Cob Jockey

Rhiannon's comment on my last post made me realize I need to revisit the whole "where are we going to live" thing now that the barn is purchased. Maybe the way we've worked through this will help somebody someday as they go through this on their own farm property.

Buying the farm ended up being a 2 1/2 year process from when we went under contract to when we closed. That was by design - I needed the time to get my house in town ready to sell and sold, and it was a complicated transaction in other ways too. Fortunately, the outgoing BO was in no hurry, which was great.

That gave Tim and I time to think about the house. The farm doesn't have a house on it, although it does have a stunning homesite at the top of the tallest hill for miles, overlooking hundreds of acres of farmland. The outgoing BOs needed to "intend" to build a house there to get financing, so it's septic-ready and even has 20 year old blueprints we could use if we wanted.

• We are so close to town, that farm field will definitely be a subdivision someday.
• Boarder traffic means the site is not peaceful, which is especially problematic with a reactive dog.
• It's the opposite of secluded, being exposed on the top of the hill. You can't see the barn from the street, but you'd be able to see the house from the street.
• Horses are LOUD, yo. Even living a quarter mile away from them, I hear their unrequited love screams sometimes (and no, it's never the stallion, lol). I started to think some separation would be nice.
• The crop farm next to the farm has a grain dryer and siloes right next to the home site, and it's loud enough that you can't talk at a normal volume outside when it's running September-November every year.

All the while, I was slowly falling in love with the farmhouse. Or, more accurately, the location of the farmhouse.

Both of the current owners' mothers lived in this house, I cannot take credit for the landscaping.

It's a quarter mile off the street down an easement driveway, and that plus the rolling terrain means even people who have lived here their whole lives don't know there's a house there.  

Just part of our long, long, LONG driveway. The farmhouse is right there on the left, but almost invisible thanks to the hill and trees.

It's almost fully protected from ever having neighbors, except the ones that own the rental house, who also own the 20 acres and the only other house behind the farm.

(It was all one farm at one point before being parceled off into two 20 acre tracts, and yeah, if we win the lottery, I'd love to combine them again and own it all someday. A 40 acre horse farm with a big brick colonial and a little farmhouse is a hell of a property!)

It's surrounded by incredible mature trees. 

Just a few of the mature trees in the backyard

It's Meatloaf paradise - despite being close enough to one of the local high schools to hear the announcers during football games and two minutes from Best Buy and Lowe's, the ravine, the hills, the trees, and the complete lack of traffic mean Meatloaf is the most relaxed out here she's ever been.

I've been enjoying the quarter mile walk across the hayfield to the barn. It's the perfect distance to wear my dogs out before work in the morning. 

The barn as seen from my front lawn.

My neighbors' house across the street from the farm on a misty morning. Currently the only house in that field across the street.

The house itself is nothing to write home about, but it ticks Tim and I's boxes in a few ways: 

• It exists, therefore it's cheaper than building new.
• Whole-home renovations are my comfort zone; new construction - not so much. All of my contractors from the last reno gave this one a thumbs up after inspecting it.
• It's small. We both value having "just enough" house after having big ones previously, and a house that encourages us and the kids to spend time outside. Not because it's unpleasant to be in, but because it has wonderful inside/outside spaces and because this beautiful property is just outside the door, begging to be explored.

The only problem? The owners weren't sure they wanted to sell. But after six months of getting to know me, they started to explore the idea, and as of another year after that, we are finally under contract. And it feels so right.

We closed on the farm today.

Ooooooomg.

This represents so much more than a real estate transaction. The person I was five years ago couldn't have done this - wouldn't have done this. I thought I was a lifetime boarder married to a guy who just wasn't cut out for farm life, and that was that.

But I've learned what feelings are and how to listen to them. That little voice in my head when I'm sitting on the tractor bush hogging that says "This is fun." The realization that shooting the shit with the old farmers at the feed store, and muttering "fucking horses" as I fix the latest thing they broke are actually enjoyable. I grew up on a hobby farm, and it turns out, that's who I still am.

I enjoy this.

I also couldn't have done this without the intense and sometimes painful process of learning what it means to allow people to get close to me, to let them help me, and most importantly, what it means to be deeply in love with a supportive partner that cares about me and the things that matter to me.

It's no coincidence that I didn't start the process of buying the farm until a couple years after the co-op began and until after I started dating Tim. I could not imagine owning a farm with my ex-husband, who once said "We can buy the farm, but I'm not even going to mow the lawn, it'd be all yours." 

(Joke's on him, the neighbor has mowed the lawn for years and plans to continue.)

