The Barn – Page 5 – Our First Horse

Poopsicles; or, the Hazards of Winter Horsekeeping

February 12, 2007 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

Thermometer in winter 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.

Frozen Hoses

January 27, 2007 Bill Comments 3 comments

Frozen hose with wrap We’ve had a few days where the weather has been freezing much of the time and we’re having trouble getting water through our hoses now. When we know the temperature will dip below freezing, we open the nozzle end and turn the water supply off at the spigot so when ice forms inside the hose and expands the water, it has a place to go. We also cover the spigot end with some fabric and a bucket. The pipes are already insulated. Now we don’t normally need water in the morning because we fill all the horse buckets when we clean stalls. The hoses sit out in the sun all day but lately don’t always thaw before we need to use them for water. What seems to work is not only opening the nozzle end when we’re done but also disconnecting the hose end at the spigot. It helps that our property slopes where the hose lays; the water mostly drains on it’s own. The reason this is a pain is because the spigot end always has lots of water in it so my hands/gloves always get wet and I don’t like being wet AND cold. I don’t mean to whine. I know you guys up north have it WAY colder than we do in the south. I’m just so looking forward to spring. Come on spring!

I did try one thing that helps, though. I had some pipe insulation (Home Depot or Lowes for around $2 for 6 feet) collecting dust so I wrapped it around the nozzle end of the hose (see picture above). I don’t know if it helps keep the ice away but it’s so much nicer holding onto the pipe foam than our ratty old garden hose.

Do you have any tips on dealing with garden hoses in the winter? For us, they are a necessity since we don’t have faucets everywhere we need water each day.

Always Double-Check Stall Latches

January 23, 2007 Mikki Comments 1 comment

We haven’t had any incidents recently (knock on wood), but one of our biggest fears with the horses is that they will get out of their stalls at night. This has actually happened three times – twice with Valentine, and once with Moonshine. (Not counting the time Valentine got into Moonshine’s stall.)

The first time was pretty funny. Our barn is situated so the horses’ stalls are on the side closest to the house, with their windows facing the house. When we walk up to the barn, we walk to the south side where the big door is, open the gate and go in (there is a gate at each end of the barn, one to the driveway and one to the pasture). Usually, when we round that corner the horses’ heads are poking out of the stalls into the barn “aisle” to greet us. On this particular morning, there was an entire horse in the barn aisle, munching on hay. Apparently, we (read “I”) had not latched Valentine’s stall door all the way. He didn’t seem to mind.

Just a couple of weeks later, Bill came to me one morning with our digital camera and showed me a picture on the screen. “What’s wrong with this picture?” he asked. I studied the photo of a horse grazing and suddenly realized that the pasture fence was behind the horse. “He’s on the wrong side of the fence!” I said. “She, actually,” he replied. Again, we had forgotten to check the stall door latches, this time on the outside door, and Moonshine had been wandering for who knows how long. Long enough to eat our budding corn stalks, anyway.

The last time was a fluke; Valentine actually broke his stall door open one night. But these experiences remind us: always check all your stall doors, and gates, then check them again. Better safe than sorry!

But don’t be surprised to find your horse on the wrong side of a door anyway. Some horses actually learn to open latches on their own. Ours have been nosing around the doors, and I just know we’re going to find them outside one day when we’re sure we checked those doors.

Stall Fork Preferences

December 14, 2006 Bill Comments 0 Comment

It doesn’t take long to figure out what products and procedures work well for horse chores. Last night while shoveling horse stalls (it’s more like forking horse stalls), Mikki grabbed the manure fork I normally use and I, in turn, took hers. After a few minutes, we happily swapped back again. Neither of us found it easy to work with a manure fork weren’t familiar with using. That might sound silly but we each use a different size and style fork and that makes more of a difference than I would have thought. Mikki uses a smaller fork purchased at a tack shop for around $20. It’s the typical style you see for manure duties, with a nice smooth aluminum handle. We bought the fork I use specifically for use with pellet bedding such as Woody Pet and Equine Pine. In fact, I think it’s actually manufactured by the Woody Pet people (I think they call it their “Fine Tines Fork” – around $26 at Tractor Supply). Its tines are closer together for catching small manure pieces. It’s also quite a bit larger than the one Mikki uses and as a result picks up a LOT of horse manure, which makes it quite heavy to use. For those who use sawdust or pine pellets, cleaning stalls is partly scooping big chunks of horse manure and part sifting to separate the good bedding from the little pieces of manure. The larger fork does a great job as a “sifter” since it’s deep and the sides adequately keep the payload from prematurely escaping the fork. The smaller fork Mikki uses doesn’t work as well as a sifter because the payload keeps falling off the sides. At least it does for me. Mikki has it down, though and much prefers it over the larger stall fork.

