Life at livery - 6 months on

 

We've been in livery for just over 6 months now and if we're honest, although the horses have settled happily, things haven't turned out quite as we'd hoped. It's okay but we have been rather putting off talking about it, not wanting to sound like we moan all the time, but it really is time for another update. It's a bit like the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good:

The yard owner has allowed the horses to live out 24/7 which is really what we prefer, this has made life much easier than trying to keep Eggsy Pony from attempting to jump out of his stable.

The yard is only 5 minutes away from home by car, as opposed to 20+ minutes when we were at Muddy Bottom, it's about 40 minutes on foot so not that bad if necessary.

3 of the 4 paddocks have field shelters, one is very leaky, the other two are new, but no one really uses them except as a toilet.

2 of the paddocks have troughs we have to use buckets for the other two.

Everyone has been nice to us, to our faces anyway.

As well as the stables we have a small feed shed to ourselves which is brilliant as we feed straights and all 4 equines have slightly different mixes.

Space in the hay barn to store our haylage and straw.

The bad:

The fencing is in a very poor state of repair, so poor in fact that even our oldie Boo went walkabout, to keep everyone in we've had to spend our own funds (and time) on upgrading the fences with additional electric fence lines and purchase a second electric fence energizer as the yard owner is unwilling to have the mains electric fence on for more than a few minutes at a time.

The paddocks are poorly maintained, the alleged annual spraying hasn't happened and before the drought started killing everything off they were a mass of inedible weeds. We've spent days removing ragwort.

People smoke in no smoking areas, a real worry with hay and straw around.

With regard to the space in the barn for storage, was quite pleased to finally have somewhere dry  to store forage and had intended to feed both hay and haylage. Sadly this was not to be, the roof leaks, so we'll stick to the wrapped haylage rather than risk hay being spoiled. Also one of the tenants, yes there are people living on site (we didn't know about that and it's a whole other story) allows his dog to go to the toilet in our straw. 

Bonfires, hasn't been one in awhile as an irate neighbour called the fire brigade to the last one, but the burning of old sofas etc right next to your horse's paddock is not conducive to a happy livery yard. 

The muck heap hasn't been removed since we first arrived, it's huge and spilling all over as no one seems to fork up. 

The ugly: 

This

should you be interested there's more about the livery yard wars in The Eggsy Pony Diaries over on  Ko-fi where you can settle down with a coffee and read Eggsy's musings.