Natural defenses

Storm Virgil may be messing with us now, but Saturday could not have been more beautiful. And Friday wasn't so bad either.

Not to squander the opportunity, I spent the two day winter respite in a marathon of yard work. I felt the pain Sunday, but it felt good to make some progress on the spring to do list.

First up, clearing the downed trees in one of the new pastures. When we built the barn last fall, we probably cut down 15 trees in the near vicinity. One or two, a beautiful mature pine and a nice tulip poplar, had to go because they were smack dab in the way. But the rest were sacrificed for safety reasons -- wild cherries (poisonous), a black walnut (can cause founder), some honey locusts (the thorns from hell). (Not to worry, we still have dozens of each left. Sigh.) We didn't get them all cleared away before winter hit. Three cherries still lay in the new pasture. I managed to clear two completely. One remains.

In addition to clearing the downed trees, I was able to prune an ancient apple tree and two old peach trees. I think the peaches will have to go, there just wasn't much to save on either tree, but the apple tree is huge, healthy, and produced very tasty apples last year. I also took another stab at shearing the thorns of one of the honey locusts out in the pasture. The thorns came off like a dream with my new pruning saw, but created quite the nasty pile on the ground that I haven't cleaned up yet.

Those thorns on the honey locust are just frightening. When I was researching ways to deal with them, I read a theory that the tree evolved the thorns to keep wooly mammoths and other tall prehistoric creatures from eating them.  Apparently the thorns don't appear any higher than 15 feet or so, even on a 40 foot tree. So the theory goes. As I wound up my work, with the evening settling around me, I checked out my trees, trying to decide if I believed that theory. I discovered this.


It's a squirrel's nest, buried in the middle of the thorns about 10 feet off the ground. Truly this has got to be the Fort Knox of squirrels' nests. I would never have recognized it under all the bristle, save for catching the gleam of one small squirrel eye, watching me as I worked. Unfortunately, my iPhone doesn't capture that detail.

The squirrel was frozen in place while I scrabbled around the tree and at first I thought maybe it was some ancient petrified remains like I find every so often around here -- somehow impaled or imprisoned in the tree. How on earth could it have gotten up that scary trunk and into that hidey hole?

I found out soon enough. When I walked away, the poor squirrel, feeling stalked maybe, dashed up the trunk, across the high, thornless branches, into a neighboring tree and down to the ground as fast as he could. I watched him go. He eventually evicted a downey woodpecker from a hole high in a smooth-barked silver maple behind the house.

Apparently Fort Knox wasn't his taste. He preferred a penthouse suite.

Out of whack

Three hours holding ponies for the farrier this morning. In the cold. Can't feel my hands or feet. And it's the end of MARCH!

Eighteen degrees when we woke up, this second day of spring. Water buckets were frozen again  (#*!@^).  The norm here is more like lows of 30-35 degrees this time of year. Overall we are about 5 degrees colder than normal for the month so far. That number is on track to be even bigger, considering the forecast for the next week. More cold, more snow.

Crazy spring cold this year.
Crazy spring heat last year.
Crazy drought last summer.
Crazy rain the year before.
Crazy wind last summer.
What's next?
No jet stream at all?

See, I thought global warming was going to be a gradual, barely perceptible shift a few degrees up the scale. A shift we ordinary folk wouldn't even notice unless a climatologist pointed it out...after the fact.

Instead we're getting these crazy pendulum swings from one extreme to the other, suggesting anything but a gradual shift. More like an equilibrium point shifting into chaos (Um, chaos in the technical sense -- not going for hyperbole here. Hardly seems necessary.) I find it all pretty disconcerting.

Oy. What craziness will summer bring?

I say potato, you say potahto

Not everybody minds the mud....

Presenting ponies after a day outside.


Annie, the fancy little carriage horse. Dirty only up to her dainty little fetlocks.

Thyme, the wild child. Dirty all over.  I think she went swimming in it. 

When a drylot becomes a mud lot

I've been thinking a lot, and none too optimistically, about mud lately. I'm consoled somewhat by The Contrary Farmer's take on the topic today. At least I'm not alone. His solution is to keep livestock small and well-distributed over the land. Small farms, small beasts.

You'd think I'd be well-prepared to handle the problem then. Small ponies, small goats. Four pound chickens for crying out loud -- they hardly generate any mud at all. But there's a catch-22 with equines. Since I have more ponies than horses at the home barn, I can't use grass to hold the dirt. I can't rotate from one grass pasture to another. I can't simply let the horses out to pasture, no matter how small they are. To prevent laminitis and founder, I need a drylot. But, the problem with bare ground is that quite often you end up with something that is anything but dry.

Last year as a rookie pony keeper, I simply let the ponies chew down the winter grass in their large pen and did nothing else. No grass, no risk. Win win right? Well, I had never had to personally manage mud before. At first, when soft spots developed, I just ignored them. Then, if they got too deep or too wide, I put some straw over them. You can see where this is going right? It worked well enough during the summer, when the weather was hot, and because of the drought, oh-so-dry. The straw sopped up the moisture and then dried out. But as the weather cooled into the fall, it stopped drying out.

The line between gravel pad and mud is clear.

By Thanksgiving, the new barn was completed, including a 12-foot perimeter of gravel pad around the whole thing, to prevent mud pits at the stall doors. I moved the ponies into their new space and took down their old pen and was thankful to 'fix' the original mud problem by simply abandoning it.  I, naively, thought I had handled it. Well, spring rolls around and guess what? The ground just past the gravel pad, 12 feet and 1 inch from the new barn, is a mudpit and even the ground where the old pen was is still mushy. I'm not sure it ever even completely froze like the rest of the place, with its deep mixture of straw and mud.

What to do?

I can't just replant with grass, because of the laminitis risk.

I hate to fill an entire yard with gravel or sand, but it looks like I'll have to or l'll have an entire herd of ponies knee-deep in mud.

Does anyone have any suggestions? What's the best and most economical material to use? I fear whatever the solution is, it's going to cost about the price of a used truck. Poo.