Enjoying a beverage on the site of where we thought we would build our house after a long day working on the farm in March of 2024

 But we, together, these four ladies and Tim and I, are capable of doing so much more together than I ever could when I was my hyper-independent self. And it changes everything to have a partner who feels as much ownership of the place as I do, someone who sees me for me and loves me for me, and someone who will be shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the mud when the chips are down.

He, thankfully, loves cold weather.

Finally, it represents a lot career-wise too. Ten years ago, I was making barely more than the janitors working in IT for a county government, and I couldn't afford Connor's board without doing 8 hours of barn chores every Sunday. Over the last ten years, I've pushed myself to the very top of my industry, to leadership positions at the company that makes the software I once managed for a janitor's salary. And with a Bachelors in Equine Studies. It's definitely been some luck and some right-place-right-time over the years, but I've earned my position, and I love what I do.

Here's to the next chapter of our lives!

He makes me laugh

On Wednesday night, Mary came down. Our plan, which we had been building Disco toward for two weeks, was to lunge him over a raised pole with me on his back to get him to (finally) canter under saddle.

"Keep an eye on the weather, there's a very slight chance of severe weather tonight," I told her as she left.

I'm a trained storm spotter with the National Weather Service - the kind of person who reads paragraphs of Forecast Discussion notes from meteorologists twice a day when they update the forecast just for fun. Total weather nerd. So I knew the risk was minimal to low on Wednesday, and I was aware, but not concerned.

Mary and I lunged him without a rider first, then we discussed the game plan as I got on his back. "Okay, you're going to be cuing everything, I'm just holding the lunge line. As you approach the fence, get in two point, put your leg in the canter cue position and use your voice to ask him to canter. If he canters, great, let him keep going as long as he wants, but it probably won't be long. And bring him back to a trot before the next fence if he gets that far. We'll do it a few times on one side and a few times on the other."

With that, I walked him onto the circle. We got exactly half a circle into it when the sirens went off:

I know you can't hear a GIF, but just before I stop him, loud tornado sirens start, Mary asks what I want to do, and I jump off casually saying "Let me look at the radar."

I jumped off and checked the velocity radar scans on my phone. Unlike the usual reflectivity radar that shows precipitation, this type of radar scan shows you whether winds are moving toward or away from the radar site. If they're moving both toward and away from the radar in a specific spot, that's rotation, and it shows up as the confluence of green and red in one spot. If it's strong rotation, that spot lights up brighter and brighter.

During a tornado warning we had had the previous week, I rolled over in bed, checked the velocity radar, saw a weak area of rotation on the other side of the county, and went back to sleep. 

This time, I checked the velocity radar and saw a bright, clear tornado signature heading straight for the barn. "We need to go NOW," I told Mary.

The tornado signature is the confluence of the red and the brightest green color, just down and to the right from the little tornado icon.

We rushed poor Disco into his stall, stripped his tack, left it on the ground, left all the lights on and booked it back to my house to get in the cellar.

When we came out of the cellar a half hour later after the storm had just passed, I stepped onto the front porch and heard the unmistakable roar of a tornado to the east, moving away from us. Like low, continuous thunder that didn't stop.

Yeesh.

During the damage survey the next day, the NWS found that an EF-2 with max winds of 112mph had passed just two miles away from us and was on the ground for 13 continuous miles. No one was hurt, but unfortunately a couple of farm families lost entire (non-animal) barns and grain siloes. How easily that could have been us! 

Red dot is the barn

My night wasn't over, since the power was out, and uh, it didn't look like it would come back anytime soon.

There's a whole row of these things bent over like this one mile from the farm.

The farm is on a well, and it only has about an hour's worth of water in reserve before the pump needs electricity to pull more up. Since we have auto-waterers that only keep a very small amount in the stalls and then fill continuously to add more while a horse drinks, this essentially means we NEED backup power for any outage lasting longer than an hour. 

For that reason, the barn owners put a permanent generator in that runs off a house-sized propane tank that sits off in the woods you can see in the distance below.

It's the beige box in the front landscaping.

My BO has always insisted they've never needed that generator in 18 years, that because they buried all of the power lines to the farm when they built it, power rarely goes out for more than an hour, and he does have a solid backup plan to use the water wagon to trailer some over from his house across the ravine if everything really goes to hell.

But I'm neurotic about horses, water, and climate change, so I insisted on getting the generator running last year, which thanks to Leah's husband and my SO (who both, conveniently, work for a diesel engine company and both, specifically, have a lot of generator experience, just usually more on the datacenter scale than the farm scale), we did exactly that last year.

