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Posts that talk about the barn.

Why Are Barns Made of Wood?

Why Are Barns Made of Wood?

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Horse stall latch

Seriously. You take a couple of 1000+ pound animals with sharp tools on their feet and put them in a structure made of wood and held together with a few thin pieces of metal, and there are going to be incidents. Take our adventure a few weeks ago, and then what happened last night.

Our barn is about 100 yards from our house, and we’re fairly deep sleepers. Luckily for us (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), we have three canine sensors with keen hearing who aren’t afraid to let us know if something is amiss, at least in their tiny little minds. Like at 4:00 this morning, when Jack, the oldest, went nuts barking. Usually, this means that the neighbor dogs down the hill, who live outside, are barking – why we need to know this, I don’t know, but he doesn’t like to miss any opportunity to bark. But when he’s insistent, like he was this time, we always check it out. Bill pointed out later that any good farmer would have been checking it out by standing on the porch with a shotgun in his hand, but we prefer to do it by peeking out the windows in our jammies.

On this occasion, there did appear to be something actually amiss – there was some loud banging coming from the barn. Bill looked out every window that offers a view of the barn, but couldn’t see anything, and that includes horses. There were no horses to be seen. Finally, he ventured out on the back porch, sans shotgun, just in time to see the outer door of Valentine’s stall – which in addition to being latched is nailed shut – fly open and reveal Valentine on his back with legs flailing in the air. He ran back to tell me (I wasn’t fully awake yet) and we started pulling clothes and shoes on. I ran up to the barn to see Valentine standing outside his stall, looking pretty much normal, although a bit surprised.

Unfortunately, the outside door of his stall is surrounded by stuff – the tub to a utility trailer and a pile of fence rails. There is no way a horse can get out of there without jumping. He’s apparently not much of a jumper and decided to turn around. I don’t know how he managed it in that small space, but he did. He went back in his stall and I followed him in. We checked him from head to toe, and with the exception of some bleeding from a pre-existing wound and being pretty sweaty and caked with what I’ll politely call “dirt,” nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We let him and the mare out into the pasture, 4 hours early, and investigated the area to try to figure out what happened.

The evidence: A dirty, sweaty but uninjured horse standing outside his stall; spilled water bucket next to the stall door, still hanging on the hook; open stall door with scuff marks and small gouges on the inside; and stall door latch ripped off, found about 15 feet away from stall door. Also, Bill’s observation of said horse laying on his back in the stall with his legs in the air.

Conclusion: Valentine laid down and at some point maneuvered himself into a position where he couldn’t easily get up. This caused him to panic, so he flailed those long legs around so violently that he burst his stall door open. After it was open, he managed to get himself up, only to discover that, hey! There’s a door open! So he wandered out into the small space but couldn’t go any further.

So, we fixed the stall door and moved the debris. Hey, if the mare can wander around in the middle of the night and eat grass, Valentine should too, right? Actually, we just thanked our lucky stars that he didn’t injure himself on the stuff out there and moved it just in case it happened again.

This brought up an issue we’ve been wrestling with: barn security. A previous owner had, as I mentioned, nailed the outside stall door latches shut. This is good in a way because it’s hard for someone to sneak your horses out that particular door. It’s also bad in case of an emergency – what if the barn is on fire and you can’t get the horses out through the inside doors? There is a fine line between keeping your horses (which are, let’s face it, valuable property) secure and being prepared to get them out of the barn at a moment’s notice. A lot of people keep an inexpensive halter hanging outside each stall door in case of emergency. We find ourselves unable to do this, for fear of making horse theft that much easier.

For a future installment: Ways to protect your horse from theft and get it back if it is stolen, e.g. branding and microchipping.

Horse Bed, Bath and Dining Room

Horse Bed, Bath and Dining Room

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Mikki’s parents are visiting this week and while we were up at the barn, her dad comments “so this is their bedroom and bathroom”. Ha, I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. Their stalls are a combination of a bedroom, bathroom and dining room, really. Okay, now I’m glad I’m not a horse.

That’s it, carry on. I just thought it was an interesting observation.

