B&A - The Front Pasture!

We have pasture! Of course we don't have our fencing up yet, but we have pasture. So exciting!

This is our "Front Pasture". Hopefully one of two or three pastures that we'll get in eventually. We still have the jacked up fence along the perimeter that came with the house and it's just cross fenced with t-posts and one strand of tape that isn't hot, but the pasture is graded, seeded and growing grass beautifully!

For a little comparison, here is the before picture from when we first bought the house.

We didn't take out too many trees from this particular section, but we did remove lots and lots and lots of brush and blackberry bushes and the big pile of junk that I assume was from when they originally cleared it. There were 3 large piles of debris around the property that they never got to burning apparently. I know I've mentioned the panicked clearing of our property in 2 weekends time with less then a weeks notice before and I promise I'll tell you that story one day.

This is a picture of the pasture while we were clearing. We (and by we, I of course mean the boyfriend because I was pretty much just supervision/support) moved the original pile up, fluffed it and added TONS more to it. It pretty much burned for two weeks straight and we got rid of a lot of stuff. Luckily the boyfriend is an expert on heavy equipment and whipped the property into shape really quickly with just the rented dozer.

If you can focus on the pasture behind my shaggy horse in this picture, you'll see what it looked like after the clearing. We wanted the horses to still have turnout, but it was rocky and uneven and only a few small spots had grass and it just wasn't very pretty at all. There was still about 15 feet of blackberries along the bottom fenceline also so the pasture didn't go all the way down.



Here the boyfriend is on Holly in April cleaning it up, making sure it's all level, getting rid of most of the blackberries and rocks and clearing all the way down to the bottom fenceline. Quality Control (Cheyanne) is watching intently, making sure the job gets done right!

After he finished with all that he seeded it and counted on the spring rains. Well, we got one good drenching, like torrential down pour, where a lot of the seed was just washed away, and then not much else. He reseeded the upper portions where it had washed away and then set up some sprinklers since we weren't getting much more rain. It was hard to complain about no rain after the loooooong winter we had, but it would have been nice for the grass growing operation.

It all worked out though. There is plenty of beautiful, tall grass out there.

Since it's still baby grass the roots aren't strong enough to stay put with the ponies nibbling on it, but the boyfriend said too bad! They need turnout! They have been getting stalked (or is it stocked?) up standing in their little paddocks and bored out of their minds. They need the exercise and freedom. And the grass! Though hay prices have come down to around $11/bale here, from the $17+ it was, it's still nice when they get to graze. I think they were really loving it. We had some very content ponies.



I just love this shot....

It's a dream come true on so many levels: the horses, the pasture "done", owning the property, having a view of the mountain...it's still almost surreal to me. And seriously, how many people do you know that are lucky enough to have that view from their front porch? I could stare at it all day.