Riding, Lately

It's been stunningly beautiful this spring. My memories show me spring snow storms and mud, and other than some temperature drops, the mares have been naked and slowly transitioning onto grass. Trees are leafing out pretty spectacularly, the hay field grew 6 inches after the application of some nitrogen... life is good.

Riding has been happening, except over the weekend when it got very chilly and I just wasn't feeling it.

Bailey has been yawning over the jumps I have set, so it's time to reconfigure the field again, or move jumps into the ring for some variety. Right now I have a two stride combo through the middle, with my warm up barrels (because they're small and boring) on the diagonal, and a weird bending line of skinny metal barrels winding through. It's been fun to ride the accuracy questions with the 2 stride, which is set a bit forward, and also maintain turning. We've had three sessions on it now and Bailey yawned hardcore during our last ride - you know it's time to change your jumps when she's foot perfect through on the first or second attempt.

Dressage has been hard with her, not because she's bad (actually she's been fabulous) but because going right is like... really hard to do properly. I'm not sure where the heck my legs go wrong, or why I over bend her like crazy going right, but I've been putting the focus on it hard, and things are slowly getting better. We've been focusing on not just motorcycling and over bending right, making sure the left is still correct, and prompt transitions. I still am doing a prep and go cue for canter, but I'm trying hard to break that habit. Trot has been improving hugely under the "leg means go" regime - I no longer put my leg on, then harder, then kick. It's refreshing. We also are pulling groundwork back in, because I feel like Bailey has been lacking some personality shine lately. Maybe she's just more fatigued being out 24/7, but I feel like she has feedback that she's internalizing vs showing me and it's making things harder.

Arya has been... suspiciously good. I got on her the day of my last post about her, and she's hardly put a toe out of line since.

You think I'm naughty? The insult!!

It's highly suspicious, and I'm still coming to our sessions with a big stick, but perhaps she's going to start acting her age?? Maybe??

ETA: Yeah, I cursed it. Dingus tried to exit the arena backwards via rearing and scooting backwards with a few reining spin impressions towards the end of our last ride. And then it rained all weekend. So... square one begins again today.

Fox Point Farm: A (long, rambly) 3 Year Anniversary

It just occurred to me that we've been on the farm for three years, and that I should probably talk about that. Because it's been a pretty great, and it's been really hard. Even this week has been a reminder that things can be beautiful and running smoothly, and other days every battery on the farm is randomly dead all at the same time and nothing works. 

Some things are coming full circle, like this is one of my favorite photos from the first month of farm ownership:

And I took these photos a few days ago:

 The farm is beautiful, in every season:

But it's never been without challenges. 

When we moved in to our "turn key" farm, the pastures were overgrown, riddled with gopher mounds and holes, and the paddock was a knee deep mire of standing/flowing water and years of manure that was not managed. The barn had two tiny stalls and a huge swath of empty unused space. The pastures had wandering, random fence lines.

And in three years, we've:

- Tilled under and re-seeded something like 13 acres, and fenced two new growth pastures from that number. 

- Straightened fence lines, completely redoing 99.9% of the fencing (the remaining .1 is the board fencing near the barn and the front paddock gate)

- Installed 1500' of drain tile, give or take, through the paddock, in the back yard and through the riding arena

- With the help of our hay guy (who does a lot of the work, admittedly, but we put up our portion: harvested 3 cuts off of our hay field despite two of the rainiest hay making summers in the history of ever (and yes, miraculously they were put up DRY. Blessed is my hay guy, despite his total lack of communication)

- Tamed the 3 acres of "yard" that we keep relatively mowed and cared for looking (including my jump field)

- Replaced the washer, dryer, kitchen appliances and water softener

- Completely overhauled the barn interior, putting in 5 stalls.

- Doubled the hay storage space off the side of the barn (three sided storage)

Sorry for the list, but I'm super proud of the work we've put in :) 

Gratuitous Arya photo to distract from my bragging

2020 has turned into a busy year in the last few weeks. We purchased a pump and have been using it to drain the small, man-dug pond between the arena and the paddock after heavy rainfall. This makes a huge difference for a lot of things, because the way our property's watershed seems to work is that the pond fills up with water flowing off the hay field, out of the riding arena and from the general area. Once it fills up to a point, it starts to flow across the paddock as it can't hold any more, and this small pond is above the second, larger pond behind the house. This causes the mud/mire/mess to form, and makes life miserable - like, I use a sled to get manure to the pile because the cart wheels sink several inches into the muck and take a Herculean effort to even begin to move. 

Light blue lines illustrating water flow across the property, with bad sketching of new fence lines in green
And yes, someone should shoot the previous owner who built the barn there

So yes, we've been pumping the pond. And the pond kept refilling, even without rain. Where was that coming from. And the hay field wet spot is much less wet. So we've been pumping the pond, and, last weekend, dug a hole in the lowest spot of the hay field (calf high standing water, even after about a week of basically no rain) and pumped that. And the field is drying. And my paddock is dry. 

The only unhappy one is me,sort of, because I have to wash mud off the dogs every day because they like to play in and around the edges of the pond, and the water left behind lots of nasty mud. Feet of it. But a pretty significant drying issue seems to be solved by the application of gas powered pump and lots and lots of hose. 

Breaking up a wall of boring text with non-contextual pretty pictures of the mares...

The other busy thing has been the changing of the guard in the equipment shed. The hay shed has had some standing water issues since... always. I lost the bottom layer of hay on the lower side the first spring, and while we haven't had that particular issue this year, we have had a lot of wet, sometimes standing water wet ground on the left side, in particular. The problem being that the left side is where the round bales live. We have some material on order to hopefully raise the floor up and prevent the water issue, but given the number of times we've had to call the neighbors to bail us out with round bales, we decided it was time to upgrade our hay moving equipment. 

So we own a skid steer now.

The tractor is for sale, and since we are selling that, we decided to sell our riding mower and just get one mid-size zero turn mower to cover the gap losing the 60" mower on the tractor and the 46" riding mower left. Our little hobby farm suddenly has lots of big scary-to-drive pro equipment! The skid in particular is intimidating; it's a track model so it feels to me like a little farm tank. I'm excited through, because that baby probably won't struggle to drop rounds come rain or snow or feet of mud... and that's nice to have, in case our mud control goes off the rails. 

It's bittersweet to think about where we started; I was so sure I didn't want to feed rounds, didn't think we needed a mower that big, didn't anticipate the mud or the work. We survived a trial by mud, and it's been a utter blessing and a total headache. We've learned so much, and also torn our hair out at the intrinsic knowledge that farm raised people seem to have that never makes it to the internet for desperate hobby farmers like us. On the whole, though, I love it here. I love being able to care for my girls the way I want to, and I love watching them enjoy their lives healthy and happy. I love listening to the frogs sing all evening in the spring, and I love looking up at the stars, no matter the season. 

So yeah, we're here, at three years. It's taken some time, but hoping we've finally figured at least some of the basics out?