Getting A Room

Getting A Room

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Sharing a stall damangeHaving a boy horse and a girl horse is interesting, even if it’s a mare (can make baby horses) and a gelding (can’t make baby horses). They still go through most of the motions, especially her and it’s obvious to me she gets quite frustrated when our gelding doesn’t show as much interest as a stallion would. But still they flirt. They nibble eat other, posture and he’s sorta interested. When they’re near the barn I usually tell them to get a room. Well…this week they did that.

The night before it happened we were outside roasting marshmallows and I thought I heard banging in the barn. I went to investigate and I swear the horses were looking out of their stall, whistling, as if to say “nothing to see here, move along human”. I looked around and saw nothing. The next morning I get up, walk to the barn and notice troublemaker Valentine’s head poking out of Moonshine’s stall. When I got to the stall I saw her in the background, eyes wide open as if to say “I told him we’d get in trouble…IT WAS ALL HIM!”. That banging was apparently Valentine, our big gelding, kicking the boards between his stall and hers (see pic). Upon closer inspection, I can’t see how he got through there, as he’s wider than the opening.

So I let the horses out and we re-installed the boards, this time with screws.

Now as funny as this is, a few things have me concerned:

  1. I’ve heard horses shouldn’t be in the same stall, even if the stall is pretty large. They’re big, powerful and not graceful in small places.
  2. The displaced stall boards were laying on the ground with the nails poking up. Most of the nails were bent over so I imagine they stepped on them.
  3. Even with strong screws, if this 16.3 hand gelding wants to visit my mare, a few screws and a 3/4 inch wood slat isn’t going to stop him. I hope this isn’t a trend.

Oh, and to be fair I see how she encourages him so my mare isn’t the least bit innocent in this incident.

Barn Snakes – Everyone Should Have One

Barn Snakes – Everyone Should Have One

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Photo by Bradley Brister on Unsplash

Our chicken snake - WillyOn the EWWW! scale (ha ha), this one is way up there.

So, one of our sudden thunderstorms was brewing and since our horses think they will melt in the rain, I went up to the barn to let them in. By the time I got there, it was really coming down – a real gullywasher, as we call it in the desert, or as they call it here, a frog strangler. Since we had put off cleaning out the stalls until right before bedtime, as usual, it wasn’t done. I decided to let them in anyway, since it wasn’t too bad in there and I figured they’d rather be in a dirty stall than out in a downpour. So I opened the mare’s stall and the gate, and she came on in but veered off to the hay. Fine. I let him into his stall with no problem and turned my attention back to the mare. She would not go into her stall. Then I noticed a pile of poo right in the entryway. “How on earth did she get that there?” I wondered, peering at it closely. Then suddenly the pile of poo uncoiled and slithered across her stall, under the wall into the adjoining stall (not Valentine’s, thank goodness, or we’d still be repairing it). Ew, ew, ew!!! Of course, the mare agreed with me, and still wouldn’t go in there. I finally ended up cleaning out the stall and coaxing her in with food. She very reluctantly entered. Between the thunderstorm and the serpent, she was a bit twitchy.

Then I tried to find the snake. It was nowhere to be found. Well, out of sight, out of mind, right? It was still raining to beat the band, but the horses needed water too, so I ran out into the rain, around the side of the barn where their windows are and the buckets are hung…and stopped short. There, on the barn “veranda,” all stretched out watching the rainstorm, was our snake. Ew, ew, ew again!! He didn’t seem to notice me so I took a good look, so I could research the thing and find out what kind of snake he was. He was black and grey and knobby, very thin, and did not have a “viper” head. So I tapped his tail with my shoe and he slithered under a nearby woodpile. I then, very quickly and keeping a close eye on said woodpile, filled the buckets and ran back to the house.

That evening we had a church supper, so we asked our preacher and the gentleman he was talking to about our snake. We were assured that he is a harmless chicken snake and we should let him be because he’ll eat vermin. (I personally think he’s vermin too, but whatever.) We could have accepted this if Mr. Watson hadn’t gone on to tell us tales of 7-foot long chicken snakes, and snakes in beds, and other bone-tingling snake stories. When we got home, I did some internet research and discovered that what the people around here call a chicken snake is actually a rat snake, and can indeed reach the 7-foot mark. Here’s what our barn visitor looks like:

The Common Rat Snake

We call him Willy, because he gives us the willies. Bill thought a silly name would make the snake less scary.

