Getting the farm Horse-Ready
To start with, we’ll just include one part to this post, but there will be two feature documentary length vlogs in here eventually. It’ll be followed up by horsey-part tour when the other temporary delays (like the paint not drying, and now the corvid infestation) are over. We’re holding off doing finishing touches to temporary (3-5 year) horse housing until these issues are overcome.
Part 1: June to October 15th 2024…
When we arrived, the dairy building looked like this:
It had no water supply, no working electric, and no safe stabling. It had a VERY dodgy roof at the back end which wouldn’t have survived Storm Eowyn, and there were internal pipe leaks, inadequate guttering and blocked drains.
Outside, the field had fallen down dykes (dry stone walls), broken or missing gates (see image) and the entire 19 acre parcel was unfenced internally.
An old boundary gateway for the field, mangled by cattle and held up with twine and barbed wire.
We needed to house 3 horses: A 10-year-old spaniard, a weanling, and a flighty-in-the-stable unbacked 3-year-old. They were arriving on October 16th. The race was on (amongst everything else we were doing at the farm), and the budget was TIGHT.
The 55-minute vlog below covers everything we did to get from day 1 in June, to pony-arrival-eve:
That took us through this whole before, during and after, inside the dairy:
55 minutes was long enough for one video, especially with the amount of very sketchy bits health and safety wise, so we’ll circle back with Part 2 later.
Part 2: October 16th 2024 to May 10th 2025…
This part includes the final [rush] jobs, the horses arriving, fencing, finishing touches to the Dairy for a very bad winter, and us all settling in. It also includes some clips of Velia’s education from leaning that rugs handled by us don’t bite all the way to riding away.
It was certainly a journey, alongside working more-than-full-time, plus fully renovating the cottage, and moving between it and the farmhouse as the months ran on.
We’ve learnt so much about the land over the past year, from floods to drought and everything in between. Thankfully, Storm Eowyn was described by the locals as “definitely not normal!” so at least it won’t be making an annual occurrence (fingers and toes crossed on that!). The horses were so used to being in for high winds before the 25th January that they just napped. Their building was the only one to sustain no damage across the entire site.
The field was highly changeable in its ground condition and managed to hold on until the start of January, when the going went downhill considerably. By early March, we needed an extra 10-15m of ground, but the weather changed to the scorcher we’ve had since mid-March, quickly drying the ground everywhere into concrete-esque moon craters. It was at this point we moved them off the trash paddock and further up the hill.
Spring grazing can definitely be cut in half, as the rate Tuna ballooned was quite extraordinary. We’ll be letting her loose a little more condition this coming winter to compensate for how good the grazing actually is here.
Big thanks to Ryan, for the winter support, who distributed our bales every week and was always there if something went awry!