The Farm - Part Four

Appaloosas

At some point, a local woman named Nicole from the area caught wind that we had a small farm with available space and approached us about leasing her the remaining stalls for a few of her horses.  She was knowledgeable and had a world of experience with horses and promised to teach Aria the ins and outs of the equine world. I agreed to provide the three available stalls for the price of one with the provision that she works with my daughter and provide both guidance and lessons.

Nicole moved a trio of horses in the following week – she specialized in appaloosas with godawful names like Moon, Sissy and Glitter – Appaloosas are known for their spotted bodies, sparse manes and tails and big bodies.  They were excellent for trail rides and “pleasure mounts” and considered tough, hardy and independent. But in my humble opinion, these were scrub horses – not as beautiful or regal as Cisco or Oakey.  One was a roan with wild eyes that would buck whenever I walked past it. Another was gray with spots – definitely not the coloring I would prefer for a horse.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Nicole loved her horses.  And she kept her promise to teach Aria about horses.  We made so many mistakes when we first got Cisco and Oakey from how much to feed them and the difference between sweet feed, grain, oats and hay.  Nicole was a rough and tumble horse woman with a couple of young kids and a hard-working husband and when she came to the farm, she basically took over the barn. 

She would tell me when to order more hay and where I could get the best prices for it at the time. I was buying premium sweet feed for our two – she said I was wasting my money. 

We were using straw as bedding for the stalls – but when it came time to “muck” them, the crap would stick to everything, making it harder to clean.  She switched us to sawdust, which was delivered by the ton and wound up being cheaper. She also rode western and got Aria involved in local horse shows.

The better part of the field behind the barn was flat meadow and suitable for the horses to graze on the grasses.  We outlined much of the area with electric polymesh white ribbon fencing, which was easy to erect using metal T poles that plugged into a power source inside the barn and provided a wide-open area for the horses to run and graze.  As time went on, we added gates and subdivided the big field into smaller areas for other animals and to keep the male horses away from the females. 

It was easy to walk the horses out of the barn and into the field to let them graze without worrying that they roam off the property to neighboring farms or back beyond the back property line to the woods behind us. The horses learned quickly to avoid the ribbon fencing – it will “pulse” a low voltage shock that would go on/off every few seconds.  On occasion, one of the kids or I would accidently touch the fence in the course of doing chores – the shock wasn’t enough to hurt you badly, but it made me sick to my stomach whenever it happened.  I could see why the animals didn’t like it. 

Pennsylvania is known for some wild thunderstorms and if the animals were out grazing and the power went off, they would instinctively know the fence was dead and invariably would go up to the fence and bounce it up and down by taking the ribbon in their teeth and pull it back and forth.  We learned after they tore the ribbon during an outage to replace the electric transformer with a solar powered box.

In addition to the fencing, we added big 150-gallon galvanized steel stock water tanks that sat in the field – horses drank A LOT of water and as the farm’s animal occupancy grew, so did the need for water and tanks. 

I was naïve enough to think that you needed a separate stall for each horse, and figured Nicole would be restricted to the three stalls provided.  But I came home one day to see several horses in the field and realized that she had no issue with letting them live outside full time. At one point, we had 9 horses at the farm – a pretty good deal for her for what we were charging a month that she was paying for board.

There was a standpipe water pump down by the barn that sat outside the one door – because the horse farm was originally a sod farm, the ground was rich and moist naturally and the well was only 80 feet deep.  Under normal circumstances, this would have been fine.  But now that we were watering a football team of horses, I would occasionally have muddy water and worried that the well would go dry. Thankfully, that never happened during our tenure there, but during a few bitterly cold winter months, the pump would freeze solid. 

There was nothing more terrifying than to pull that handle up and hear NOTHING…No water rushing – nothing for the animals to drink.  It wasn’t a matter of saying, “Oh well – they drank yesterday – I’m sure they’ll be fine…” they needed water and would bang their buckets like prisoners in those cheesy movies where they run their tin cups across the bars when the guard walked by.

The only other water supply meant going up several concrete steps onto a concrete deck, in the back door of the house to a utility room with 5-gallon buckets in each hand to get water and carry it back down to the barn.  On more than one occasion, water would slop out of the bucket when I opened the back door and spill onto the concrete deck.  I would get down to the barn and hook up the bucket in the stall and watch the horses suck up 5 gallons of water in one big gulp and then look at you like, NEXT?