Hot, Dry and Boring

Hot, Dry and Boring

July has not been fun!  It’s bad enough that there isn’t any local racing but the news from the fairgrounds is almost all bad.  They declared bankruptcy which led to the car races (they lease a portion of the racetrack grounds) and the County Fair, which uses the grounds, being cancelled.  Yavapai is still a largely rural county with more cattle and horses than people and kids around here still love 4-H and raise their animals to show at the fair.  This was a major disappointment to them and as an old 4-Her, I really felt bad for them.  About the only good thing I got from the article in the local paper, and I am probably grasping at straws here, was that one of the reasons they couldn’t have the fair was because they didn’t know who would own the fairgrounds in late September, when the fair was due to be held.  There are supposedly a few people looking to buy the grounds – of course with the stock market crash this week – it will probably remain shuttered.  Drat!

Still no rain for me and my small farm.  I am some 20 miles from Prescott and Prescott has been getting some, below normal, but at least some.  It has rained once here on the farm, the whole summer and it was more noise than rain.  I even lost power for the first time in a long time.  When I first moved here in 1983, it was so rural that we still had party lines and you only had to dial the last 4 numbers of a phone number to make a call.  Prescott was long distance and we had no home mail delivery – well, we still don’t have that, but cable came in the first year I was here and I was lucky that I was on the right side of the river because the other side didn’t get cable for another 10 years.  Anyway, back then the power would go out at least once a week.  No one really cared, it was just the way things were and we were happy we had electricity most of the time.  So when I lost power the other day, it was weird – but it came back on fairly quickly and all I had to do was reset all the clocks.

That one little storm also brought the biggest tree limb down on my house.  It fell about 25 feet but the roof was ok.  Scared the bejesus out of me!  I had just had the tree man out to trim up all the trees and remove the tent caterpillars that were attacking my cottonwoods.  They are weird caterpillars that build what looks like a giant spider web in the tree.  I am not sure whether they eat their way out or swaying in the wind pokes a hole in the tent and they get out that way.  Anyway, I guess they eat the tree and eventually kill it.  YUK!  I really do like my trees.  Anyway, the tree man came back and sawed the limb up and took it away.  It took me a week to clean up all the branches that had blown down.  Looked like a war zone but it is all cleaned up, now which is a good thing because the pellet man was due to arrive a couple of days later.

The pellet man brings my horse feed so I don’t have to haul around big hay bales.   In Phoenix they have a big feed mill where they compress hay and form it into small pellets about an inch long.  I have a big storage bin and order 5 tons at a time.   They bring it in a huge truck which of course scares all the horses to death when it rumbles up the driveway.  The truck carries 20 tons at a time and has a long chute that shoots the pellets into my bin.  It actually works out to be more economical in the long run then feeding hay.  There is no waste and the horses like them wet as well as dry so I can put them out and not worry if it rains – if it ever should.  When you feed hay, if the ground is wet or muddy, you have to feed a lot extra because the horses like to eat it off the ground and no matter how well you secure hay off the ground, much of it will end up under their feet and then they tromp it in the mud and won’t eat it. 

Probably the biggest downside to pellets is that a horse will get bored.  With hay, there are always wisps lying on the ground so a horse can spend some of his time searching for it.  They like to do that.  But, I have pasture so they can eat the pellets, which I free feed, and then go satisfy their grazing instincts out on the grass.  I also feed grain so my horses are happy.  One thing I have found, that if you do choose to feed pellets – be sure to feed them in buckets or troughs on or near the ground.  Horses have been known to choke on a pellet.  When a horse eats out of a bucket, their head and neck are almost at a 90 degree angle.  So anything that goes in their mouth has to make that sharp turn to continue down their throat.  That’s where things can get stuck.  A horse is a grazing animal and was meant to eat from the ground, with their head and neck in a line.  Feed pellets down low and they probably won’t choke.

I spent July doing mostly things that needed to be doing and around here there is always something.  The mower man came and cut down all the weeds in the pastures and they look good – for now.  This is the first year I have had so few horses that I can actually rotate the pastures and the pastures are much happier.  Usually I over graze them all summer and they have all winter to try and recover.  In mid September, if I have any extra money I try and over seed some of the pastures but I may not get that done this year.  It’s a lot of work, ripping up the pasture, spreading the seed, covering the seeds up before the birds get them all, and then hoping that you got the seed in late enough so it is past the growing season for weeds.  The grass needs enough warm days to get to about three inches high before the temperatures drop down to freezing at night, which usually happens in late October, early November around here.  The horses would have to run really fast before I have the money to do all that.  I think the next thing on my endless to do list is dirt work.  I have a lot of exposed fence posts, deep ruts where the horses walk the fence lines and natural erosion where dirt that is at the top of the hill washes down to the bottom – leaves exposed fence posts on top and a very low fence at the bottom of the hill.

So, since most of you probably care less about the farm and more about the horses – here ya go.  The racehorses have been on a bit of a break since the 4^th of July.  Both Crown Secret and FD Icy were at Sun Ray Park in northern New Mexico but their season ended after the fourth.  I thought my trainer was going to ship to the meet at Albuquerque which starts the 13^th of August but he sent them to Ruidoso in the southern part of the state.  I wasn’t very happy about this but they are there now and were moved before I was told – the coward!  Icy is actually running on Friday the 12^th, in the fourth race.  *******Update*****  I Don’t think Icy cared for the mud.  It was pouring down rain, the track was sloppy and he was down in the one hole.  He missed the break and when he got mud in his face, his head went up and he struggled.  He was last most of the way and ended up 6^th as the post time favorite.  Bummer!  I don’t know when Secret will run, unfortunately I have seen the condition book for Ruidoso and unless they write an extra – I don’t see much if anything there for her.  Now at Albuquerque….. 

The horses I have here are doing pretty well.  Barilla has finally relaxed and is enjoying her time off.  She arrived pretty drawn up and refused to eat for at least a month.  Before you cry animal cruelty – I tend to exaggerate a bit because it makes a better story.  But she likes the old horse Butch because she can run him off from his feed, so she is eating well now.  Don’t feel sorry for Butch because he is cleverer than she is and since she can’t stand to be alone, he immediately wanders off to the pasture and she follows.   As soon as she starts to visit with the other horses, he hightails it back to the feed and gets his share.  Horse games – they make you laugh and I feed them a lot so no one is slighted, besides they have all the grass they can eat.

Cash Receipt managed to stick something in his groin area and it probably needed a stitch or two but it is in an unstitchable place.  Needless to say the vet has been out every other day to check on him as it is screw worm season and I sure don’t want him to get those.  They are worms that get into open wounds and then eat flesh – horrible things!  So I doctor him twice a day, spray him for flies at least three times a day, stuff pain killers and antibiotics down his throat and he hates me.  I had to bring him up to the barn as I can’t catch him in the pasture anymore.  That meant I had to bring Nae Doot up also because they are fast friends.  They are in a big pen right next to the house and they share a fence with the dog.  The dog thinks they are great fun to bark at and they think the dog is quite entertaining.  So all day long, the dog barks at the horses who egg him on by running up and down the fence with him and the whole house is covered with dust which creeps in everywhere – it’s not the best built house in the world.  I am sure the neighbors all love me too.  Good thing they all do things that annoy the rest of us so none of us really complain.  Next time I will tell you about the pasture raised chickens.

Well, this is getting long, so that’s it from my corner of the world.  Hopefully August will bring me some winners – or at least some placings so that come September, I can afford to ship Barilla and Cash to Phoenix for the winter racing.  I just need the ones that are racing now to do well enough that I can get the next ones in training and to the races by December or so.