Posts Tagged ‘riding arena’
Battling Growth
Sometimes it does feel a little like a battle against a siege of growing greenery. The lawn grass that I cut with the borrowed mower the other day now looks like I’ve neglected it for a couple of weeks. Now imagine what the areas that haven’t been cut at all look like.
The two pastures we refer to as “back” and “north,” are over two feet tall. I was just starting to mow the back pasture last Saturday when the sound from the brush cutter caused me to stop and check on the gear box. There’s some serious mowing left to be done back there still.
Yesterday afternoon, Cyndie laid down some pool noodles in the arena space to do an exercise with the horses. She said it didn’t work very well because the grass was too tall and it was hard to see the noodles. I decided to get that cut before resuming work with the brush cutter.
First, I needed to sharpen and adjust the blades on the reel mower for Cyndie so she could use it on the labyrinth. Seriously, there is nowhere that doesn’t need mowing right now, pretty much on an every-other-day basis.
We try to keep the arena grass as short as possible, usually mowing it with the rider. I ventured in there after dinner last night with the borrowed tractor and quickly discovered the grass had grown a lot longer than was noticeable from a distance.
It was so long and thick in places that I needed to make a first pass at a high setting, to enable mowing it a second time at the lowest one.
While I did laps on the rider, Cyndie worked the fence line with the power trimmer.
A couple of soldiers fighting the good fight for order and scenic well-being against the growing chaos and unwelcome infestations.
Seriously, it’s like landscape warfare.
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Much Improved
One of the first things I notice when I come up our driveway is how the temporary fence around the arena space is holding up. I’ve figured out that it is in a spot that is particularly prone to a beating on windy days. Logic would suggest we could solve that issue with a permanent fence, but we aren’t ready for that level of commitment yet. This location is growing on us, but it was far from a certain thing when we chose to mark off the dimensions.
It was refreshing to discover Sunday that we could fix, and even improve the current set up without needing to spend a lot of money. We already had most of what was needed to accomplish adding better anchor posts and getting it connected to the existing electric fence.
Now I don’t need to use the solar-powered fence charger that the horses had taken a liking to nibbling on last fall, and I can still keep them from messing with the plastic posts.
I pulled the webbing tight when I finished on Sunday, and it was still looking great when I got home yesterday, despite a reasonable breeze.
Now all it needs is Cyndie and a horse out there doing some dressage routines.
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Arena Space
Just when we are beginning to see progress on improvement of our hay-field, we go and re-purpose a significant chunk of it for a riding arena. Cyndie has been planning all along to have an arena, and this section of the field wasn’t producing the greatest grass, so we think it is a good location. Per Cyndie’s request, I mowed the field short in that space, and yesterday I measured and placed step-in posts she purchased for a temporary fence.
It gives us a tangible view of what her desired dimensions look like in that spot. It is a little awkward for now, because the area isn’t completely flat. It took me a lot of tries to get it oriented the way I wanted, because so many of the visual references are not square. Combined with the hill, those features created quite a battle between my eye and the tape measure.
Next, I need to install fence polytape on the posts to create a visual barrier that will allow Cyndie to ride the horses in the space. Somewhere down the line, probably after we get a landscaper to install drain tile and improve the surface of the paddocks, we would like to get the arena graded level and then have a layer of sand put down.
I have contacted two different landscaper/excavators who we were referred to for improving our paddocks, and neither one of them has returned my call. It’s frustrating. Our window of opportunity could close for the season before I can get work scheduled, and then we will have another winter/spring of mud hassles to endure.
I might be forced to do some of the work myself, like digging out a better defined drainage swale. The issue I’m most concerned about is how to determine and maintain a proper slope. I haven’t the equipment or the know-how to execute establishing that critical feature. Is that going to become another thing I have to learn how to do myself?
I’m hoping not.
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Relative Something 