Chipping away at chores

Owning your own small property – whether you have animals or not – is a fair bit of work.  Well, I suppose you could do as much or as little as you wanted, but most of us want to enjoy our property and keep it as neat as possible.  (Lots of people don’t, I know…!)

Maintaining fencing and in our case, keeping the electric fence working and free from weeds is a major chore.  It is one I quite enjoy, even though it is hard work.  Luckily I only have about 4-5 acres fenced, so it isn’t too bad.

Last year, I just had my small paddock (1/2 acre approx.) and about 1.5 acres of pasture for the boys.  This year I knew I needed to fix the fencing on my 2-3 acre front pasture, in order to give them enough grass to get through the summer.  The previous owners had taken out a section of fencing to put in a pool – not complaining about that – but the fence still needed to be fixed!

Early in the spring, I spent a nice sunny day out checking all of the doodads insulators that hold in the electric braid. A lot of them had come loose over the years.  I also cut by hand the few little trees and weeds that had grown into the fence over the past couple of years.

A few weeks later hubby helped me put in 9 t-posts and we re-routed the fence.  I find electric fencing kind of fun – maybe I should have been an electrician?  ;-)

The cats were funny – they weren’t the best helpers – but sure kept us amused by attacking the electric braid (before it was connected) and climbing ladders.  We probably would have been done a bit more quickly if we weren’t distracted by them!



Sleeping on the job!



Unfortunately I couldn’t get this field bush-hogged this spring, so the weeds grew up quickly on me.  Plants, grass, etc. all of a sudden grow like crazy around here. Some days it feels like we are living in a tropical rain forest! 

 As the horses graze this field, we have been going out with our Stihl brushcutter (awesome tool!) and cutting the grass/weeds under the fence line and taking out trying to take out the tall weeds before they go to seed.  It is a bit of a losing battle, but we are putting in a good effort!

One last thing I was able to have done this spring was remove the giant pile of old beams from my small paddock.  My coach’s hubby came over with his tractor to do some work on the riding ring and just happened to have a bucket on the tractor, so I asked if he could move the beams. We were going to tackle it by hand with a wheelbarrow, since the beams were rotted, but the tractor made short work of what would have taken us hours/days!  Sadly he doesn’t have a bushhog attachment for his tractor…or  I would have asked/begged/bribed him to quickly mow my pastures as well…

oh, what I wouldn't give for my own tractor!!!

 And one last thing I haven't been doing enough of: taking pictures.  I managed to catch this rainbow by chance one night. I was grumbling that it was raining again and couldn't ride.  A few minutes later this amazing double rainbow appeared and I actually had my phone with me to snap this shot!

a pot of gold could come in handy...