Having paced out the field boundaries the other day and spent hours poring over the plans, calculator and scratch pad in hand, I’ve decided on my paddock layout.
There will be a walkway about 12 feet wide the full length of the east fence, with wider places halfway and at the far end where the horses like to hang out and sleep. I’m going to run a fence between the odd triangle of ground on the west boundary and the nearest corner of the woodland patch, so the damp end of the field will form one paddock. I have no idea how big that patch will be – I looked up how to calculate the area of an irregular polygon and decided I really don’t want to know!
The west side of the field will have a much narrower pathway as far as the point of the triangle, for walking goats and wheelbarrows along without ‘help’ from curious young horses, which only needs to be 4-6 feet wide. The rest of the field will be split into four roughly half-acre paddocks.
This gives me 5 paddocks for the horses and, with a length of temporary electric fencing, 10 for goats and poultry to rotate after the horses. That way should maximise grass resting time, parasite control and food value for everyone, as well as giving me plenty of time to work on the unoccupied paddocks to fill in holes, reseed bare patches, keep on top of weeds and so forth.
Some sketch maps and counting later, I need 26 wooden fence posts for corners and gateways, so I’ve visited my local sawmill to see if they could beat online prices.
They can – and by a long way! A 3-inch thick wooden post 6 feet long costs me about £7 online plus delivery – but the sawmill can do them for me at £2.89 and I can collect for myself; they’re only five miles away!
The camera traps failed to catch any predators, though I now have a lot of pictures of horses’ legs and some of the horses eating hay or drinking water! I’ll put some more batteries in the cameras and keep them running, though, through the nights.
Herd cohesion is still building nicely – I saw Abe and Dancer grooming each other in the yard the other day. It’s lovely to see Dancer expanding her grooming to include other horses than her mum, and it’s very good to see Abe learning to groom without taking a sneaky nip, the monkey!
George had his feet up twice all round yesterday and again tonight without complaint.
The rabbits are now working their way through a bucket of grass per cage, so it’s time I picked up some timber to build arks, or tractors, to get the youngsters and bucks out on the grass and feeding themselves. When I get to building my deep beds I’ll make them the same size as the arks so I can use the bunnies to clear off vegetation and fertilise the beds – a job chickens are also very good at.
Cairnorchies Chronicles 