A week after the first and only sighting, and with silly name dispensed, Bill can still barely set foot in the barn.

Death to Flies!

Death to Flies!

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No to flies!
Fly photo by Manlake Gabriel on Unsplash

Time for a report on fly control. First, a little history.

When we first got Valentine, it was the dead of winter. It was very cold, and we were very new to all aspects of horsekeeping, including manure management. We didn’t have a clue what to do with the poo he filled his stall with every day. So, what we did was…and I’m embarrassed to admit this…chuck the manure over the wall of Valentine’s stall into the stall next to his. It was meant to be temporary until we figured out what to do with it long-term. We don’t do that anymore – but there’s still a pretty big pile in the vacant stall. The thing is, we have a really nice trailer to load it up in and take it out to the pasture. But we had to disassemble that trailer to get it onto the other trailer to move it out here (Bill has a “thing” for trailers). And we haven’t found the bolts to put it back together again. So it sits in pieces next to the barn and the pile of manure sits in the vacant stall awaiting the assembly of the trailer. It’s a sad, sad cycle.

Anyway…so knowing that there would be a lot of fly attractant sitting around the barn (and by the way, we are moving it out a wheelbarrow at a time, but it takes a while), we knew we’d have to be pretty aggressive with fly control. We decided on a multi-faceted approach:

Feed-through fly control. As the name implies, this is a supplement that you add to their feed. There are several different kinds. Solitude IGR, EquiTrol, SimpliFly and similar products contain a horse-safe chemical that is passed through the intestinal tract into the manure where flies lay their eggs, preventing the formation of the larvae’s exoskeleton when they molt (gross, huh – but they are FLIES). There are also a few herbal-type supplements that are supposed to make your horse unappealing to biting insects, such as Inside-Out. (I’m thinking of trying one of those myself, I’m entirely too tasty to mosquitoes and such.) We chose a formulation offered by a local feed store. It’s of the first variety, the exoskeleton knocker-outer. We add 1 teaspoon to their food every night, and they don’t complain. We’ve been feeding it to Valentine for about two months now with no problems.

Fly Parasites. It sounds strange, but we bought bugs to eat other bugs. Not only that, but these fly parasites look like tiny little flies themselves. But instead of harassing your horse (and you), they eat fly pupae. Yummy! We ordered them by mail through Arbico Organics (there are several companies that sell these). They send a batch of Fly Eliminators once a month. The first batch we got was already hatching; the new batch we got last week isn’t hatching yet, but once the bugs start hatching, you open up the bag they’re in, distribute them at dusk around places where flies might want to lay eggs, and let them go to town. We see no flies around our giant manure pile, so I tend to think they are working quite well.

Spot-On Fly Control. If you have dogs, you’ve probably used a product like this to repel ticks and fleas. It comes in a little tube that you squeeze on your pet from neck to tail. For dogs, it comes in a 1 ml tube; for horses, 10 ml. We use Equispot. You squeeze one ml on the poll, one ml on the back of each leg, then the remaining 5 ml along the back from ear to the top of the tail. Frankly, I’m not impressed with this product – the flies don’t seem to be deterred from any of these areas at all, and still congregate around their eyes. But I haven’t stopped using it to see if it will make a difference, either.

Fly Sprays. We started using a fly spray to supplement the Equispot about a week ago. There was a lot of stamping going on – the horses were frequently stamping the ground to shake flies off, and this can actually cause injury to the horse – so we spray their legs with Bronco Fly Spray before they go out in the morning. The first day, we tried to do it after they were already out in the pasture. I don’t recommend that, because they’re not fond of being sprayed with anything, and it’s a lot harder to aim the spray when they’re moving out in the open than when they’re in a 12’x12′ stall.

Wound Care. Flies are unfortunately attracted to open wounds. Your horse is going to get owies, and you, of course, don’t want to spray a strong insecticide on an open wound – that would really sting. There are fly repellants especially formulated for open wounds. Since they’re “gentle,” they’re also good for, ahem, sensitive areas. Our poor horses were being eaten alive on their bellies, so I posted a message on Horse City’s forum asking for advice. I was told to use SWAT ointment. It is also working very well.

