Category: Paddock Paradise

The Fence – Part 1 of ???

Now we move on to what has become the bane of my existence. The fence. As mentioned in this post, we decided to go with Electrobraid as our fencing material and the Common Sense Fence system with their Mule Corners and fiberglass in-line posts. Before we could install anything it had to get delivered and it was being delivered via freight (i.e. semi-truck). Our experiences with things delivered via semi have been a mixed bag thus far so I was a little nervous. Our driveway is not currently conducive to large vehicles. Long term the plan is to install a smaller circle driveway in the front of the house and a larger one behind the house between it and the future barn, but for now we just have a long somewhat twisty driveway that ends at our garage with only a small turn-around for normal sized vehicles. Hence my concerns.

The first issue was a confusion on contact info, the delivery company called Bluebird Fencing to arrange a delivery day and not me. We got that sorted and luckily I asked about equipment to unload it, namely that we don’t have any, which had apparently not been in their notes, so we got switched to a truck with a lift gate. Then of course they gave me a delivery window of “Monday.” Thanks for that. Not having gotten anything more definitive than Monday I spent the day working from home and watching out my window. The day goes by and no truck. As 4:30 PM comes and then goes I call Bluebird Fencing to make sure there hadn’t been another mess up in contact info but she hadn’t heard anything either. She did have tips for next time: always insist on a shorter window and if they won’t give one ask that they contact you the morning of delivery with a smaller window and get the drivers name and direct phone number. Not sure it would have worked, but we’ll definitely try that the next time something large is delivered via freight. About two minutes after I get off the phone with her she calls back because they had messed up our numbers again and had just called her – since she knew we were home and waiting she told them yes, we were home and waiting. Driver finally shows up around 5:30 PM while we were in the middle of making dinner. We stop everything and run outside hoping to catch him before he got too far down our driveway to discuss where exactly to unload this stuff and where he could drive his truck safely. We were not fast enough.

He gets out and starts the unloading process by opening the door and getting the pallet on the pallet jack and then we talk options. One of the other complicating factors is that our driveway is still gravel, we’ll be paving it after the barn is built (the barn will get built!), but things like pallet jacks don’t operate on our gravel driveway. We tell him where we’d like it dropped off – right behind the house and that he doesn’t have to get it that far off the gravel, literally on the grass next to the driveway will work for us. But he thinks he can do some back and forths and get the truck in a slightly better spot. I don’t know what he was trying to do, but what he did do is get back in the truck, back it up, and then pull forward. Meanwhile the still engaged pallet jack is continuing in the direction it started going – right out the back of the truck and crashing onto our driveway as Nate and I watch it all in fascinated dismay. He gets out, looks at it, and says “guess we’re hand unloading after all” and just starts unloading it onto our grass. Really wish we would have had our phones to film it. In retrospect I should have insisted he wait until I could take pictures in case anything was damaged in the fall – well other than the pallet jack which was toast, but that was his problem and not mine. We chip in and help unload which is when I first discovered that if you handle fiberglass stuff you need to wear gloves! Nate didn’t have issues, but I got several fiberglass slivers and they were not fun. We get it all unloaded and then he insisted that I needed to check if anything was broken right then and there because if I didn’t file a claim then I could never file a claim ever. I’m not sure he was correct, but I did a quick glance at everything and it all seemed fine. It was mostly steel augers and fiberglass fence posts so not exactly breakable. We signed the paperwork that said it was delivered and go back into the house to finish dinner and to not watch as he gets his semi back out of our driveway and on his way.

Once he was gone and dinner was done I went back out to make sure everything was in fact fine and that it was all there. That was a little easier said than done (doesn’t that sound familiar). Very few things were actually labeled and having never worked with any fence system of any kind it was hard to know what I was looking at. I wound up going out with the picklist, the emailed invoice, and a tape measure and checking and rechecking everything that we had. That is when I discovered that it wasn’t all there – we were missing the three anchor braces for the three planned gates. It appears that the picklist, which was two pages, didn’t print quite right and cut off that item. I contacted Bluebird Fencing who contacted Geotek (the makers of the fence system) and they were both super great and overnighted us the missing three pieces. All was well – or so we thought.

Now we just had to turn this:

Into this:

 

How hard could this be?

Give me Shelter – Part 1

Waiting for the fence materials to arrive we turned our attention to shelters, plural. My long-term plan is to have three shelters. It is very windy where we live and we don’t have just one prevailing direction. Winter tends to be more west, north-west and summer south, south-east – but some of the worst storms in both seasons switch – it is very annoying and makes it hard to place one shelter that would be able to safely harbor my horses all year round. Leeloo also hates bugs almost as much as I do but will not keep fly related “clothing” on. Flymasks are rubbed off within hours. Fly boots are actively ripped off with her teeth the moment I take her halter off. I have this long-term idea of creating a summer “bug” shelter that would have solar powered fans running and shade – it’s not a fully formed idea yet – but what this means is ultimately I want three shelters. I also want to plan for some additional animals as this hobby farm grows so I wanted the biggest shelters I could get so they can handle additional animals when they come – no reason to buy something twice!

