When putting down gravel...

[TheJenners]

… Say for all-weather footing for runs off of stalls, or for underneath paddock shelters/run-ins, what prep do you recommend?

I’ve heard mixed reviews on the geo-tex. Where I am currently has those grid things and two of the paddocks stay pretty firm and two are still super swampy*. Obviously you don’t just dump it down on the ground - or do you? Can you scrape the grass back with a blade and put it down?

I’m planning on putting something down in a 36x36 area off my barn because I have a horse who needs to come off grass twice a year. And I also want to put some shelters in the pastures and want to put gravel or screenings inside and then outside in an apron around the shelters (so if two 12x12 shelters, close enough together that a horse can’t pass through but not touching (otherwise you need a permit), footing for the whole area and then some in the front).

• this is the same barn where the BM stopping mucking for like two weeks in the winter, so there is a LOT of organic material mixed into the gravel now and I have no idea how much that is impacting the “swampiness.”

[Jim_in_PA]

Remove organics. (Soil, mud and any vegetation down to sub-soil) Grade for drainage. Geo if you want to. (I would) Then you footing of choice.

[ShotenStar]

I’m with Jim: Grade down to clean dirt, adjust the slope as needed, then apply new footing.

I did a layer of #2 stone, geotext, then stone dust for my sacrifice area - the stone provides the drainage, the geotext keeps the stone down/away from the horses, the stone dust provides a nice easy to clean / quick draining surface. It has worked beautifully for us for many years now, though I am thinking that a load of stone dust may be needed next year – my sacrifice area is on a slight slope and the stone dust has washed downhill in some torrential rains. I have graded it back up the slope but I think too much has been lost now and some new is in order.

Star

[SugarCubes]

We just did this to our paddocks and they turned out incredible! He took off about 1’ of topsoil/organics, filled with 6" of 2" gravel, compacted, then 6" of screenings, compacted. The paddocks are nice enough to ride on and are totally mud free. We skipped the geo fabric since we did such a deep base of the bigger rock.

[2miniB]

Depends on your ground conditions. We have topsoil then sand. The dry lots where we put geotextile down tend to get more weeds popping up. We did the one that’s in use now a little differently. Just scraped down and leveled the topsoil, making sure its graded away from the barn. Then added 4" stone dust on top and used it like that for several years. More recently, we’ve added 2-4" crushed granite on top.

It all holds up very well, even during mud season.

[cristalle]

[QUOTE=Jim_in_PA;8856139]
Remove organics. (Soil, mud and any vegetation down to sub-soil) Grade for drainage. Geo if you want to. (I would) Then you footing of choice.[/QUOTE]

This is what we did too. I thought using the landscape fabric helped to keep the gravel from getting ground in, and the whole thing has held up well.

[RedmondDressage]

I imagine the two that are swampy are so because they’re improperly graded. Neither hoof grid nor geotex make water magically disappear out of low spots. Rather, they keep the soil underneath from working its way up and creating mud. I am a fan of geotextile based on the sorry time I’ve had it installed. I redid my paddocks in spring and we’ve had some good rains. I can already tell it’s going to keep my paddocks in much better condition than when I had nothing separating the topsoil and the gravel.

[fordtraktor]

When I looked at that grid you were supposed to put geotex underneath it. But I haven’t looked at all the varieties.

[costco_muffins]

Don’t do geo with Rory and the Burrito. Yukon ripped all ours up and made a mess. Just scrape the organics, do a few inches of minus, compact it, and put a few more inches of clear on top. That’s what we did and it is great.

[Calvincrowe]

I put my geotextile, gravel on top, directly on hard packed (boot sucking mud in the winter) dirt on a slightly sloping dry lot nearly 12 years ago. It’s worked wonderfully ever since. I clean it religiously, and replenish the “screenings” sized gravel every 3-5 years (depends on who is on it). If you have diggers…well, all bets are off on using cloth. They will dig it up. It will be a disaster. You will swear mightily.