I was so grateful to hear the roar of that thing Wednesday night and to watch the well pump pressure gauge go up when it needed to.

I started getting targeted advertising for generators two hours after some frantic texts and phone calls to my boarder and my SO as I stumbled through my first time running a generator, because of course I did.

Thankfully, the power came back on after about four hours, so it ended up just being a good test for the generator and for me knowing how to use it. I am so grateful it wasn't worse.

A house near the farm I pass pretty regularly

(Side note: the warning was issued at 8:16pm, and the tornado didn't hit until 8:44pm, giving Mary and I plenty of time to take shelter. Also, the warning polygon shape ended up precisely covering the exact path the tornado ended up taking. All that is to say, the NWS is AWESOME and has made such incredible forecasting advancements in the last 20 years especially, and anyone that wants to defund them is an absolute moron that doesn't understand the good work these people do for honestly pretty low pay given how many lives they save every year. Ahem.)

A different kind of product review, this time, something for the farm.

Disco and Connor's field is one of two fields on the property that don't have an automatic waterer or power. In years past, we have broken ice twice a day, sometimes needing a sledgehammer to get through it, and just crossed our fingers that it wouldn't freeze back over during the day. Since it has a spigot, I did look into non-electric autowaterers, but those were a no-go for several reasons that are pretty specific to my situation.

Then I 80% solved that problem for $29.95.

(And to be clear, I still want an autowaterer out there, but this is a pretty darn good solution for the price).

Nelsons: A love letter. They are incredible. There are no downsides. They just work. They are little miracles.

Freeze Miser kept hitting me with targeted advertising, and it sounded too good to be true at first. A dumb little gadget that keeps hoses, pipes and stock tanks from freezing? Prove it.

So I bought it. And it proved it.

It got down to -5F air temperature overnight this night.

It's basically a dumb thermostat. There's a wax plug inside of it, and when the water temperature coming out of your hose (not the air temperature) drops below 37F, the wax hardens and a piston inside of it allows the release of a steady stream of water. More at lower temps, less at higher temps. You can put them on a float valve, but I chose not to.

My camera roll is full of pictures of the tank that I send to everyone else like "OMG I can't believe this thing works!" all the time

I am on a well, and I have mine hooked up to a 5 foot hose that comes off of the spigot and is then bungeed onto my fence to keep curious ponies from messing with it. You have to have the brass end pointing level or down, not up. I have mine high enough out of the tank that even if the tank completely filled past the overflow outlet (more on that below), it wouldn't touch the brass end and potentially cause it to freeze up.

I was worried my Curious George Welsh Cobs would play with it, but so far, so good. It's been running continuously for about three weeks now, and no issues. (Don't take that as a challenge, Disco). It has also been nice to not have to worry about filling the tank - if it's cold, it's continuously filling itself.

On a heavy snow day, it still kept a hole big enough for a muzzle, and that's just slush sitting on top of the water, so they could (and do) easily break a bigger hole to drink from.

The only struggle so far has been figuring out how to divert the overflow. I added an outlet a couple inches from the top and attached a hose to it that I intended to use to send water into the ravine a few feet away, but that hose froze because the outlet water flow wasn't strong enough over the distance of that extra long hose. 

Since that tank is against the fence and the outlet is on the far side where people don't walk, I've simply let it drain out the back and create a little skating rink back there, and this has worked fine, although I'd still like a more elegant long-term solution.

Hose outlet that my SO built, minus the hose

So, we are still breaking ice, but even on the coldest nights, it's never sledgehammer thick anymore, just a quick whack and skim. And even if someone forgot to break ice, the horses would still have drinkable water, which, since I set the co-op up to accommodate for all kinds of human failure modes (we're all human, myself included!), I really like that. All in all, it's been a success.

Original outlet hose design, back when you could still see grass (Remember that, grass? I don't, at this point). I think it might have worked with a shorter hose and if I had waited to connect it until there was a stronger outlet flow.

Bottom line: It's no autowaterer, but it solves many of the headaches of providing drinkable water without a power source in winter, and I can definitely recommend it.

What: Freeze Miser

Price: $29.95 for one, multi-packs available at a per-unit discount price

Where: www.freezemiser.com

"Our winters haven't been too bad the last few years. It's sweatshirt weather through Christmas, then we get about 8 weeks of winter but the snow never sticks around for more than a few days, then it's spring." - my words last year to our newest boarder who moved here from Las Vegas

Yeah. About that.

Normally we have two miles of visibility from the top of this hill, which is my driveway. That's not fog, that's heavy snow.

