fell off. Thankfully he stopped when I managed to fall in front of him. I still don't know if he will walk through that ditch when it's muddy. Shortly after that it got pretty dry and he's walked through it without any problems. 

Then there's the creek.  I'm counting this as a true accomplishment. In the spring, we had to fight to get down into the creek.  He truly doesn't have a problem with water. Rather, I think it's the muddy bank.  He would refuse to get in under saddle, but would follow me right in when leading him.  Now he goes in without much of a fuss.  It probably doesn't hurt that there are tasty water grasses on the other side and I let him eat these. 

One other minor accomplishment that happened very recently is leg yielding.  I'm not good with working with him on specific tasks, but the last saddled ride we had, I realized he was beginning to move off my leg.  We even did some turns on the hind and fore on the fence line.  

We didn't have any lessons together, and didn't get off our property last year, but at least we accomplished something.