By Patty Wilber
Well, this might be a more entertaining read if it were about how to extract your equine from a peat bog on a trail in Ireland. But, NO! This blog is about slogging around the bog that my horse facilities became after last Thursday’s foot of snow that went to melting almost immediately.
We were nearing recovery this Thursday, but now it is snowing again…
Last Thursday: Woke up to a foot of snow.
Last Friday: It warmed right up, so the snow was half gone by noon. That left 4-6 inches on the arena The quickest way to get rid of snow besides using a snow plow and moving it off to the side, is to drag so the sand churns on top of the snow and the dark collects the heat of the sun. Melt City.
Half as snowy as the day before…
Ah, that’s rideable! (It is not slick due to the sand and crusher fine in the arena.)
Last Saturday: A little frozen in the morning, but that did not last long.
Commence boggage.
Lots of water. But still Not Slick, and hey, good water training!
By this Thurdsay, the arena was free of water and just perfect!
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All the pens have covered areas so the horses can debog at their leisure, but most other areas….a lot of muck.
Indy says, “what? r u kidding? i am not stepping in that!” But she doesn’t seem to mind laying in the wet so she is always covered in dried boggage. Might have to change her name to MP. Mud Puppy.
Last Sunday, we planned to move crusher fines before everything melted so the tractor would not get “bogged” down. That worked for the tractor, but the pile of crusher fines was frozen! Jim took a mattock
and chopped through several inches of ice-bound crust to reveal the loose ‘fines underneath. Then the transporting began.
Bog-less!
Some areas just sucked the material in and remained really soft.
Are those muck boots or bog boots? And this is AFTER the crusher fines were added! They were sucked in by the muck! Bogs away!
Usually, drying out does not take too long, but this was a lot of moisture.
The water tanks are full though (from the snow melt we collected off the roof)!
After today’s snow melts (on, say, Sunday), I’ll be pretty excited to see how far I can sink in the bogs!
Is there any way to design an open-air arena that absolutely does not turn into a bog after a big rain or snow? Given the psi of horse hooves, that is, which punch right through soft stuff and into what might seem like a good substrate (gravel) for drainage. This is an idle question and you’re a busy trainer, so…no rush on a definitive answer. I’m not building an arena any time soon. Probably never, given my age and so on.
Relative to the natural adobe mud around here, Patty’s arena is amazing… 8) (But I don’t have an answer to that question, except to suppose it’s possible with enough $$$ and drainage management installed.)
The crusher fines and sand mix is actually rideable in almost all conditions, even underwater. Ice is less lovely. That one corner is the low spot so the arena actually drains to there (and there is an outlet of sorts, too), I just avoid that puddle for a few days. But even the puddle is not very boggy (kind of fibbed about that since the puddle pic was so nice). Every once in a while, after a long dry spell and a heavy rain, I get a top-layer quicksand effect, I guess because there’s a more impervious layer and the water lays on top trying to float the sand around. It is super mushy in the pens now tho–the weather is not warm enough to hard freeze and we got 4 inches or so of new snow…More tonight maybe. joy. I am inside working on the new lab manual we are writing and letting the snow dogs in and out at their behest. They seem to be liking out a lot!