Category: gates

Arrival

not to be confused with the movie

Where were we… oh yes, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

A little additional context to round out the picture. On top of everything happening with Juniper and the new horse I was also working out a bunch of details to get our first ever cover crop planted this fall (there will be a post about that eventually) which involved coordinating with the county, and then another county because the first situation fell through at the last minute, and a neighbor with a tractor, and finding seed (where do you buy enough winter rye seed for 15 acres?!) etc. and I also had a doctors appointment and an MRI scheduled because my doctor and the neurologist she referred me to wanted to rule out MS as a possible cause for some things I have going on. Both of them thought it was pretty unlikely I have MS but both of them also thought it was likely enough that it should be officially checked on. I will also have a post on that, but I will not leave you in suspense on this one, I do not have MS, but at the time this was all happening I did not know that, I only knew that two doctors thought it was unlikely but still possible.

Back to the horse saga. Tuesday morning is lots of frantic phone calls to my normal vet plus my friend Sarah’s vet who has been treating Juniper, my neighbor, and my friend Hilary who was our back-up ride, trying to figure out when and where Juniper can get a dental but still be home when the new horse gets here. Luckily Sarah’s vet is able to squeeze Juniper in Wednesday morning and Hilary, who helped me bring Leeloo and Juniper home the first time, has a flexible day that day so she can go with me to pick up Juniper from Sarah’s house, bring her to the vet for her dental, hang out with us there while Juniper comes to from being sedated, and then bring Juniper back to my house.

It is at this point that I realize we will have to find a way to separate Juniper and Highlight (I still don’t love that name but I haven’t come up with anything else so Highlight she is) since Juniper will need some careful observation so we know exactly how much she is eating and drinking and to make sure her digestive system is operating correctly (i.e. she’s pooping). I also don’t want to put Juniper through the stress of meeting a new horse when she is clearly not feeling well. However, we are not at all set up for separate pastures. We have one shelter in the fenced in area, it has three bays, but it is one structure. We also only have two gates into the entire fenced in area. After some frantic brainstorming we opt to put up a temporary strand of electric fence coming out from one side of the gate and attaching to the wall of one of the shelter bays which is wood and therefore will not conduct the charge to the entire shelter. We’ll also need to block the tiny passage behind the shelter. This way I can use the gate by the shelters to get to Juniper and then I can walk up and around and use the gate by the house to get to Highlight. Except at the last minute it occurs to me to check in with the seller to see if Highlight has been on grass this summer and of course she has not been, so I can’t just let her out on the grass which is finally doing well with all the rain we got this fall. So now I need to block her off from the grass which means blocking her off from the gate. Then Sarah, who has been taking care of Juniper this summer and through her two colics, asks if I’m worried about Highlight bringing any illnesses home with her. I wasn’t, because she is coming from a very small private location and she passed a wellness exam, and every other horse in the trailer will also have passed a wellness exam, but there is still a tiny chance she could catch something and bring it home. If Juniper were healthy I wouldn’t worry at all, but Juniper is far from healthy right now and it’s just not worth the risk. So, we set up a second temporary set of electric fence on the other side of the gate so that there is a ten-foot space between them and they can’t make contact. I have now effectively created two separate paddocks with their own shelters and a 10-foot space between them. Yay. Neither of them has a gate or access point of any kind. Boo.

Doesn’t matter because I have no other choice as it is now 9 pm on Tuesday night and everyone’s coming home tomorrow!

Wednesday morning – arrival day!

Hilary and I drive separately in case the shipper makes better time than expected and/or the vet runs late. For once things go as planned and the vet sees us right on time. Juniper receives one of the quickest floats I’ve ever seen a horse get and he extracts two molars (photos if you’re curious) but we still need to wait for her to wake-up so she can safely handle the trailer ride. Once we feel she’s coherent enough to hold herself up we head for home, Highlight is scheduled to arrive in 45 minutes!

