Some weekend high winds and torrential rain!

I expect your horses like ours gather at the gateway ready for IN and their tea. So as the winter goes on the gateways get like a mud bath. So we strip out the top soil and put in about 6 inches of stone and cover with about 3 inches of top soil.

One of our mare loves to paw at the heap of topsoil and ended up with a pink nose after licking some of the stone!

The culprits who did the work. 

As the forecast was for heavy rain I didn’t bother to spread the top soil. Hopefully that will get done later this next week.

Field shelter is coming on and as with the best of plans it is not quite what I had envisaged, but someone is bound to appreciate it.

29th August

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So all mares have been covered and still two to scan to confirming they are in foal.  That should happen this week. One mare has a lot of cysts and it is proving difficult to find a heart beat. Although her humour has changed so Ann is fairly confident she is in foal.

One more field to top and tidy up before Autumn sets in. We use an aerator or slitter to treat our fields . I think this year of all years it has showed its worth as grass has been in good supply and steady growth. They say a slitter can help produce 30% more grass and it saves on spreading fertiliser. Hopefully if the ground dries up some more we will slit all our fields again. It is a great boost to surface drainage. With horses they really pan the ground being not cloven hoofed so the slitting helps break the surface up without destroying the grass. Plus you don’t have to shut the fields off from the horses whilst you do it.

We haven’t got very far with our field shelters. The steel legs have been modified to a more secure footing so they should get planted this coming week. 

Sorting through some old photos and I came across this picture of Caerba Legacy as a foal. The scary thing is this looks very much our current colt foal!

Talking of raves from the graves there was this picture of Caerba March Mavis from her hay day. Well she is enjoying her retirement and keeps the others in order. Unfortunately over time like most of us here she has far more grey hair now than she should!

21st August

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We have all had hair cuts this week including Toux Omar and myself all with a No6! He looks quite hansom now with his hog mane. This is all in preparation for the Breed Show of the weekend 9th September. So three horses and 4 ‘grooms’ are going down. Lorry is getting serviced this next week and tested in preparation.

Omar has a fair tale to tell. He is a younger full brother to Caerba Legacy. Unfortunately he was a surviving twin and was born with misshapen legs. Thanks to Ardene House vets he survived to become quite a character. He is very easy going but determined as a youngster to go where he wanted to go and was prepared to drag anyone along with him. Thankfully he has grown out of that now. He is always playing boys games who ever he shares a field with and never stands still for very long and soon comes up to greet you and follow you where ever you go.  Omar enjoys a hack and is only really spooked by roe deer that suddenly appear and jump up in the forest or near the tramlines. Being a working farm vehicles are not a problem to him.

This week we had one more sortie to pull the remaining ragwort that was missed earlier on. It seems this year it has sprounted in places it has never been seen before. One plant in a shelter belt between some parks was exceptionally big. Such that the roe deer have been thrashing their antlers on its!!  See the lighter coloured stem towards the bottom. Well at least that is one chore out of the way until next year.

Looking around the countryside there are still many fields with tansies in and horses. A friend on the west coast had field full of ragwort and the deer used to come down and graze the field and it looked a real eyesore. It took him about 4 years of spraying and pulling of the plants to really get on top of it, but it certainly looks much better now. So it is possible to crack the problem without too much grief and we hope in time more people will do something about their ragwort.

 14th August

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It has been a quiet week. , sorry quiet wet cold week.

We recently had an old silage shed taken down and now await a new one to go up in its place.  Part of the shed was a lean to the main section. So we have salvaged the lean to bit and plan to put two bays up back to back and make two horse shelters. The fence line would go down the middle of the shed.

We have sorted out the best of the steel work and wooden purlins. Its an old shed so measurements are in feet an’ inches. Inside should be 15ft long and 17th wide with three walls to about 6ft high and 7ft 6inch open doorway complete with a telegraph poles for the rubbing of arses. I have set myself a deadline of getting it up and roof sheets on by the end of the month ~ fingers crossed.

Unfortunately I failed at the first fence when my 7m long tape measure died, but Ann remembered I won another in a raffle sometime ago and that was hidden in a draw full of tack. Anyway the electric fences are all moved leaving room for the construction team to start on Tuesday. Monday is a head scratching day wondering what to do first!

Our new foal is doing fine and never seems to sleep much. At a week old he was pinching some of Maeve’s hard feed. He is becoming very bold and comes up and has a news with no hesitation.

We discovered, well Ann  did that three of our electric fencing batteries have gone missing. Tracing back in time it seems to co-inside with a ‘delivery’ where the parcel was left in our workshop ~ which is most unusual. Normally any parcels are left in the car port by our back door. The delivery company has been marked, but it has spurred us into actually thinking about a cctv system.

It hasn’t helped much in that some people have been on holiday and so activity around the farm has been much quieter. But that all changes this week with all hands on deck.

We had a pot mended on our amplifier this week with thanks to Holburn HI FI. They did say the Denon amplifier had a strange farm like smell to it. This isn’t surprising as it has been playing music to our chickens non stop 24/7 for near on 10 years now. It looks like new now.

We are selling our compact road sweeper. It is a City Cat 2000 and it all works fine, and for £1500 +vat it can yours. 

Next week it is about time we said something about the other horses and their potential.

7th August

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