Bringing Leeloo home before a barn is built also leads to some other major logistical issues that need to be addressed. Where are we storing hay for the winter? Where are we going to have vet appointments and farrier appointments in the winter? Where am I going to actually be able to bring my horse in to work with? One of the paddock paradise principals is that the paddock is the horse’s home and personal space so you shouldn’t do stuff with them in it. Also, I hate weather of all kinds and want a place to get out of it to do stuff with my horse whenever possible. I put all of this together with my long-term goal of having three shelters to come up with the following plan. One shelter would be used as its name implies and would be the shelter for the animals. We’d place it in consideration of the strongest winter winds since those are the biggest deal. The other two shelters would be outside of the paddock and would face each other with a space in-between. One of them would be used to store hay – because hay cannot sit outside in the elements – and the other would be my makeshift “barn” with a stall of sorts on either side where I could bring a horse in to feed or doctor or trim or groom and the middle would be an “aisle-way” of sorts and storage. This meant I was looking at getting the three largest shelters I could. BUT – because this is all temporary until we get an actual barn built and a permanent paddock track created and because I didn’t want to deal with the city and building permits – these shelters need to be temporary and moveable, no permanent structures allowed.

Some credit for all this craziness of getting Leeloo home before there is a barn belongs to a non-horse-having friend who asked me last summer why I didn’t just bring Leeloo home. I listed the many barriers to that happening – fence, shelter, water, hay storage, poop management, place to do stuff with her in winter, etc. Having a horse at home is far more work and far more complicated than having a cat or a dog. But that conversation planted a seed that unbeknownst to me was germinating all that time so when my farrier said this spring “She’s never going to be sound in this environment.” that seed sprouted into this current madness. That same friend is also one of the most confident, go-for it, we-can-do-it, optimistic people I know. Which is good for me because I am only confident with things I have a lot of experience with and I tend to view the world from a pessimistic (realistic?) lens. When I told this friend that her crazy and totally impractical suggestion from last summer apparently germinated into this thing actually happening, but that I was still concerned about the cost of everything including how expensive a three-sided shelter was, she very confidently declared that together she and I could build the shelters I needed by ourselves for less money and in a reasonable time frame.

Some key background information: Neither of us are accomplished woodworkers, we are novices at best. Nate and I did take a community woodworking class several years ago and built two Adirondack chairs and a bench. The bench has a persistent wobble that we haven’t been able to fix and one of the Adirondack chairs had a loose seat slat issue from the very beginning, but we didn’t realize it until we were moving it out of the classroom to get it home and at that point were both too embarrassed to bring it back inside to fix it (this is why it’s good for me to have a confident friend). My friend has slightly more experience than that, but still definitely in novice territory. We also both have full time jobs and she has kids – and she tried really hard to talk me into building these shelters ourselves and was confident we could get them done in the same time-frame the professional companies I was looking at could get them done. She almost managed to convince me. Almost.

I talked her down to building one shelter, the one that would be used for hay for now and would long term be my crazy “summer bug” shelter, since potentially wrecking a perfectly fine and expensive shelter on a half-baked idea doesn’t make much sense, but wrecking a shelter made by two novices that probably isn’t going to be so great to begin with seems far more reasonable. I also have several other building projects in mind including hay boxes and some compost bays and said I would love her help with those projects. These conversations happened in April. In this case pessimistic caution turned out to be the right call because the shelters ordered from the company arrived weeks ago and to-date my friend and I have managed to build one, singular, hay box.

 

That still needs a lid.

Best Laid Plans

It should surprise no one that my original paddock track system layout has been modified significantly from its first iteration however, before I go into more details a brief public service announcement.

There is a saying in the horse world, “two horse people, three opinions.” It is not unusual for people who are passionate about something to also have strong opinions about that thing, but for horse people, particularly those living near a metropolitan area it sometimes seems more pronounced. I think it has to do with the increasing cost of having a horse close to an urban area. Anyone willing to put so many other wants, and occasionally needs aside – I still have one pair of pants I can wear to work, that’s enough, right? – to afford a horse and/or has that much money to begin with comes with a certain amount of crazy passion. 

 

Please note the complete and utter lack of sources or any information about my data collection methods – that’s how you can tell this graph is legit.

I mention this because if you, person reading this, have horses yourself you might have some opinions on some of things I’m going to talk about in this, and future, posts; and they might be different from the opinions I have and the decisions I made. I am happy to have a conversation about our differences in opinion, either in the comments here or on Facebook, I ask only that they not be in the form of “What you are doing is stupid and wrong. Let me tell you why…” 

On to the original plans. As I mentioned in a previous post, the layout of Leeloo’s new home is based on the work by Jaime Jackson and his Paddock Paradise book/website/Facebook group. The ultimate goal is to get my horses moving as much as possible and living in a way that more closely resembles the way their wild/feral relatives live so they can be healthier happier horses. There obviously have to be some concessions, but I am trying hard to keep that primary goal in mind.  Below are the first few drafts I had put together.

