The Start of the Farm.....Part 1

Today I was suppose to go to a women’s farm conference but instead I am at home with a puker.  I was really looking forward to going as it covered a variety of topics such as balancing a farm with everyday life, keeping safe on the farm, managing farm records (ugghhh - I totally could have benefited from this one!!) & a great opportunity to network with other farm women.  Plus the day ends with cheese, wine and door prizes - totally bummed I am missing this!  I am hoping that one of my fellow farm gals will fill me in later with all the details and information that she took from it.

Instead of sharing about the farm there, I will just blog about it instead.  Let me just start by saying that neiter my husband or I grew up on a farm, worked on a farm, nor did we have any experience in livestock.  We kinda of fell into where we are now.

START OF THE FARM - PART 1 OF THE 4 PART SERIES

Never imagined that this would
eventually become a pasture and
where the pole barn would be.

It all started almost 10 years ago with a phone call from my husband.  I remember I was shopping with my mom and sister at Kohl’s when he called.  He asked me if I knew anyone who wanted two horses (for free) as his mom’s friend had passed away and they needed to place them somewhere.  The first thing out of my mouth was - “we could take them”!  What the hell was I thinking?????  Oh yeah, that we had 50 acres in the country and had LOTS of room.   So that  phone call was the start of the farm and my husband reminds me of that quite frequently.  Since we didn’t have fencing or shelter for them, we needed to board them down the road.  It was a learning experience from the get go with them.  We had have a vet do coggins checks on them & make sure they were geldings otherwise they couldn’t be boarded at the place we found.  We also had to rent a trailer for a 2 hr drive.  When we got there, we were able to catch the quarterhorse but the pony - WOW!!!!!  He was so afraid of everything that it took hours of us chasing him around, cornering him in this shed and that shed-  round and round we went.  Finally we were at our witts end and loaded the first one we caught and sure enough, the other followed right in the trailer.  Guess we should have just tried that first instead of exhausting ourselves.  Then it was time to hit the road - in a blizzard!  Just fantastic!  We were both nervous as could be hauling LIVE animals and then to have crappy road conditions just put the icing on the top.

Picture please!  Always
had to get his nose up to the lens.

Enjoying the sun
and the green grass.
:)

We made it to the horse boarding place safely and unloaded.  They took off into the herd running everywhere and causing mad chaos with all the other horses.  The one that we were able to get loaded first seemed to be picking fights with all the large draft horses, we figured that they had to get their pecking order all figured out before things would settle down....or so we thought!

Nervous pony

The boss

A few days later I had a farrier scheduled to come trim their hooves.  When he was trimming the quarterhorses hooves he called me over and asked me if I knew that the horse was a stallion.  I gave him a confusing sort of look and didn’t have a clue what he was talking about - I mean the vet verified that these horses were geldings.  He then told me to reach up underneath the horse and feel......HAHAHAHA!  Nope - wasn’t going to do that - no fondeling of a horse for me!  I trusted him and made a not so nice phone call to the vet explaining that the farrier had informed me that the horse still has his balls.  She insisted that he didn’t and sometimes they will have fatty deposits in that area.  We went back and forth on this and eventually she said that she would make a farm visit the next day.  You should have seen her face when she realized that she screwed up!!  Now what???  Are we going to have a bunch of pregnant horses out there???  She assured me that because its the dead of winter (like 3 days before xmas) that it was highly unlikely that anything had happened.  So the next step was to take care of the “issue”.  I was totally unprepared for this and if I knew what was to happen, I would have made sure that my husband could of been there.  A little surgical operation needed to be done and I was the lucky one that had to hold the flashlight!  Ummmm.....yeah.....it was not pleasant!  The vet had to “cut them out”.  WOW!  What a great experience to have 3 days into being a horse owner!

About 9 months later we finally had some land fenced in and a pole barn built for shelter so we were able to bring the horses home.  My husband and I were so anixous to work with them and try to ride them.  Riding never did happen with those two as they were rescue horses that the lady had rescued from being abused.  So we ended up getting some riding horses and slowly learned from there.

Stay tuned for Part 2 - CATTLE....