We generally have 2-3 months of mud in the spring and another 1-2 months in the fall. Some people will gasp when I say this, but here goes….I didn’t have the money to set up a dry lot when we built our place so I just let the 4 horses tear up a 2 acre pasture during the muddy season and decided I would rehab it over the summer while they were out on the other 5 acres. The pasture gets torn up for sure, and makes me cringe when I look at it during muddy season, but other than right in front of the barn, there are no deep muddy spots because there is enough room for the horses to spread out. Once it starts to dry up, I move the horses to the summer pasture for about a month. Then I harrow the torn up pasture and let it sit. It’s come back beautifully every year for the 8 years I’ve been doing this. But it means I can’t bring in more horses because I need to fully rotate the pastures every month or so through the summer.
My mud story from January 12. Note: I board
Yesterday was, shall I say, interesting. The ground here is very soft and very clay like mud at the gate of the horses pasture. I put Ariel back in her pasture after riding and as I turned to leave my boots got stuck and I fell in front of her. As I am lying in the mud like a stuck turtle, her best friend sticks her nose up Ariel‘s butt. Ariel jumps over me which is very scary because all I see are horse hooves coming at my head, and Ariel runs out of the pasture. Fortunately she was the only one who escaped and the rest of the horses ran to the other side of the pasture leaving me still stuck in the mud. I managed to get up but fell again. By this time Ariel has run up and down and around . I looped the lead rope around the gate and heaved myself up literally covered in mud. I captured her. No damage was done but I had to drive home in my underpants because my britches were solid mud.
Fortunately I had long underwear on so I wasn’t totally nekkid on the drive home.
P.S. I still had my helmet on when I fell. From now on I will take someone with when I go to her pasture. Also, there is a second gate in a much less muddy area that up until my accident was hot wired. Gabriel cut the wire so now I can go in and out safely.
My blast from this past spring mud story:
Previous barn, I was trying to drag the wet outdoor to help it dry out faster. This arena is sand on a clay base (native soil). Cheap cheap. Someone had left their trail course bridge in the arena, and in order to drag I needed to move it. It was waterlogged and heavier than sin. I’m a stout and strong thing, so I heave it up and start dragging it to the corner of the ring, me traveling backwards dragging it.
Well, the corners have lost their sand top layer, so my boots hit the slick clay and they go straight out in front of me with the waterlogged bridge pinning me down. I’m cursing up a blue streak because I can’t get out from under this thing, it’s right in my lap so I can’t get any leverage with my arms, and I can feel the wet clay going through my pants and underwear into my buttcrack. I finally manage to squirm out from under it, and my breeches are entirely saturated with sucking-clay-mud… the top from the bridge residue, the bottom from my sitting in it. Unlike @peedin, I had to sit my clay-ass right on the leather seat of my little Jeep because I didn’t have a change of clothes.
It was funny immediately, as I can only imagine what it would have looked like to an outsider. Gah!
@peedin and @endlessclimb You should post on the “Feats of Astounding Incoordination” thread in the Off Topic forum. 
Since we have moved on to story telling, I shall share a good one from a few years ago.
I have some pretty substantial low spots in some of my dry lots (mentioned above, and a reason for needing to be built up). A couple spots are low enough that they develop shin-deep water puddles; not so much in terms of mud. There is some wind erosion, a little bit of erosion from snow melt and run off, but mostly the low spots are man (me) made. In the spring when things thaw, I scrape my paddocks out and in the past I have gotten a little extra with removal, and have taken out some of the native soil. Each subsequent spring, those low spots just get lower as manure removal from those low spots is tricky.
One particularly wet spring, I got fed up and bought a sump pump so I could quickly move the giant water puddle from in front of one of my sheds/barn. This thing came with like 100’ of plastic hose, so I can move a lot of water quite a ways away rapidly. It pumps at 72 gallons per minute.
The tubing connects to a very shallow output lip on the pump with a hose clamp. I connected it all and and was thoroughly enjoying watching this bad boy drain this massive puddle. As the puddle got smaller, I needed to move the pump to a lower spot than it was originally situated. So I picked it up and walked a few feet, opposite the direction that the hose was run to.
I didn’t realize that the hose clamp was barely holding on, and the little bit of tension created by my moving the pump popped the tubing off of the pump, while I was leaning over with my face directly over the output. I was instantly shot in the face with 72 gallons-per-minute freezing cold shit water. I shouted to my mom, who was watching with glee from a distance, to unplug the thing.