We settle Juniper into her new arrangement and wait for Highlight’s arrival. It is a little delayed but she is there within an hour and a half. It is in getting the two girls into their respective areas that I realize how much of an issue our gateless set-up will be. We set up the fence so there were plastic “grips” on the ends of the hot lines so we could unhook them from the shelter wall to go in and out, the problem is there is no other support structure for the lines so the moment we pull them off the wall they go slack for the entire length of the run and touch the ground, plus there is no place to actually put them so I have to somehow hold the lines in one hand while trying to get myself and various things (water, feed, hay, medicine, pitch-fork) from one side to the other. And of course the moment the lines go slack both girls try to go through to meet each other. This is not a feasible option for doing daily chores. That means I get to very gingerly climb through the fence every time I need to get to the other side and despite my very careful climbing I manage to shock myself at least once every time I do chores. Let me tell you the hot lines hurt, particularly when it’s your inner thigh that makes contact as you attempt to step over it, but the ground line, which under normal circumstances has no charge running through it so you can grab it like normal to hold it out of your way, you know with your entire hand gripping it, that fucking HURTS when you are touching it and then accidently hit a hot line with whatever random other body part you aren’t paying enough attention to (I have been trying to keep the language pg-13 on this blog for reasons I am not clear on, but this situation is without question an F-word situation, but I digress…). So at least once a day, if not multiple times a day, I manage to shock myself while doing chores. “Why don’t you just unplug the fence?” you ask. Well Highlight is a very personable, very sweet, and very smart horse, and she watches you. She watches me climb through the fence every day to feed her and give her hay and pick up poop, and then she tries to do the same thing even with the fence hot. So turning it off seems like a recipe for disaster. And it turns out I’m right, because even with the lines hot Highlight managed to pull one of the hot lines (the one I gingerly step over) off the permanent fence and right across the entrance to her shelter on the night it’s pouring rain. And the way the line fell it is in contact with another hot line so it still has a charge running through it so when I get home from my 12 hour work day and go to give Juniper her PM meds I find a soaking wet, unhappy, and scared Highlight. So I’m standing in the rain on the soaking wet ground pulling a still electrified line of fence out of her paddock muttering expletives with every grab because everything is super conductive in that moment. Then I have to convince Highlight that the shelter will not in fact attack her and she can go in it, and please go in your shelter and get out of the rain. And then, I have to fix it so she doesn’t try that stunt again and get in a worse situation. Did I mention I worked a 12-hour day and it was pouring rain. Good times.

After that I stop going through Highlights fence to feed her and just throw hay over the fence, and push her feed under the bottom line and use a rake to grab it back out. No picking up poop on her side until we work out another option, which is definitely having them together sooner than planned, but this set-up is not sustainable.

And that was our first week.

First Real Snow

At least the bugs are GOne

We had our first real snow of the year this week and we were definitely not prepared. The morning of the snowy day itself we opted to do all the feeding, both their breakfasts and their hay for the day, inside the shelter bays because Leeloo still does not have her winter coat and I didn’t want her to get too wet. Unfortunately, Juniper decided that morning that she didn’t want to eat any of her breakfast until she had some new hay and Leeloo of course wants nothing to do with hay until she has had her breakfast. Feeding them in the shelters however means I can’t actually separate them so this added even more of a challenge on a morning when I was already rushed because I had to be in to work by 9:15 AM and had to stop and get treats first and do all that driving in the snow. In the end Juniper didn’t get much of her actual breakfast and I felt guilty and more determined than ever to get that “barn” shed set up as soon as possible.

When we did chores that night we also discovered that the shelters themselves aren’t quite the wind and snow break we had hoped they would be.

I cleaned out as much of the snow from the left most shelter bay as I could but had to leave the deepest stuff on the edge.

The next day however was way worse. Our location is very windy. VERY WINDY. I never understood how windy a place could be until we moved here. Here are some pictures that hopefully help illustrate what it is like:

This is less than twenty-four hours later and there was no melting happening, only the wind.

All that snow just got blown everywhere – including giant drifts across our driveway that we just paid to have plowed out the night before (yay!).

This kind of shows the drifts as well as the new drift patterns created by the hay boxes that we hadn’t dealt with before. Winter is so much fun.

In addition to the drifts across the driveway we also had drifts on both sides of the gate to the shelters which meant I couldn’t open it enough to get the poop cart or, more importantly, the hay cart through. The wind was too ridiculous to even consider feeding them their breakfasts up front by the roundpen where we normally do so I can separate Juniper and Leeloo. Juniper once again wasn’t interested in her food and wanted hay but this time I was a bit smarter and dumped Leeloo’s food out on one of the mats in the farthest right shelter bay so it would take her longer to eat and then snuck out some fresh hay for Juniper to eat and then brought Juniper her breakfast, after she had a chance to eat some hay for a bit. This worked pretty well until Leeloo finished her breakfast and came to see what Juniper and I were up to, fortunately Juniper had eaten most of her breakfast by then so I said good enough and moved on to trying to clean poop out of the shelter bays when there was no cart to put it in. It didn’t go well.