There are other options as well: good old-fashioned fly strips, bug zappers, and fly masks. We haven’t tried any of these yet, but we may in the future. In the meantime, we’ll continue our current methods of fly mass murder.

Death to all flies!

Carpenter Bees Attack!

Carpenter Bees Attack!

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Carpenter bee closeup

As a kid, I recall spring and summer brought lots of bees. I specifically remember these huge bees and how they would bore holes into our wooden fences. They never seemed to do any harm to me so I left them alone. Now that as grownups we’ve moved from the city to the country and spring is upon us, I started noticing these huge bees here in Tennessee. There have been a lot of them around our house and barn (both structures have wood siding) but since the bees haven’t been bothering us, I didn’t pay much attention. That is until I noticed the number of holes they were drilling into our house and barn.

Carpenter Bee Damage

These holes are BIG (almost dime size) and there are a lot of them. But I really paid attention after doing some research on the Internet. The one or two-inch deep hole we’re seeing is only a tiny part of the tunnel they bore. That tunnel takes a 90-degree turn and can continue anywhere from 4 inches to 10 feet, depending on how many bees use it. Obviously this kind of tunneling can cause serious structural damage. So now we’re on the hunt to kill carpenter bees. Here are some interesting things we’ve learned:

  • Females drill the holes and are the only ones with stingers.
  • Males are very aggressive but do not have stingers so they can do little harm.
  • Adult carpenter bees “overwinter” (hibernate?) in these tunnels and then emerge in spring to mate and drill some more.
  • Insecticides can easily kill the bees but it’s difficult to eradicate the eggs those bees have already laid. Dusting with carbaryl (Sevin) seems to be most effective against infestation and re-infestation since applied dust can travel through the tunnels. This can kill the bees and help de-hydrate larvae the following season. Dusters are available at many hardware stores for around $15.
  • Some wait until fall to plug-up treated holes but holes should be plugged after the adult bees are dead.
  • Prevention includes diligent treatment of existing infestation as well as painting wood surfaces. Carpenter bees seem to prefer unpainted, untreated wood. Wood stain doesn’t seem to help, but pressure-treated wood does.

So now we’re spending an hour or two every week working on this carpenter bee problem. In our barn alone, which is a six-stall barn (pictures later), I must have dusted 50 holes so far. Uggg.

For more information, the following link was helpful to us and there are a lot of articles on Google:

Ohio State University Extension – Carpenter Bees, HYG-2074-94

Serta or Tempurpedic?

Serta or Tempurpedic?

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Handful of pellets

At some point – preferably before you get your horse, but at least soon after – you will have to decide what kind of bedding you want to use for your horse. Of course your horse’s comfort is an important consideration, but since, unlike your dog’s bed, this bedding won’t just be slept on – that’s right, horses are not “housebroken” – there are other considerations too, such as absorbency and siftability (is that a real word, or did I just make one up?).  When you greet your beautiful, elegant equine companion in the morning, you will see that he made a small project for you to work on that day. More likely, two or three projects. He probably even has some stuck to his face. Sweet.

There are several options for horse bedding, beginning with the base – the stall floor. Our barn floor is just plain old dirt, but some barns have permanent flooring. You can also put in rubber floors – we are looking into that. They are easier to keep clean than dirt, and more comfortable for your horse than dirt or cement.

On top of whatever kind of floor you have, you need the multi-purpose bedding. This should provide comfort for your horse and absorb whatever he may leave in there for you to muck out. There are basically three choices: straw, wood shavings, and wood pellets.

Straw is the classic barn bedding. Upsides: It’s cheap and easy. I think it’s pretty comfortable too – we used it at first, and Valentine never complained. Downsides: it’s not very absorbent, and it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak…when you go for the poo, you get a lot of straw too.

