It has been one of the most busy months I have ever had, and its been pretty centered on getting this fix me upper, fixed. First, the property is a mess. The previous tenants decided it was acceptable to not use a trash receptacle, especially out by the horse area. Second, those same tenants thought it was acceptable to never clean a stall. Third, they also decided everywhere was a burn spot and they should try to burn everything-including glass, metal, and heavy plastics.
Early in the month, we started cleaning the trash off the grounds. After multiple trash bags full, I think we have most of the garbage picked up. While cleaning up the mess, we found even more stuff to fix up around the property. One thing we noticed is how messy the place becomes in the rain. The nice hard packed ground becomes a real slip-in-slide, knee deep mud mess with the tiniest amount of rain. With that in mind, it made the rest of our improvements slow going.
On the dry days, that we could get the truck back in the horse area, we had to shovel out a years worth of horse poop from the two stalls. This was the nastiest thing I have ever encountered. I feel so bad for the previous tenant's horses. How could they let them live in that filth? It was packed solid and about a foot deep, every shovel load was saturated in urine and had an overwhelming odor. I have been told that they trained horses here. Who would leave their horse with them? Did they not check the facilities their horses would be staying at? I would have ran for the hills the horse area was so uncared for. It took us four solid days of working on the stalls to get them cleaned up.
While the stall cleaning was underway, we had a wind storm. Much to our dismay, it blew one side of a stall off. I have never encountered such high winds and I am glad this happened before we had a horse in the stall. Knowing that this has happened and could happen again, our next project is to put the stall back together and tighten/add more screws to the stalls to make sure this does not happen while a horse is in the stall.
This week we have been working on prepping the acreage for turnout. While raking the burn piles up and removing the pieces that are nonflammable (mostly large pieces of glass) the irrigation manhole started to overflow. The irrigation is not suppose to be on till tomorrow, so we called our water guy. He immediately came out and fixed the overflow, but while he was there we started discussing our pasture. Turns out our water guy is a wealth of knowledge and informed us that our pasture has been nothing but white-top weed for awhile and if we want to put horses on it, it will need to be sprayed and probably re-seeded. Of course, we only have one acre's worth of water rights, so re-seeding is going to be a bit of a challenge. Our water guy gave us some numbers to people that could spray and who would be able to recommend a pasture grass that needs limited amounts of water.
It seems this property needs more attention than some elbow grease. While it has been a lot of cleaning up after someone else and not a lot of fun, we can finally see a difference. We have a very cute place. Now that all of the trash is gone and the horse area is starting to come together we can see the outline of our farm. Still not the dream, but definitely the beginning of our hobby farm.
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