This of course is why I want to have that middle shelter set up as a makeshift barn with a stall on either end; so I can bring both Leeloo and Juniper in someplace out of the elements and into separate areas. Then Juniper can have as much time as she needs to eat her hay and all of her breakfast and they can both be dry and out of the elements for a while. It will also be invaluable when the farrier comes out next time because I really don’t want to be standing out in the snow and the wind while he’s trimming. I also really need to figure out how to block off the “stall” ends of the barn shelter since the snow and wind demonstrated how easily they can make their way around the edges.

Nate was kind enough to shovel out the gate later that day so we can at least open it wide enough to get a cart in and out. Of course getting the hay cart through the snow and the various drifts within the paddock itself was another matter. We absolutely must find another solution to that because I’m not hauling that cart through two foot (or higher) drifts all winter! I’m thinking a sled? Or can I convert a wheeled cart to a sled cart by locking the wheels onto skis of some sort?! Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Also discovered that I really, really, need some actual winter boots:

Where Do the Weekends Go?!

Always more things to do than hours to do them in

We got a lot done this weekend, though not enough, as always.

Friday we took full advantage of my 20% employee discount at Fleet Farm and loaded up on some winter socks and gloves and I was able to get this coat I had been eying from the cash register all week and it was on sale! 30% off, plus my 20% discount, plus we were able to use the $5 off of $50 coupon from the popcorn you get for free when you get gas from the Fleet Farm gas station (which I sadly do not get a discount on). Clearly this is the start of an application problem for my next Math Literacy class.

Saturday however was not as productive. We were able to move some stuff off the driveway in preparation for the snow plowing that is sadly right around the corner. But our attempt to hang the gate on one of the shelter bays in the “barn” shelter ran in to some snags almost as soon as we moved all the tools and such from the garage down to the shelter. Namely the drill bit we had wasn’t the right one to make the holes needed for the gate’s J bolts and the latch for the other side of the gate did not actually come with hardware for the post, despite the fact that the package clearly said “hardware included.” When I double checked on the website there was some small print about hardware to attach it to the gate was included but hardware for the post was not. Thanks. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to go get those missing things right then because the farrier was scheduled to come at 3:00 PM.

This was our second farrier appointment since bringing Leeloo and Juniper home and though the first one went okay overall, I was worried how this one would go. Leeloo hasn’t been her normal sweet and well-mannered self the last few weeks and it has gotten noticeably worse since the corn was harvested. I’m not sure if it is the change in weather and the fact that she still doesn’t have her normal winter coat yet, if having the corn gone has made her whole space feel too open and exposed, if with the corn gone she can hear/see/smell the neighboring horses better, or if the neighbors up the hill happened to get a new horse and the timing matched. She is almost always looking in the direction of the horse farm just north of us on high alert, pacing and calling and staring. While Nate and were moving the stuff off the driveway she was clearly agitated and did a little mini rear while staring off at that farm and I was concerned the quickly approaching farrier visit was not going to go well. I grabbed her halter and brought her into the round pen; my plan had been to make her walk and trot a little bit but mostly change directions a lot to get her mind on me and off of whatever was stressing her out since it was too cold and the ground too hard for anything else. The moment I took the lead rope off and stepped back to ask her to move she took off doing at this huge extended trot with random canter strides thrown in and a little bucking for good measure. When I asked her to switch directions she would do these ridiculous sliding stops and spins, including one pretty decent canter pirouette. I never did anything more than step ever so slightly in front of her and say “change directions.”  She clearly has a lot of pent-up anxiety and energy and I will need to do better about finding time to work with her. I just wish we had a better place to do it in. She of course managed to ding up her left heel bulb with one of her absurdly unnecessary moves, but she wasn’t noticeably sore on Sunday and she seemed a bit more relaxed – she even laid down for a little while (in her rolling/sleeping hay pile of course). Though that may be me seeing what I want to see. Regardless it was worth it because she was pretty good for the farrier when he got there. We had one moment when she was being rude, trying to put her foot down before the farrier was done with it, and when he let her know she couldn’t be rude she had a mini meltdown. We just circled a few times until she realized all we wanted was for her to stand still and then the rest of the trim went fine. The crappy weather (going from wet and muddy to immediately freezing) has made the footing everywhere awful and has made everything we have to do that much harder, the stress from not having everything done yet, plus Leeloo’s clear anxiety and general unhappiness with her current living situation has all combined to make me feel like maybe this “Bringing Leeloo Home” idea was not a good one. But the farrier said Leeloo’s feet are looking better than they ever have in the entire while he has worked with us – so I’m holding hard on to that.