Here’s what they look like. Even though the larger one looks like it’s carrying less horse manure, remember it’s deeper. You just can’t see the depth in the photo.

On the left is the smaller fork, with the larger Woody Pet fork on the right. While shooting these pictures, I lost some of the horse manure from the fork on the left.

Incidentally, we’ve been using both stall forks for at least 6 months without any of the tines breaking. They’ve fallen down in the barn and used as rakes and shovels (not recommended) and have proven to be durable, despite being plastic. The bolt holding the fork onto the aluminum handle of the smaller one needed tightening once.

Horses, Fire and a Wood Barn

December 9, 2006 Mikki Comments 2 comments

As you all may know, we moved to the southeast from Arizona. In Arizona, fire is very, very scary. Setting a fire in your backyard and leaving it to burn is a major no-no. Here, it’s no big deal. We have an empty field across the street from our property, and the owner has spent many months clearing it. He chops down a bunch of trees, mows down weeds and sets whatever’s left on fire. Then he just leaves. No big deal. He did this shortly after we moved here, and believe me, Bill and I were fit to be tied. We let it go until it was a few yards from our other neighbor’s house, then put it out ourselves. I’m sure the natives are still giggling over that one.

Anyway, someone not too far from here is burning a big pile of something tonight. Either that or a house is on fire and no one has noticed yet. Our house smells like a casino (cigarette smoke, for those of you have never been to a casino), and there’s a haze of smoke all around. You can see a glow over one of the hills just east of here. The horses are pretty freaked out, and we’re concerned ourselves. Especially since we just locked our horses in a barn made entirely of wood.

Unfortunately, we can’t stay up all night to watch in case the fire makes it all the way over here. Normally, we might try it, but we have to take The Kid to school early in the morning, Bill is pretty sick with a cold and I’m still recovering from some other bug I caught last week. But as a precaution, rather than leave the horses’ halters and lead ropes in the tack room like we usually do, we brought them down here to the house with us. That way, just in case something were to happen, we have halters ready. We really should do that all the time, and if we had more storage here, we would. But there’s simply no space. We have a mudroom planned, though, and that would be a great place to keep a couple of emergency halters. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people keep a halter hanging outside the stall door for emergencies, but we’re too paranoid for that. It feels too much like leaving the keys in the car.

So that’s our emergency plan, such that it is. It’s kind of a short-term plan, but we really need to have an emergency plan in place, and so should you. In our case, we need to worry about fire, tornado or nuclear fallout. Think about what might happen (even a remote possibility) and plan accordingly.

As usual, more on that later. For now, we have the teeny-tiny chance that the fire that may or may not still be burning a half-mile away could possibly spread to our barn covered. Whew.

Horses and the frozen tundra of the South

December 5, 2006 Bill Comments 0 Comment

Today was the coldest day yet in east Tennessee. Actually, there have been colder days since we’ve lived here but not since we’ve had horses. Lows at night are in the lower 20’s and we’ve had some wind. Although my Arizona butt hasn’t quite acclimated to winters that are actually cold, our horses seem to have adapted nicely. Both Moonshine and Valentine have thick fuzzy winter coats and despite our attempts to shelter them from the cold, they seem to prefer it to being stuck in the barn.

One thing I’m not familiar with is frozen water buckets. Yesterday and today both I’ve gone out to discover all of our animal water buckets had almost an inch of ice on top. I was expecting this but I’m not yet sure what to do about it. Most of the buckets aren’t near any power source so a bucket heater or bucket de-icer doesn’t seem like it would work for us. We could use an extension cord but that increases the possibility of a barn fire. I’m also concerned with our horses nibbling on the wires, though it seems like the heated buckets use steel wire wrapped cords to prevent nibbling. I saw a product called Thermo Bucket that uses a simple insulated float but it looks too thin to drink from. Maybe it’s just a bad picture. So we’re looking for a solution, mostly for in the barn stalls. The ice in the outside bucket I can break up effectively and it sits in the sun most of the day.

Because we baby our horses, the subject of horse blankets has come up, too. Mikki is interested in trying them but I’m skeptical. Besides yet another horse expense, I wonder if the blanket would stay on for very long. I can see Moonshine rolling in the dirt to get it off. Plus I wonder if it’s even needed. Here comes the old “horses in the wild don’t need that” argument. But it’s true. How many horse blankets do you see in those pictures of wild horses running in the Montana snow? None. Of course, horses in the wild probably don’t live as long as our pampered domesticated horses. But even when it was 26 degrees (F) outside, neither horse shivered or showed any signs of wanting to seek shelter. I did see Valentine galloping around more than usual. Maybe it was to warm up, maybe he just felt frisky. But no blankets for now.