I spread out the big three needs (water, hay, shelter), so that the horses have to travel to get from one to the other. Ideally the paddock track makes one big continuous loop so that no horse can ever get trapped in a dead-end by another horse being a jerk; however it is not unreasonable to have offshoots as long as the end of an offshoot allows a horse to get away from said jerk. Leeloo has been described by the barn manager of our current barn as being the most dominant horse on the property who is tough, but fair, “Leeloo will only kick someone’s ass if they deserve it.” That being said, minimizing any damage a tough but fair Leeloo can do is still a goal. One of the constant tensions anyone with horses has to deal with is the desire to keep our animals safe with the need to allow them to be horses, and horses have hierarchies that are determined through physical means, some which can cause injury – which sucks.

You can also see there was a question about water. Because this is all temporary until we can get the actual barn built, we aren’t doing things like digging new water lines so the water for the horses needs to come from the spigots by the house. And because we live in Minnesota the water also has to be close enough to an electrical outlet that we can get a tank water heater in it. We have two spigots and exterior outlets on our house, a set in front and another in back. Originally, I had a convoluted plan to run the hose and the extension cord up and around our garage door, but then remembered that we have that other set on the front of the house – so the water moved there.

There is only one large flat area that isn’t too close to the septic system and isn’t currently corn field so that is where the shelters landed. From there it was a matter of going around some trees, the septic system, and the house.

Obviously I can’t just show Leeloo the drawing and ask her to please keep to the designated areas, so we need some fence. Several years ago I had reached out to some of the people I know who have their own barns or horses at home and asked for one thing they would absolutely do again, one thing they would absolutely change if they were starting from scratch, and any recommendations for various horse related products, companies, etc. One of those recommendations was for Monica and Bluebird Fencing. Monica is amazing and has been super helpful through this whole process. We talked on the phone for a solid hour that first time while I explained what we wanted to do (track system); what my priorities were (1st – safety, 2nd – cost, 3rd – ability to move the whole thing in the future); what animals we were hoping to have (full sized horses, donkey? pony? goats?) and landed on Electrobraid as our fencing material and the Common Sense Fence system by Geotek as the corner and in-line post system (more on how that has been going soon). She then asked me to send her my plans so she could price it out and give me a quote. I sent her the plans above and she got back very quickly to say I may want to rethink them. As originally drawn I was looking at a VERY expensive plan because every change of direction was about 20 times more expensive than a straight in-line post, and every corner was 30 times more expensive than a straight in-line post and there were a LOT of corners and direction changes in those early plans. With that in mind I sat back down with the goal of minimizing corners but still getting Leeloo to all the places I wanted and keeping her off all the places she couldn’t be on. And here was the new plan that we are in the process of putting up:

 

We got it down to thirteen corners and three gates, which at the time seemed very reasonable. Ignorance, what bliss.

Where Will She Go?

Coming home from that uplifting appointment I tell Nate that I want to try to bring Leeloo home this summer and though supportive, he was understandably skeptical. We had already agreed to, and taken payment from, a local farmer to farm most of our land for this year, so where exactly was I going to put Leeloo? Also the whole point of bringing Leeloo home was to get her to move more – how exactly was I going to do that?

 

 

In the course of our lameness issues, we have worked with at least six different vets, six different farriers, four different chiropractors, a massage therapist, acupuncturist, and osteopath. The one thing they all agreed on was that Leeloo needs to move more, and move in terms of low intensity activity, i.e. walking. So how do you get a couch potato of a horse to move more? I’ve been pondering this for years now, and a while back when discussing this issue with a friend I shared my ingenious (laughable) idea for a hay feeder that would force my horse to move. The general outline was creating a long rectangular box which you would put a perforated barrel, filled with hay, into and Leeloo would have to roll the barrel up and down the track to get the hay out. There are obviously lots of flaws to that idea, but my friend was very kind and just listened and when I was done, asked if I had heard about paddock track systems. I had not.

The basic idea is that you spread out the horse necessities (food, water, shelter) in different locations that require the horse to walk between them. Intrigued I searched the internet when I got home and discovered Jaime Jackson and Paddock Paradise. I acquired his book of the same name, devoured it, and knew that this was my answer. This was how I was going to get my horse to move! One of the many beauties of the Paddock Paradise system is that you don’t need a lot of land to make it work. So, I pulled up an overhead view of our land (thanks ever present observation satellites, your existence isn’t creepy at all) and thought yes – I can get a paddock paradise track set up around our existing yard and house.

We can do this!