Getting Ready for Waste Management Day

I haven’t hurt like this in years! I didn’t realize shoveling poo could make me hurt so much. I know trudging around with the wheelbarrow does make my wrists hurt but my arms and shoulders are feeling the workout from yesterday’s pen cleaning. Of course, had I not let it go all winter I probably wouldn’t be in this boat.

I’m hoping that the rain will hold off and Mike can get a load of poo out to our farmer friend’s field tonight. Our farmer friend is letting us use one of his tractors to pull the manure spreader. Thank goodness we found one and fixed it up last year. Mike took the snow bucket portion off the Massey so he can scoop the manure into the spreader. I’m afraid that it’ll get to a point where I’ll have to shovel it into the bucket. But at this point, I want that gigantic pile gone.

We only have until Sunday to get it done. Then our farmer friend is going to get into the field and we’ll be out of a place to spread the poo. So as long as the rain holds off or doesn’t rain too hard we’ll be out every night trying to get rid of that pile. I have the ponies in their night pen, I’ll leave Bob out so he can munch on the grass, and the rest of the herd will go into the barn. I don’t want the horses out on the pasture just yet and we’ll have the gates wide open.

I need to move some of the corral panels around so I can start letting the horse out onto the lawn for a bit of evening grass. I want to get them adjusted to the grass but I also want to be able to catch them and put them back into the drylot for awhile. I did that last year and it seemed to work out ok, although it did wreak havoc on my lawn. But it’s only grass and I’m tired of mowing. And to top it off, gas prices are going up so who wants to spend money on mowing the lawn when I need to find pasture for all the horses.

I’m hoping once we get the manure pile taken care of we can switch tractors with our farmer friend and borrow a different tractor for the auger. We absolutely have to get some fencing done. We are planning on dividing the big pasture. But if I want to bring the girls home, I need to extend one of the smaller pastures (and turn part of our lawn into a pasture, much to Mike’s dismay). I’m sure he’ll like the “new mare pasture” once he sees how good it’ll look and how happy it’ll make me. Haha

We also have a bunch of house remodel stuff to work on before Memorial Weekend. It sounds like we’ll have family stopping over so I want to make the house a bit more presentable. I don’t mind living in plastic but after a year it gets old. I’d like to show off a nice clean house instead of the mess that it is. So there might not be much riding time or grooming time in the next two weeks. We do have a trail ride this Saturday so I need to get King and Rain out. I’ve found that if I don’t take them out and run them around the day before the ride, they are a bit of a handful. Rain hates it when I ask him to slow down. If he’s pooped from the day before he’ll listen and actually walk slow. He prefers to be in the front of the pack while King refuses to be anywhere but the very last horse. So it’s a bit of a controversy Rain and I have. But Rain is going so well that he listens for the most part and we don’t argue during the rides.

I’ll hopefully get some pics of the Waste Management in progress and of Sam so that I can show off any weight gain. I’m afraid he might be losing more than gaining. I think I need to get him out on grass too. The problem is I’m not completely used to him so I don’t trust him enough to simply turn him out like I do Bob and walk away. I don’t have time right now to let him hand graze. I may have to put up some type of hookey fence to fool him into thinking that he can’t go past a certain spot for grazing. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll come up with something, I always do!