In our barn, the outside stall windows are now closed for cold weather, though the ends of the barn remain open as we have no doors. We’re considering adding doors but it won’t be anytime soon.

Let me take a minute to say that I do realize 26 degrees isn’t that cold. Many, if not most of you live somewhere that has harsher winters than we experience in Tennessee. That whole “frozen tundra of the South” thing was a stretch, to be sure. It doesn’t get much colder than this except in the mountains.

900 pounds of horse manure!

November 20, 2006 Bill Comments 4 comments

It all began with me wondering how much horse manure I shovel each day. So armed with a fish scale (a scale with a handle and a hook used for weighing fish), I filled a few buckets with manure tonight, subtracted the weight of the bucket and discovered that I shovel around 30 pounds of horse manure daily for my 1,000-pound horse, Moonshine. Tomorrow I’ll measure our 1,200-pound horse, Valentine. So just for fun, here are some other measurements to help put things into perspective. Remember, this is for my horse Moonshine only:

Output (manure only)

30 lbs. daily
900 lbs. monthly (almost half a ton)
10,950 lbs. annually (almost 5.5 tons)

*note: this is manure that’s about half a day old. As it dries, I’d guess the weight drops dramatically. Also note this only covers manure inside her stall, where she spends 8-10 hours a day.

Input (food and water)

80 lbs. water daily (10 gallons) or 29,200 lbs. annually (3,650 gallons/14.6 tons)
10 lbs. hay daily or 3,650 lbs. annually (almost 2 tons)
1.5 lbs. oats daily or 548 lbs. annually

*note: hay figure does not include hay fed in pasture. Grazing on grass not included. Does include water consumed in pasture.

Wow, so I’m shoveling about 5.5 tons a year in manure. Horse chores provide good exercise! As my biceps grow I’m looking forward to answering the question “wow, what’s your secret?” with “horse manure!”.

Protecting Wooden Stall Doors – Part 1

November 12, 2006 Bill Comments 2 comments

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:

and after:

For an update, see below.

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

Becoming a Horse Person

November 2, 2006 Mikki Comments 4 comments

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:

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.

Those are My Oats! And Those, and Those…

October 19, 2006 Mikki Comments 0 Comment

We recently had a recurrence of a problem with Valentine (see Getting a Room). As you know if you’ve read this blog, we have a mare and a gelding. We have a three-horse barn and their stalls are next to each other. Every once in awhile, Valentine for one reason or another decides that he wants to be in her stall. (As for what that reason might be, well, he is a guy – it’s either food or…well, this is a family show.) Since he’s 16.2 hands high (that’s 64.8 inches in people talk) and weighs about 1200 pounds, and there’s an inch of wood slats and a few nails and screws between him and his destination, it’s not too hard for him to accomplish his goal. So a few days ago, we came up to the barn to find one less plank of wood between their stalls. Again.

So this time, in addition to replacing the nails with screws, we took the simple but effective step of switching their stalls. The wall between their stalls is formed by vertical slats nailed to two horizontal planks, one at the top and one at the bottom. Moonshine’s stall was the smooth side of the wall; the nail heads were on her side. So Valentine could simply push on the boards and presto! Out popped the nails and down went the boards. By putting him in the stall with the smooth side, it made it much harder for him to remove the planks because he would have to actually break the boards. Of course, if he wanted to, he could easily do it, but shhhh…don’t tell him that.

Anyway, Valentine’s now in the middle stall and Moonshine is in the first stall. Unfortunately, after months of it being the other way around, we were bound to forget the new routine, and tonight we did. We opened the gate and let Moonshine into the middle stall. We could have just left her there, I suppose, but we really didn’t want to risk yet another replay of Getting a Room. At the very least, it’s a pain to put those boards back up, and the worst-case scenario is an injury to one or both of our horses.

So we needed to switch her into the other stall. Let me tell you, that was easier said than done. There were OATS in the feed trough. Once her head was in there, she wasn’t letting them go. Since we don’t leave halters on our horses (I’ll have to post the reasons for that someday), I couldn’t just grab her and pull her out of the stall. We tried to get her out of the stall by pushing her around. Normally that would work, because she’s actually very obedient, but have I mentioned that she really likes OATS? She wasn’t budging. I risked life and limb and stood in front of the bucket to keep her away from the oats while Bill tried to lure her out with a handful of oats, but she’s no dummy. Trade 2 cups of oats for about a tablespoon? Come on. Eventually, Bill went for the halter while I tried to keep Moonshine from eating my jacket till he got back. We got the halter on and pulled her out of that stall into the right stall with no problem, and let a very anxious Valentine into his stall to discover if there were any oats left for him. Needless to say, that bucket required a refill.

Our First Horse

A family's experience with first-time horse ownership, since 2006.

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