Time to clean the barn!

Today's entry comes with a BIG WARNING: I am going to talk about POOP. I'm going to show you pictures that have poop in them. We live on a farm...there is just no getting around POOP. So if you have delicate sensibilities, it might be better if you went on to look at pictures of puppies or kitties or something! Don't say I didn't warn you.


First, you have to have your dependable equipment. We bought a wheelbarrow, then our construction guys left one behind and didn't come back to get it, so now we have two. Frankly, I don't know how I would live without two of them. You also need an 'apple picker' which is a good stall fork to pick out everything in the stall you don't want to leave in there. You can also see other important barn implements like a broom, a dust pan, and of course the radio on which to blast Top 40 country songs that you must sing along with (badly of course) at the top of your lungs. It's all part of the experience.


Now I am very lucky that my biggest horse, and the one that generates the most poop by weight, is very neat in his stall. This is a picture of his stall after being in it 13.5 hours. I am not kidding. We brought them in at 4:30pm last night and they went out right at 6am this morning. I count my blessings about this every day I clean his stall. Unfortunately, his neighbors, the donkeys make up for it...


Actually, this is not nearly as bad as the donkeys get. But they do not understand the concept of pooping in one general area. They just poop wherever they want and then walk in it all night. It truly takes me as long to clean the donkey's stall as it does the other four stalls combined. I asked some donkey friends about their donkey's stall habits and every one said their donkeys are as neat as a pin. How come my girls didn't get the memo!?


So I'll spare you all the gory details involving actually picking up the poop and pee spots. Suffice it to say that I love using pelleted bedding. It's like cleaning a giant cat box but with a lot less stinky poop and pee. I make it my goal every day to get all the stall cleanings in ONE wheelbarrow. If I'm stripping a stall it's unavoidable to use two, but with Frank being so willing to man the wheelbarrow out into our dumping spot in the back 40, I want to keep it as minimal as possible. Of course, as in every farm chore, there is ample supervision. Here the mini's Maddie and Yakki are waiting for their chance to escape when he heads through the gate. This brings to mind stories of the Red Flash that I'll tell another time!


Here's Bailey's stall all clean and with a couple of flakes of hay for him to munch on when he comes in for the night. Sorry about the spots on the picture, I guess I must have stirred up quite a bit of dust in the air while flinging things around! Our routine is to bring the horses in at dark (which is 5pm-ish now, but 4pm-ish in the depths of the winter) and give them a little hay and their grain, then come back out between 8 and 9pm to give them hay for the night. Then they're back out at 6am every day, rain or shine.


We had a little tragedy today as you can see in this picture. Luckily, my barn fork lost a tine AFTER I had the barn cleaned (I was getting some loose hay from around a stall door and it snagged I guess). So I have to go get another one today so I'll have it for when I clean tomorrow morning before school. Also in this picture are the mini's halters/leads and the cotton blankie that Maddie likes to have put on her when she comes in wet from the rain. Nah, these guys aren't spoiled!


I mentioned earlier that we take our manure out to the lower pasture where we are using it to add organic material to some pretty poor and sandy areas. We have also used quite a bit of it on our veggie garden (see earlier blog entries for those pics), our flower garden and around our fruit and nut trees. It is not a 'hot' manure and will never burn. We leave it in about 1-2 foot piles and let it decompose over the winter and it turns to 'black gold'. Fortunately, there are other gardeners who value the horse manure as much as we do. Several times during the winter friends of ours will park a trailer like this one by the barn for us to fill for them so they can make some of their own 'black gold'!

So that's the poop story! It's one that gets told every day here on Red Pony Ranch. I truly enjoy working in the barn and find it very therapeutic. Other people might need to golf or see a shrink...not me! I just fling some poop and all is right with the world.