Over the previous two days, we got the biggest single snowfall I can remember in all my decades of living in Indiana and Illinois. 11 fluffy inches. A mind-boggling thump of snow for this part of the world.

Dogs for scale

Even more mind-boggling, it's not supposed to melt. Like, ever. This is the land of 4" snowfalls that melt within 3 days, so it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that we're not going to see grass until maybe February.

Mr. Canada is like whatever

In previous winters, when I lived in town, I've always tossed around if I should sleep on the couch in the barn lounge during winter storms, but I never actually did it. With this storm though, the roads were virtually impassable for 36 hours and a travel ban was put in place. I've never been so grateful to live a softball throw from the property line and to be able to tell all the boarders to just stay home.

Even for a very fit CrossFitter, walking through deep snow spiked my heart rate big time.

The barn owner is away, which meant plowing fell to me for the first time. Thankfully my partner helped me unbury the snow blade the BO had hidden at the back of the equipment barn, because wow, we may only use it once every few years, but when you need it, you really need it. This would have taken forever with just the FEL.

Between the blade and the bucket, I slowly got it done, which took me most of the day. That's a skilled task, getting snow off gravel, and I wasn't awful at it, but I know I'll get better at it over time.

I made circle drives in two different parts of the parking lot and told the boarders they are just going to have to appreciate the snow median until spring.

The horses thought the first day was great fun, when we only had about 6" on the ground, but when they came out to 11" the next day, they were all like "...nah." Nobody played and everyone just stood around and ate hay. Our old man OTTB who moved here from Las Vegas moved so slowly through it, I thought he was injured at first. He wasn't, he was just despondent, lol.

Back in November, my Minnesotan BO put snow sticks around the driveway for the first time in the eight years I've boarded here, and I joked then to the boarders that my BO almanac said we were in for a rough winter. I didn't know how right I'd be!

So here we go...a proper winter. I guess if I still enjoy taking the care of the barn on days like this, which I (mostly...I had my moments) did, I know I'm really meant for this. 

Now that Disco is home, we are figuring out winter turnouts. Last winter, we kept our 3 horses drylotted all winter because we seeded the pastures in October (which worked out beautifully). This winter, we have 6 horses, and so we had to choose which of the paddocks and pastures we wanted to sacrifice and which we wanted to grow grass in and rest.

It's no easy choice. We have 3 bigger pastures that grow a lot of grass well, two paddocks that don't grow grass well despite getting the same treatment as the others, one drylot and one drylot around the barn. We also have a stallion to keep separated, so he and Connor are unavoidably in a pasture I would love to rest over the winter but can't (long term pipe dream: build a drylot in the stallion paradise pasture), and we only have shelters in two pastures and the barn drylot.

In the end, we decided to sacrifice the two paddocks, which can be opened up to the drylots and to each other to make a pretty decent sized area.

So, a couple weeks ago we opened up all the gates and chucked the non-Connor/Disco herd of four out there. They were turned out together from April until the end of August when we had to split them up due to drought, so I didn't think things would be THAT wild.

F***** horses.

Lesson learned. Even previously integrated herds need to be re-integrated in wide open spaces. Which, after this incident, we promptly put the same four horses together in the big field and they've been just fine for weeks after, go figure.

Fortunately, there wasn't so much as a scratch on any of the horses involved, and even better, most of the fencing materials were able to be re-used. The best boarders and significant others ever dutifully came out the following Saturday to put it back together, which required just a knife, a Sawzall and about 45 minutes of work.

I complain a bit about this white fence, but on the whole, it has been great to us. Generally it breaks before the horses do, it's easy to work on, and it requires no maintenance at all unless you feel like pressure washing several miles of fence (I mostly don't, although I'm often tempted).

Our co-op model's success is due, in part, to a model that requires the bare minimum of us on a day-to-day. The horses will be fed, watered, looked over, and where they are supposed to be, and that's about it. 

But that means there are a lot of "I'll get to that someday" things that pile up, and while I handle many of them myself, I can't handle them all. In fact, I don't think I could have signed on to buy this barn before I learned that lesson - that asking for help isn't a sign of weakness or a risk that cannot be incurred lest I take up too much space in someone's life, but it takes a lot of strength, especially for a card carrying independent woman like me.

Watering and dragging is about as much irregular farm maintenance as I can fit into my life on a weekly basis right now.

So a couple of months ago, I asked the boarders if they would be willing to give up a Saturday before winter for a pre-winter fall cleanup day. They all enthusiastically said yes. So that's how all four boarders, two significant others and the current BO spent a rainy (bless) Saturday last weekend doing well, all the things.