We did manage to get the gate up on Sunday after a trip to LeVahn Brothers (the best hardware store ever). There were still a few challenges of course, mostly because Nate and I are fairly inept when it comes to anything regarding skilled physical labor, particularly when power tools are involved. Using a reciprocating saw without hurting yourself and actually cutting what you want and no more and no less requires way more skill than picking up poop does. The final cuts aren’t exactly straight and didn’t go exactly where they were meant to, but no injuries occurred and the gate is up, so we’ll count it as a win. We also had a visit from Juniper’s former owner when she dropped off Juniper’s cart. I haven’t driven a horse or pony in ages, and even then, I was never more than a novice; but I am super excited to refresh my memory (maybe take some lessons over the winter?) and hopefully try out driving next spring.

Just need to keep those positive thoughts front and center during these next few cold stupid months!

And we did get that gate up

The Fence – Part 6 of ??

Let There Be Gates

We still faced the dilemma of no truck and no delivery option for gates; and no place that rents trucks also sells gates. In the end we opted to get these heavy duty bull gates from Fleet Farm, which were on sale at the time, and rent a truck from the Menards just down the road. The first time we went to get the gates they were out of two of the sizes we wanted. We came back home, did another search and discovered they were sold out anywhere we could reasonably drive (being on sale), so we opted to change the sizes for the two smaller gates and try again the next day. They had the new sizes, so we bought the gates in the store, got the little slip that lets you into the “yard” area to pick them up, then drove two miles down the road to Menards, rented the Menards truck, then drove the Menards truck back to Fleet Farm to get the gates. The gate attendant at Fleet Farm gave us some lip about having a Menards truck – dude, if Fleet Farm rented trucks I would have rented a Fleet Farm truck but you don’t, so shut it! When we were in the yard loading our gates, I noticed that the sizes we had originally wanted but were supposedly sold out were sitting right there – of course. I also noticed that I had forgotten to bring any tiedowns this time; we drove VERY slowly home hoping we didn’t lose a gate on the way. They all made it safely and I managed to get the Menards truck back within the 75 minute window so I didn’t get charged the extra $15!

Now we had to figure out how to get the gates on our posts. The normal way to hang a gate is to drill a large hole through your wood fence post and put this giant J bolt through it, but since we have fiberglass fence posts that isn’t an option. The company we bought our fence posts from do sell gate hinge assemblies, but they are $80+ per gate and when you look, there isn’t much too them. I felt there had to be a cheaper option, and we found one! It looked to be about the same thing and it was only $20 per gate. The size wasn’t a perfect fit, but I measured and it looked like they were just a tiny bit bigger so I figured we could make them work.

Once the hinges arrived we went out to install the gates and ran in to our first issue. We had already put all the stuff (the braces and the ElectroBraid) on the end post on the hinge side of the small gate which meant we couldn’t slide the gate hinges onto the post. We considered taking everything off and starting over, but considering we had already tensioned the ElectroBraid five thousand times (okay, nine times) we said, f-it. This is temporary and this gate is mostly going to be used to go in and out to fill and clean water tanks so who cares what side the hinge is on.

As you can see in the picture the cheaper hinge assembly was also more than “just a tiny bit bigger” and was, in fact, too big to use.  Of course. After some staring and swearing I realized I could probably combine some of the pieces of the hinge kit we got with some of the extra pieces from the corner posts we wound up not using because I went and bought a round pen the first time I tried to buy gates. Once the barn is built – it will be built! – we’ll use all the corner posts, but I’ll have figured out a better hinge solution by then (hopefully).

Now that we had a temporary working solution for the hinges, we just had to figure out where to put them on the end post itself. This also proved super challenging; if we had the end post fully installed the braces would be in place and we couldn’t get the hinge parts on, but without having the post up how were we supposed to know where to put the hinge parts? Also someone had to hold the gate while the other person figured out where the hinges should go but the end post wasn’t fully installed so someone had to hold that too. The whole thing took us way too long to figure out, but we did eventually get the end post installed with the hinges on. Then we went to get the J bolts off the gate (they come attached sideways for transport so they don’t stick out) and discovered that we couldn’t. They would not budge. At one point we were actually bending the gate itself, not good. That ended our very frustrating evening; we decided to pause and try again in a few days after a trip to LeVahn Brothers.

