The horse owner’s garden – Part 2
You may recall we decided to garden this year with special attention being paid to food horses would like. That was months ago so it’s time for an update. Until the heatwave that is gripping the south started a few weeks ago, our garden was loaded with fruit and vegetables and I’d be kidding you if I said they were all for horses. This year we mostly planted carrots for them but since we learned how much our horses love watermelon, we’ve saved some of those for them, too. All these things take time, lots of weeding and sweat. Buying vegetables at the store is so much easier, though less satisfying. But I did find one thing that’s easy to grow in our garden and VERY low maintenance:
I’m here to tell ya, the easiest horse-friendly garden crop is…GRASS. This time last year, our garden was part of our lawn. One of our neighbors had mercy on us and brought his tractor over to turn the garden this spring, saving us a heap of manual labor. The tractor dug in deep and turned the soil up nicely but months later that grass figured out which end was up and thrived in our little garden. We didn’t weed for a week and the grass and weeds took over! I cut some of the grass with some hand clippers and gave the horses some and they seemed to like it as much as the carrots. Why the heck are we working so hard to produce veggies for them when they love the grass so much and it’s so easy to grow?
Seriously though, we have a tub of carrots we’ve harvested and they love them. I wish they were a little faster growing but we’ll be planting them again next year. Watermelon, too. The heatwave and lack of rain have all but killed our garden now so I guess the summer gardening season is over but we’re already planning for next year and our horses will continue to influence what we plant.
Did you grow some things for your horse this year?
Last weekend, we attended a major socio-economic event, a veritable cultural phenomenon: 
A few days after our 
Talk about an exciting evening! We stayed up late tonight because it’s Friday and we’re night owls. At 11:21 someone pulled into our driveway. Someone coming by unexpectedly that late at night is rarely good news, and this was no exception. It was the father of our horse friends, the Watsons, wondering if we were missing a couple of horses. Bill, who answered the door, said no, of course not. Why would we be missing any horses? “Say…what color are they?” “Black,” replied Mr. Watson. Uh oh. It suddenly occurred to Bill that we had put our goats out in the pasture earlier and when we brought them back through the gate to return them to their pen, we might, just possibly, have forgotten to close the gate.
Our garden is doing so well this year! A little too well, in fact, at least as far as the melon goes. We’re kind of newbies to the gardening thing as well as the horse thing (I did grow up in the Arizona desert, after all), so we’re making mistakes. Here’s one: when the seed packet says to thin the seedlings once they sprout, you really ought to follow that instruction. Bill thought the new watermelon and cantaloupe plants looked a little puny, so he left all five of them. On each mound of plants. All four of them. That’s right, we have 10 watermelon plants and 10 cantaloupe plants – in a garden that’s about 20′ by 25′. It’s now actually a melon patch with a few other plants struggling to maintain a foothold. Our pastor described it best when he compared it to kudzu.
Our new farrier, “J”, came out on Thursday, and we are cautiously optimistic. First of all, he showed up on time, which was a pleasant surprise. He brought his teenage son as an assistant, and they were both polite, friendly and quietly competent. Both horses were less of a pain than usual (although it’s possible that we woke them up when we called them up to the barn); because of that, and the fact that he had help, it took him a good 45 minutes less than it did G. Their feet look great, and J guarantees that the shoes will stay on for at least six weeks – he’ll come out and replace any shoe that falls off before then, no matter what the reason. We didn’t even know farriers offered that kind of guarantee; G was going to charge us $20 to replace the shoe Valentine lost after only 2 weeks – if he had ever shown up, that is.
I’m no expert, but personally, I think it’s better for a horse to be barefoot, if at all possible. It just seems more natural, and it’s still a little creepy to watch the farrier nail a hunk of metal onto my horse’s hoof. However, there are many good reasons to shoe a horse, and for several of those reasons, our horses stay shod (or at least, they’re supposed to). Here are our reasons: