I sold my old caravan yesterday so I have a little cash in the bank. Once I’ve taken care of Poppy and Dancer’s flu jabs (next Thursday) I plan to use most of the money on fencing needs – a spare battery for the electric fence and a battery charger come top of the list, closely followed by some wooden fence posts to make corners and gateposts for paddocks in the field.
I plan on keeping a walkway area along the back fence, so the horses will have a permanent long thin ‘paddock’ with 4 or 5 (haven’t finished my calculations yet!) paddocks leading off it. They’ll be in each of these smaller enclosures for 2 weeks’ grazing at most, then they’ll be moved to the next, giving the grass a chance to grow again. If I have 4 paddocks, each paddock gets 6 weeks without horses – if 5, then the rest is 8 weeks.
The idea of the break in grazing is that grass evolved to cope with migratory herds which eat everything in sight – but then move on, so this means that grass deals well with recovering from heavy grazing and comes back strong and healthy after the herbivores move on. From my point of view it means any parasitic worms shed in horse dung can be picked off by passing birds or have a chance to be eaten (and thus killed) by a non-host mammal (deer, or eventually on the Croft, goats) and also I can get out there and pick the muck up in the barrow without George’s ‘help’ if he’s in a different paddock, which reduces the chances of (a) George standing in the barrow and killing it and (b) parasites getting onto the pasture to begin with!
In order to help with my planning, I walked right round the field today counting my paces, so now I have rough measurements. I haven’t yet done the maths to turn numbers of paces into feet or metres (4 of my paces is 10 feet) but it’s a start! Apart from losing count twice (George and Dancer came to ‘help’ and distracted me!) and having to repeat a couple of sections, that went well and I checked for anything fouling the fence at the same time, so that was useful in more than one way.
In other news, I’ve been getting back into a nice steady routine with the horses. They tend to be in the yard when I get up, which is nice, and this morning I discovered that Poppy likes berry flavoured Huel! I use this complete-nutrition powder mixed into a drink to replace meals sometimes; I happened to have a mugful of their berry-flavoured mix in my hand when I was talking to the horses this morning and Poppy showed some interest in the smell of the mug, so I poured a few drops into my hand for her to get a good sniff. She sniffed carefully, then licked my hand thoroughly and came back for more! Dancer sniffed but then wandered back to the haynet; Abe sniffed, then sighed and turned away; George sniffed and then looked at me with a quizzical expression – but Poppy ended up quietly asking for – and getting – half my breakfast!
It’s one way to control my calorie intake!
The horses have been getting more grooming in the past few days, too, when they come back in around lunchtime and again mid-afternoon and evening. Every mane has now been thoroughly groomed, all tails but George’s are tangle-free (his is much thicker, we’re still working on a few long twisty dreadlocks in the middle) and hooves are being handled daily. I’m working on ‘walk on’ with Dancer – at the moment if she responds with one step that’s a huge success and earns her loads of praise and scritchies! George has remembered ‘walk on’, ‘back’ and ‘stand’ and I think he knows perfectly well what ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean but chooses not to do them! Abe, of course, remembers all his vocabulary perfectly and both he and Poppy are very calm and sensible about being moved around the place. Dancer’s learned ‘back’ and answers to it quite readily but still needs a touch with a hand on her chest as a reminder sometimes. I had to fetch the lunge whip and give George a little poke with the end this evening – he has his feed at the door end of the horse barn while Abe’s hangs on the gate at the far end, and tonight George had planted his large posterior in the doorway so Abe couldn’t get past! Normally a firm ‘George, over!’ is enough for him to swivel aside but tonight he just looked cross about it, so I decided not to poke him with my hand and went for the distance tool instead. As soon as I touched him lightly with the end on the side of his haunch and repeated ‘over!’ George pirouetted neatly aside, though, and Abe went through to get his dinner in peace.
Lucy is up to 6 eggs in her nest now. I spent some time in their run today with a pair of shears, butting the longer grass back so it’ll give them a nice fresh ‘bite’ at their preferred (short) length soon. The long grass went straight over the fence into the walkway for the horses – grass cut mechanically ferments rapidly and can’t be fed to horses, but cut with hand shears or a billhook it’s fine for them and they ate it so readily it didn’t have time to ferment anyway!
Cairnorchies Chronicles 