We haven’t used wood shavings for Valentine, but we do use them for our goat, Joey. They work great for Joey, because he hardly ever uses his little house as an outhouse, so one pack of shavings lasts forever. Upsides: They smell great, and cedar shavings, at least, naturally repel fleas. Downsides: We didn’t try these because we decided they wouldn’t be cost-effective. You’d have to buy a lot to fill a stall, and replace the soiled bedding with new shavings at a pretty good clip.

We finally settled on wood pellets. There are several brands out there. When we were researching this topic, the brand we found was Woody Pet. They don’t sell this brand anywhere nearby, but we checked at our local feed stores and co-ops and found a similar product sold under different names, such as Equine Pine and Eagle Valley ABM Advanced Bedding Management. We also asked other horse owners and the people at the feed stores and co-ops, and the consensus seems to be that this stuff is the best thing since sliced bread. So we shoveled out all the straw and put in six bags of wood pellets…

Pouring bedding pellets
We emptied six bags of Equine Pine into the 12×12 horse stall.

…watered them down to fluff them up per instructions…

Fluffy bedding
After watering the pellets turned to almost a sawdust consistency.

…and presto! Soft, fluffy, absorbent and sweet-smelling bedding! Which equals a sweeter-smelling horse. If you love on your horse like I do, you’ll appreciate that.

Equally importantly, the stall cleans up faster and easier than ever before. The sawdust – which is what you end up with after you wet the pellets down – sifts right through the fork and all you’re shoveling out is poo. The urine soaks into the sawdust until the sawdust has reached maximum absorbing capacity, then it clumps together and you can shovel it right out. My big sweetie always pees in exactly the same place, so I just shovel that spot out every couple of days and add more.

Barn Shoes…Make That Barn Clothes

Barn Shoes…Make That Barn Clothes

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Barn shoes

When I thought about writing this post, I was planning on discussing the fact that every horse owner who does their own horse management duties is quickly going to learn they need an old pair of shoes for working in the barn. That, of course, is true, though I might add that if you don’t already have a pair of barn shoes, worry not as the barn will claim the first pair you wear. This past Saturday, Mikki, the Kid and I spent time catching up on chores since it was warm and sunny outside. By the end of the evening, we were sore and our clothes were pretty dirty. If you haven’t already done so, plan on setting aside a pair of old shoes, some old T-shirts and yucky jeans. Heck, we’re thinking about buying some overalls, too, since, you know, we live out in the country and all. Dogs will run through the mud and then jump up on you, your horse will take a drink and then slobber buckets of dirty water on your clean shirt, a glob of fresh horsey poo will surely drop off the manure scoop onto your hat (get a hat!) as you’re cleaning a stall and even more glamorous things you’ve never thought of will happen, so trust me on this one. Your barn shoes will be subjected to corrosive ammonia and stinky mud, some of which may never come off. You should also consider investing in a decent pair of mucking boots. On those rainy days, your feet will stay drier and you’ll thank me when that large pile you haven’t cleaned up yet doesn’t ooze onto your socks. Some people opt for steel-toed shoes or boots but I’m not planning on cleaning Valentine’s stall when he’s in there so I’m going to skip those.

I no longer associate ammonia with cleanliness

I no longer associate ammonia with cleanliness

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I’ve heard scent is the strongest trigger for memories. Mikki’s been under the weather the past few days so I’ve been cleaning Valentine’s stall. These past few weeks a childhood memory flashes to my mind every time I enter his stall. I don’t know why but I keep thinking of my mom cleaning our house when I was a child. She must have been cleaning glass or something because I don’t think ammonia is used very often in cleaning these days. Apparently equine urine contains a lot (cough cough) of ammonia. As I was laying down some straw to soak up the horse urine I realized I can no longer associate the smell of ammonia vapor with something being clean. Just the opposite!

I’ve read that ammonia vapor is one of the reason you need to be diligent about cleaning your horse stall at least every day, especially if your horse sleeps there. Your horse will lay down in the stall to sleep. If you don’t clean up the urine regularly, he/she breathes the ammonia gas and that can be harmful or in some cases even fatal.

Incidentally, dry straw doesn’t soak up urine very well. I’ve heard about some kind of fluffy wood pellet thingies you can use to soak it up better than straw and I’m thinking we should start experimenting. More on that later.