Farm Updates: Spring Time

Things are greening up nicely here on the farm, finally, though a month ago I was posting about the feet of snow we were getting!

I'm becoming less and less apprehensive about my slowly dwindling hay supply; the pastures were planted late last year, and the unexpected drop back into winter with all of the snow we still had a few weeks ago left me very worried. Since then we've had lots of warm sun, and honestly, could do with a bit more rain, but the pastures are greening up and evening out (the new planting was done by a local farmer, who, apparently, has no idea what the heck he's doing. We have bald spots all over the hay field and pasture plantings that are NOT winter kill -_-). Over the last week I've been doing some seeding, and as I mentioned in another post, knocking down gopher mounds left in the only pre-existing pasture we have left. 

While I work, the horses nap.

I've also been scheming out the pasture fence, and we have plans to do most of the work Memorial day weekend. I'm still not sure how I feel about the polywire I found as a less-likely-to-cause-rope-burn-or-de-glove-legs alternative to the weirdly expensive polyrope. Most of my fence is a mix of electrobraid (nicer rope type stuff) and polyrope (nasty plastic rope) and I've found it kind of annoying so far; the fence materials are older and thus it's hard to get the charge flowing around all of the pasture and paddock, and they don't seem to stay taught when spliced. If I use splicing hardware, the hardware seems to slip no matter how tight I make it, while if I knot it, it arcs and scorches the braid around it. Clearly we have some fence issues to fix, but I am hoping I am making a decent choice. Polywire doesn't seem any harder to see than the wire and wood post fences my previous boarding barn had, so I am hoping that with a polytape top strand, the fence will be very visible for the horses in the dark and safe for them to go enjoy their grass. As much as I would love to invest in some of the fancier fencing I've found in my searching, cost is a factor so, if anything, we can look into replacing the polywire strands in a few years if it doesn't work well. 

Mud wise, we're basically dried up; the gate area still looks a bit rough despite dragging the paddock and arena last night, but on the whole, it's gone. For those of you who don't remember my rants, the paddock and barn were built on the flow path between two pre-existing ponds, which means that shit tons of water flow across my paddock every spring and after every heavy rain. Last spring I was nearly killing myself trying to wade through knee deep sucking mud to get the horses fed, which resulted in us putting in 150' of drain tile. We still got mud from all the water flowing - which got worse when the water stopped flowing and started sitting - but it was a thousand times better than last year and I think it will only get better as we figure out how to shape the paddock's contour to hurry the water on it's way. 

We have mud and dust at the same time. Yay farm!

I'm also hoping we will be able to get our tractor starting happily again after some maintenance tonight; it was struggling late last fall to start and then the weather went to shit, so we never got the problems fully looked into. We're doing lots of fluid and filter changes and a new battery tonight, to hopefully get the Baby Deere back to work. Hubby and I discussed building compost bins last night, and I'd love to get rid of my manure pile, so fingers crossed! I tidied up the barn some over the weekend, so hopefully the spring cleaning can continue!