So, lots has happened in the last few weeks. We have made quite a lot of progress lately and it’s starting to look like “a real farm,” as my husband puts it. The horses seem to really love it here and are doing well on their longer turnout schedules. We do wait to put them out in the morning til the dew is off the grass to save their feet, but there is plenty of shade so even in the heat of the day they can get out of the sun if they care to. (They mostly don’t seem to care!)
The barn is also allllllllmost finished. I still have some trim to paint inside, and the HVAC pro will be coming on Wednesday to install the mini-split (heat & AC) in the tackroom so it will be completely climate controlled. But all the other fixtures are up and it is starting to come together.
We’ve also gotten a nice routine down for the barn maintenance. Mondays are our big clean up days – pretty much everything gets washed with Lysol! But between this and our normal daily routine, we have pretty much eliminated bugs entirely. Makes for a much more pleasant barn experience, for both humans and horses.
We also got the solarium installed, yay!!! It’s hot here at the moment but hey – WINTER IS COMING. And you know what that means. We don’t want to be cold!!! No worries though; our fantastic solarium from Wilsun Customs will keep us toasty! And we got our water heater serviced too, to make sure that we have that hot water available whenever needed.
We’ve really been enjoying the arena since it was finished about a month ago. It has been worth the wait – thank goodness. We ended up installing boards around the perimeter, and backfilling those with stone to ensure that we had good drainage but protected the footing, which has worked well. The horses love the FutureTrack surface.
Finally, the pastures have been holding up really well too; big thanks to my HorseHusband who spent the entire spring getting them into top condition so they would be well established and healthy before we hit the heat of summer.
We had a fantastic fencing vendor who built us several new smaller paddocks near the barn so we’d have some great options in addition to the big open pastures we already had when we moved in.
Hedgerow Farm 