Fudge demonstrating one of many improvements installed on barn cleanup day: a coyote poop washing station in the wash rack

We cleaned gutters and cleared downspouts. We replaced the tines on the Parmagroomer, which had worn down by about 2" over the years. We raked the footing away from the indoor walls. We chainsawed bushes that were growing into the fence. We greased the slam latches on all of the gates and adjusted the hinges so that they close easily again.

He's such a keeper 💗

We replaced worn-out crossties and vacuumed the fans and auto-waterers. We did a lot to the water wagon - pressure washing the algae off the inside of the tank, drilling some additional holes and airing up the tires. We moved jumps from the outdoor to the indoor. We fixed a drippy spigot. We deep cleaned every surface of the barn, threw out anything expired and made a giant "Whose is this?" pile, which everyone went through, picked out their stuff and wrote their initials on it with a sharpie.

We also made a giant donate pile, both from us boarders and from the barn owner who is slowly getting rid of things neither he nor I want to keep from the equipment barn. The donate pile is going to a therapeutic riding barn, and included a barely used double-wheel wheelbarrow and an entire bag of pasture seed mix among many other things, so I can't imagine they'll turn it down.

But it wasn't just maintenance. We also made some improvements that will make our lives easier, like hanging a pull-out drying rack in the bathroom so that we actually start using the barn's washer, putting a 2x4 above one section of the arena kick wall so that we can store bag chairs there, and something I've wanted to do for a long time: replace the barely usable and always dirty fixed wire corner shelves in the wash rack with something much more functional:

Every horse gets one basket, and then there are two baskets for the barn (brushes for scrubbing waterers, etc). Most importantly, they all hang on hooks and can be taken off the wall for regular cleaning, unlike the old shelves.

It was incredibly cathartic to see the list disappear quickly under so many hands. I made a nice lunch for everyone, a Middle Eastern chicken soup and sandwiches, but it was the least I could do for as much work as everyone did. And at the end of it all, every single boarder said, unprompted, that we should do this twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall.

Meatloaf giving me the side eye because she was massively over my shit in the eighth hour of following me around the barn that day.

In all of the biggest and all of the smallest ways, I could not run this farm without these wonderful people in my life, and I will never stop being grateful.

At this point, my BO and I still manage the farm jointly, although I am slowly taking over more and more responsibilities as time goes on. This weekend, I took over bush hogging.

Up to this point, he had been reluctant to give that one up. He honestly enjoys doing it, and since he has a daughter my age, I'm sure he envisioned all of the many, many ways I could be killed doing it every time he thought about it. But I've proven myself tractor-capable by dragging and watering the rings the last six months without any major incidents, so we agreed that I would take it over the second half of this summer.

BO and I troubleshooting the long-neglected 8' boom sprayer that is going to be my new best friend as I go hard on getting the weeds under control soon.

 (Side note: I am wildly grateful that my introduction to owning a farm includes my BO. He is there every step of the way to give me complete and detailed instruction on every bit of farm life; not just the stuff I could Google, but also the stuff I can't, like where on this property the grass is so thick and the hill is so steep the tractor is likely to get bogged down and how to handle that, and what the best/safest path to mow the big field is.)

Isn't she lovely.

I was ready. The BO kept up with it well enough, but sometimes he'd travel and the weeds would explode and make my brain itch every time I looked at them. And I enjoyed it - seeing the weeds disappear under the tractor, knowing that it's now in my power to take them down any time I need to, not worrying about them going to seed.

Things got...a little out of control in one of the three paddocks I'm resting this summer

It's funny, the way you start to look at a facility when you're responsible for it vs. when you're a boarder. For example, earlier this year Mary and Tricia moved half the jumps from the indoor down to the outdoor, intending to set a new course each week in both rings. Which would be fine and fun, if we had staff to take both courses down before I watered and dragged, and staff to weed-eat around the poles and standards when they're outside the ring, but we don't. We just have me!

So I made the rare unilateral executive decision this week that all of our jump poles and standards will live in the indoor (where we use them most anyway), and said that I am open to them going back outside if someone else would take over weed eating around them. They all said that was fair and nobody cared enough to do that. It's the give and take of the co-op model.

That, uh, should be sand and TruTex. And will be sand and TruTex, again.

The farm feels like a lot of work right now, but I'm also reminding myself that certain things (like the weedy outdoor arena above) are only a lot of work because they got out of hand over the last few years, and that the more I stay on top of things, the easier it will all become over time.

And in the meantime - I'm enjoying it immensely.