The gates are designed with one hinge welded to the gate itself and the other bolted in place so it can be adjusted. We were able to get the adjustable part off and bring that and its stuck J bolt to LeVahn Brothers. I walked in and when they asked what I was looking for I handed them my stuck bolt and said I need to get these two things apart. He said, “I can do that for you.” took it to the back and returned shortly with them separated. Which was great, but I still had seven more stuck things at home and four of them were welded to the gates so I couldn’t bring them into the store to have him very kindly un-stick them for us. It was determined we needed a breaker bar and a really large wrench. I brought my new acquisitions home and they worked like a charm, everything came apart with ease. The proper tools are so important!

In the intervening time I also got much smarter (trying to do these things at night after work is never a good idea, no one is at their smartest after a long day of work) and realized that I could lay out the end post on the ground and lay the gate next to it along with all the other parts and line up where we needed things without anyone trying to hold anything, also we didn’t need to get the gate hinges exactly correct while installing the end post, we just needed to have them in-between the other stuff in the vicinity of their final location.  We also had a friend come over to help us out. Having a third set of hands, proper tools, and a better plan made a huge difference! With all that the second gate went up much faster and easier than the first.

Now we had gates; not 100% square and level, but good enough! On to the last step of the fence, electrification. At this point I have stopped saying to myself “How hard could this be?” or “What could go wrong?” Everything about this has been harder than it should have been, and at this step what can go wrong is electrocution, let’s not tempt fate.

Gate Expectations

Went looking for gates and somehow bought a round pen

Though we got almost everything we needed for our fence from Bluebird fencing we did not get the actual gates. We also wanted to get something to temporarily close off part of one of the shelters so we could use it as a makeshift stall until the barn is built. However, it is temporary (I will get my barn!) and anything 12-feet long, at least 4-feet high, and strong enough to stand up to a horse is going to be expensive so I wanted to get something we could repurpose – something like a 12-foot round pen panel (also called a corral panel) or gate. This meant I was looking for gates for the current track system plus at least two 12-foot corral panels or gates for our temporary stalls.

The issue is that to be horse safe these are inherently large, heavy-duty, gates and therefore not something we can transport in either of our cars. It also means that if you find a place selling good products at decent prices, but they are outside of your state, the freight costs eat up any potential savings. I had been looking at the stores in our area that do sell them, Fleet Farm, Tractor Supply, and Runnings (haven’t been to it yet but I’ve heard good things). Unfortunately, they either don’t deliver, or delivery added an extra $100+ to each gate and their websites were not easy to search or use to compare products. That ridiculously long video from Cashmans also spends time talking about corral panels and he mentions the importance of construction and materials, he also mentions many places don’t say what gauge their metal is, so you have go by the weight of the gate or panel to guess. He was correct in this, except many of the sites I was searching didn’t disclose the weight information either – great. But I kept finding these smaller operations in other states selling quality gates and corral panels for cheaper than the big stores and I felt like there had to be one like that closer to me – and I found one!

Quick side-note, from the beginning of this farce project, I have been contemplating who will be keeping Leeloo company once she is home. During that contemplation it also occurred to me that whoever it is will be new to me and though some people are cool working with new animals out on a trail or in a field I am a cautious person by nature (there is a reason my current Wordle streak is 221 wins but my average guess length is 4.2) and prefer to work in an enclosed area. Ideally one not enclosed by a barrier that will shock me or said animal if we accidently make contact with it. After that first corner post took us an entire day to install I asked Nate how he would feel if we modified the original plan and put a round pen in the center of our track system instead of another electrified fence run. This would save us four corners and two end posts, so we would only have to do 12 more and not 18 more! He was open to the idea and became more open with every corner we installed. This meant as I was searching for gates, I was also kind of low-key searching for round pens as well.

Livestock Panels of MN is located only forty miles from me and sells gates and round pens – perfect! It is a side project for someone with a contact in Texas, every couple of months they get big shipments of corral panels and gates and then sell them out as single items or entire round pens. The best part is they deliver and they are close enough that the delivery fee is super reasonable! However, at that particular moment they only had 10-foot panels and 4-foot wide gates and wouldn’t be getting anything new for at least a month or two and I thought we would have Leeloo home before then – HA! But they did have a 60-foot round-pen package available and the price was really good; I bought it and they delivered it the next day!

We still need gates though….