The bugs have been awful at this little place here pretty much since May. One huge drawback of having a warm winter: not enough prolonged cold weather to kill off the bugs. And so we are having an especially buggy summer this year. Mosquitos honestly aren't so bad, but the black flies and stable flies and green head flies and deer flies are horrible. I'm going through fly spray like crazy and no matter which one I use, it seems like a few hours later there's flies landing on the horses again.
The Poetess wears a fly mask with ears in turnout because she has ear plaques (had them last summer; not sure what her history is on those) and I don't want them to get worse/irritated by fly bites. Her mask keeps her happy when she's out in the pasture. But when she's being worked, her ears are unprotected and she really doesn't want me to rub roll-on or cream bug repellent into her ears, especially the one with the majority of the plaques; it's sensitive.
The LBM doesn't seem to care much about flies in her ears when she's out grazing. But under saddle, that's a whole 'nother story! The head shaking to remove bugs sometimes got so bad that she wasn't listening to me at all while riding.
So, shopping to the rescue: I ordered two ear bonnets. One for the Poetess to wear while working, and one for the LBM. And just like that, the LBM was no longer being driven out of her mind while being ridden. And Poetess's ears are protected during work sessions without me having to try to swipe goop into them every couple of days. What a game changer. I highly recommend ear bonnets if you are having similar issues with bugs in the ears driving your horses batty under saddle. Mine aren't fancy, and aren't the sound deadening kind. Just something lightweight to seal up those ears from bugs.
Along with the bugs being a problem, we went through about two weeks of nightly invasions by raccoons. My nice heavy duty snap-on lids for my grain bins failed me; the darn raccoons figured out how to get them off. I'm not sure if it was the biggest one(s) doing this, or if it was a joint effort of many little raccoon hands. Even on the nights they didn't get the grain bin open, I could tell they'd been wandering around inside the barn because in the morning when it was turnout time and I opened her stall door Poetess would put her nose down to the cement floor and walk up and down the aisle, smelling.
This couldn't continue; raccoons in the barn and barnyard/chicken coop area was not a good thing. So, I baited two live traps, put them nightly near the front door of the barn and in 8 nights of setting out live traps I was able to catch five raccoons, two of which were adults and three were juveniles. They were quickly given lead poisoning. DH patrolling in the evening just before dark was able to dispatch six or seven more who were given lead poisoning without being trapped first. That seems to have solved the critter raids on the barn problem.
In the last three weeks, K3 has been able to 'help' me with the LBM's training twice. LBM's owner and I had talked about putting K3 in the saddle to see what the horse would do with a much less experienced rider than I. We agreed to start this on the longe line, and then progress to K3 riding solo. So far so good, a few interesting things have come to light (the LBM spooked the first few times I had K3 raise her arms while in the saddle; shorter legs giving the walk command got ignored) which have given K3 things to do in the saddle and me to desensitize during my work sessions with the mare. We are planning on having K3 in the saddle once a week for the remainder of her summer break.
While DH was on 'vacation' (mandatory first week of July), one of the many small/medium size projects he worked on was finishing up the final two stalls of the barn by laying the floor mats. Luckily, that week had decent weather, a break from the low 90's with high humidity that we'd been having and was a comfy lowish humidity upper 70's on the day that we put in the mats. We still got sweaty and tired, but at least neither of us got heat stroke!
DH cutting a mat to needed size, using the tractor forks and a pallet as a work table.
(Yes, that's my foot in the foreground, my knee was super blown up still and I frequently had to sit with it up on shavings bales to rest it while working in the barn.)
If you recall, last summer we'd found these stall mats on sale and purchased the total number of mats we'd need to do all six stalls even though we were focusing on getting just two stalls built that year. We didn't want to come back in a few months (or more) when we were ready to mat the remaining stalls and have to pay full price (which at that time was $15/mat more than the sale price) for those. Well, when measuring and cutting mats for the very first stall, DH miscut one of the mats and it was then too small. We set it aside, hoping that it would work for one of the future stalls as each stall wasn't quite exactly 12'x12'.
As each new stall was matted, that miscut mat was still too small. It was beginning to look like we were going to have to make a half-hour trip to buy just one new mat, at the regular price, in order to finish matting all six stalls.
We were literally down to the last mat needed in the sixth stall, when, to our utter joy and amazement (because we'd been measuring it for four whole stalls hoping it wasn't too small), it wasn't too small for the final corner! In fact, it needed just quarter inch or so trimmed off part of one edge. Whew! So glad that mat wasn't wasted after all!
