Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I have to wear a halter?  ugh!

I'll get back to summarizing my 8 weeks of horse boot camp in my next post... I just wanted to share what is going on right now. Having Spencer back at home is great, but I have a bit of a problem - too much grass!!!

I don't have a drylot area where I can turn him out and limit his grass intake.  So, that has meant that he has spent a fair amount of time in his stall. Luckily he is good in his stall, but I would prefer to have him outside as much as possible.

The whole grass situation caused a secondary problem - Spencer quickly figured out that he wasn't getting much time outside, so my easy-to-catch horse decided to become a runner!  What a brat.  It took me about 30 minutes
to catch him the first time and he's been turned out with a halter since then.
He doesn't run anymore though...I guess he thought he might as well give it a shot the first time...?  :-)

The view I was getting every time I tried to catch him...

I mowed the grass in his small paddock, so that has helped, but I still don't want him out on rich spring grass all the time.  He is in pretty good shape right now,  so I don't want to lose too much of that conditioning!

Trying to get a shot of his body condition

I did try a grazing muzzle on him - he is ok with it, but not great.  He paces around his paddock and paws a lot. He was also getting into things - kicking his water trough and pawing at the pile of old house beams in the middle of the paddock (which are going to be moved in a couple of weeks!)

I'm being tortured - call the SPCA!

I think I'm going to set aside some money over the summer to have someone come in and bulldoze the sod/grass from my little paddock.  I will have over 4 acres of pasture left, so that will be enough, I'm sure!

We have also had a ton of rain in the past week - I can barely keep up with mowing the lawn and paddock, let alone weeding and fixing up my gardens!  There is a lot of stuff to maintain at this place - I'm not 100% used to it yet, since last summer was really dry and I didn't have a lot of work to do...!