With eyes closed, I drug the pump and all the hoses to the fence line, chucked it out of the paddock, splashed my face with some trough water so I could convince myself to open my eyes, and called it a day.
I still use that pump almost every spring. But you can bet that hose clamp is tightened down to within a shred of metal fatigue. I’m much more careful and observant when moving the pump around. But it has not failed me since that day…
OMG. That is straight out of a movie!!
All these stories are making me feel loads better about losing both shoes - twice each - yesterday morning trying to catch my mare in her muddy turnout.
I am loving these temperatures to ride this year (haven’t broken out my winter coat once!), and it’s nice not having to worry about my horse or self breaking a leg on the ice or about white knuckling the drive there… but the mud is crazy. Upside? It’s warm enough to hose legs & bellies off when necessary.
Muddy in Massachusetts…the ground has not frozen yet and most likely won’t. Rain no snow…It’s a mess. I do have 4 areas that have held up pretty well so I rotate the turnout there on really bad days…like tomorrow when it will rain and be 53 degrees
this is a great story.
Tangent, but reminds me of when I was a teenager barnrat and was cleaning stalls with my best friend Kristen, working in the next stall over. We were talking and laughing over the stall walls about who knows what, and I had something particularly funny/important to say. So I unexpectedly came around the divider wall, mouth wide open because I was talking loudly – just as she had already let fly a whole forkful of wet manure. Which hit me square in the face.
Will never ever forget that, nor will I ever laugh as hard.
Oh man, I wish there was a gagging emoticon!
You have to have a sense of humor in this world we live in. I found my shit water facial pretty funny instantly, because if someone else is going to laugh at me at my expense, I might as well have a laugh too. But it was cold. Mid spring (which is just second winter where I live) so it had warmed up to probably high 30s that day. The sun was setting, so starting to cool off. I was frozen and soaking wet. Funny, yes. But so incredibly cold, and messy getting those clothes stripped and in to the washer. I remember stripping down buck ass naked on the porch and carrying my dripping clothes inside, not giving a damn that the floor was now wet (through the kitchen) with the shit water.
Side note, my sister and I used to fling the packed down chunky urine spots from the run in sheds at each other for sport. Wtf was wrong with us…
ROFL! We had cows growing up and my brother and I used to play King of the Mountain on the manure pile.
These are hysterical.
I have PTSD about squeezing by a spreader in the aisle due to similar happenings…
For those of us in the frozen tundra, a frozen manure ball flicked with a hockey-like wrist shot sure stings a fair bit, particularly on the point of an ankle bone.
(It was cold. We were easily amused.)
Likewise, we had a checklist if we foresaw an imminent unplanned dismount. Feet out of stirrups, check for wall or fence, keep mouth closed: sand arena with barn cats.
greys
I’ve been known to pick up a fully frozen pile and yeet it at my sister. That is if they’re not frozen to the ground. Not sure what’s worse: tripping over a full pile and ending up with manure ball shaped bruises, or skating on individual frozen manure balls that are like walking on marbles.
Just give it a few years. You’ll reconsider launching that forkful, because you’ll just have to pick it up again before it turns into a frozen landmine, and it’s cold, and you’d rather be in the house with your hot cocoa and rum (hold the cocoa), dangitall.
Now everybody get off my lawn.
greys
I honestly appreciate this topic so much!
I board my mare, she’s in New Jersey.
I was out to see her yesterday and the mud was really bad, I nearly lost a boot and fell over a few times and I had never seen it so high on her legs. She has arthritis too in her knee.
I tend to hate the mud for her sake because on those days, she tends to have more swelling and limping.
The barn didn’t drag the field with the ever soft mud; so I was out there picking her manure, gritting my teeth as I was doing it, thinking, as a boarder, aren’t I paying for her field to be clean?
Oh, this x1000. I sympathize with you!
I wouldn’t bother. Unless it’s a small paddock and will start to pile up. It’s an eyesore but not really anything else.
Thanks! I don’t want to bother but there have been mounds of poop, especially by her hay feeder. I don’t want lots of germs to spread,
My one friend who used to board here thinks this is an issue because of smaller paddocks and she even encouraged me to get a fecal egg count. My mare is in private turnout because of arthritis so hers isn’t as bad, but I plan on mentioning it to the barn owner yet again today. We pay more for private turnout and it irritates me to see mounds of poop accumulating while the owners are sitting in their house. If it’s too wet to drag, they could at least pick for a few minutes, It hardly took me 20 minutes to pick almost a wheelbarrow full of manure the other day
That depends. What does your boarding contract say?
