Happy New Year 2017!

What a great way to start the new year! Hopefully none of you were looking forward to that Mariah Carey performance...oh boy, talk about rough! But this blog isn't about any of that. Nope. My idea of this is blog is to show you my experiences of owning your own barn and horses, exercising them (and myself for that matter), basic care and health, as well as traveling to competitions to compete with friends and family. Showing you all the lows and highs, the successes and, yes, the fails as well, because it's not always smiles and giggles with these guys...but the good trumps the bad and I wouldn't want it any other way. So...on that note, here we go.

As the holiday season is starting to wrap up, it's time to look forward to the next thing I'm most excited about, Summer! I love Summer, mostly because there's no more snow and no more working up a sweat trying to put dozens of layers of clothes on to go outside and not freeze. Here in Michigan, there's not a whole lot to do outside once the snow starts to fly, especially if you don't have an indoor riding arena to keep out of the elements and stay somewhat warm to work in. The best you can do is either make friends that have nice places for you to bring your horse to, to ride, or wait until it warms up just enough to melt the snow to work a tiny bit. We make it work with what we have. This week started out 'nice' though, I mean, it was a nice break compared to the single digit wind chills we were getting earlier.

We've had the horses home for about 8 months so this is our first winter with them and I believe they have the same feeling about winter as I do...it's not my favorite season, let me tell ya. As it was warm enough to work outside, it was good for the horses to go outside too. Help them stretch their legs and more around after being in their stall all night. We put Rocky and Billy out in the pasture together and keep Paxton inside as he can be a bit of a bully and get into mischief, so he goes outside when the other two are in. I love putting the horses outside though, especially when the snow first comes and really when it leaves, because they love to run, jump, spin around and play. Like two dogs that haven't seen grass all winter and just have a ball! After the horses go out, their stalls get cleaned with a pitchfork and wheelbarrow to pick out the dirty shavings filled with poo and pee and then lay down fresh clean pine shavings so they have something to lay on and stay comfy and warm. The shavings also make it smell a little bit better too, fresh cut wood always makes it smell clean and new. Their water buckets also get cleaned out too to get fresh water every day, but sometimes we have to really scrub the buckets if they decide to leave a 'present or two' in there for us. Thankfully all three of the boys are relatively clean, so it doesn't take more than an hour to get everything done and we have heated buckets in the winter so the water doesn't freeze, which saves us time and keeps water thawed for the horses at night.

After the chores are done, we dump the wheelbarrows with the poo over behind the barn so it keeps the bugs out of the barn and so we can't see it from the house. Well...since the horses have been there for 8 months, the pile of poo was becoming a little large and the area was starting to get full. Hmm...what do you do with all that crap? Well, some larger barns will hire someone to take it away in large dumpsters and use it for fertilizer while other farms may have their own tractor and manure spreader to take and spread on their own fields. We didn't have anything like that so I did some research and found the perfect sized spreader just in time for Christmas! It's an ABI classic spreader that I ordered online and it's perfect because it's not super big like the ones they use for large barns so we can park it inside and pull it with a 4 wheeler or a garden tractor. And, with it being as warm as it was today, we decided to give it a test run. Who knew that spreading poop would actually be neat and kinda fun! We had a system down pat when we did it too, my dad would load the spreader with the bucket on his tractor, I would drive the other tractor attached to the spreader and my mom would have a shovel and ride on an ATV to help scoop up any that fell out of the bucket. As I'd drive with the spreader, it would work off the wheels and start moving the floor chains towards the back where the blades would help break it down and spread it behind us. On occasion, however, the blades would get going fast enough that to poo doesn't always get thrown behind me. Yep, there were times that it would come and go over my head onto the front of the tractor or it'd hit me in the back! Eww!! Thankfully it was still chilly out that I had my hood on so none of it did get in my hair, because that would just be disgusting! But, we played with that thing for hours and had some great laughs while doing it!

With having the horses home, I've become closer to my family and we've come closer to each other. Working on the farm and caring for others besides ourselves has really made me appreciate the moments that we're able to work together and also grow together. We're always learning about ourselves and each other, and I wouldn't want to trade it for anything else in this world or any other.

#horse #ABIManureSpreaders #hobbyfarming #family #ArabianHorses #horseshowing #fun