[SouthernYankee]

I compacted the ground and added screenings. We have clay so we don’t need to dig to the subsoil. This was from 3 years ago and we have had to add a little gravel back to the pad but it’s only because some of it gets stuck to their feet when it’s muddy and tracked off. I do remove all organic matter from it as much as possible, the organic matter that gets smooshed before I can move it is raked off right after a heavy rain when it turns to soup.

http://i1230.photobucket.com/albums/ee499/mstout2/Farm/Farm-%20Outside/iPhone7122.jpg

[TheJenners]

[QUOTE=costco_muffins;8857464]
Don’t do geo with Rory and the Burrito. Yukon ripped all ours up and made a mess. Just scrape the organics, do a few inches of minus, compact it, and put a few more inches of clear on top. That’s what we did and it is great.[/QUOTE]

Rory has grown up a LOT but roger that with burritos. They play with EVERYTHING. Cute but prob not with something like that. I was thinking about just putting some sand in their area for rolling purposes.

[costco_muffins]

Yukon loves his sand pit. Advice for that is to try to make it a smaller area with slope - our flat areas with sand are pooling points for urine and poo water

[TheJenners]

Good tip!

[Bluey]

Sand for horses to roll in and nap on are best left with a slight slope.
Ours is a sand pile we flattened down just right and they love it.
They lay on it with the head on the up side, like a pillow of sand there:

[SugarCubes]

For those of you with sand, did you just dump a pile in your paddocks? My paddocks are compacted screenings and the horses get hock sores when they roll. How much sand did you use? Do you put a border around it with landscape timbers or rr ties so it doesn’t wash out?

[2DogsFarm]

Agree the geotex is needed no matter what is under it.
W/O your gravel will eventually vanish & be replaced with whatever the base is.

My horse & pony are not diggers, but the Winter after I redid my sacrifice paddock - scraped down 6", geotex with ~3" road base gravel over that - my hydrant sprang a leak necessitating the plumber digging up my lovely gravel & cutting away a flap of the geotex
I replaced the torn segment as best I could & raked (by hand :dead:) about 95% of the gravel back over it.
There’s still a flap of geotex visible, but almost 4yrs later it has not been further compromised by weather, horses or me mowing over it.

Yes - shallow-rooted weeds have come up, but mowing keeps them down & there is NEVER mud in the paddock.

The sole problem area is directly behind my stalls where horses drag out bedding as they come & go.
I keep it picked clean as long as there’s no snow on the ground, but once we get snowfall all bets are off & by Spring it is a mess for about 3’ behind each stall.
I am going to try adding a 2X4 threshold they will have to step over to see if that mitigates the muck.

[bdj]

I’m actually renovating a 24’x75’ pen right now, and based on my excavator’s advice, we’re not doing geotex, just scraping out the organics, and then backfilling with large stone and topping it with several inches of stonedust, which will be compacted. I’m not terribly worried about digging (the mare is good about that), and it was an additional expense that Eddie (the Excavator) didn’t feel was necessary. He’s got the experience and is a local guy, so he knows what type of soil I’m dealing with better than I do.

Once the pen is done, we’re going to do the two stalls - they’ll get a nice deep layer of stonedust, topped by stall grids and then backfilled with more stonedust (so my task for the weekend is to figure out how many will need to be cut to size and mark them so he can trim them on Monday - talk about fun!). We’re also going to run a line of the stall grids right against the exterior wall, so that the water that drains off the roof doesn’t dig through my new footing - I had a ring mat in front of one of the walk out doors and it did a great job of stabilizing everything, so I’m using the stall grids to replicate that effect. (Until I can get gutters installed, but that’s another task for another day.)

Of course, we’re on the other side of the country from you, OP, so my info may not be terribly relevant or helpful…

I didn’t get a chance to take pictures outside this morning, but I’ll try to get some in progress and finished ones over the next few days to post for anybody who might be interested.

[Bluey]

[QUOTE=SugarCubes;8858305]
For those of you with sand, did you just dump a pile in your paddocks? My paddocks are compacted screenings and the horses get hock sores when they roll. How much sand did you use? Do you put a border around it with landscape timbers or rr ties so it doesn’t wash out?[/QUOTE]

That is what we do, have a small truck bring a dump of sand and then we flatten it a little with the bucket on the tractor.
We get sand from that pile as we need some, when it gets very low, we order another dump.

It is a good way to have sand on hand and there, the horses get to play in the pile at their heart’s content.

Where it is, we don’t need anything to contain the sand in place, water doesn’t wash thru there and rain doesn’t seem to wash any of it off.

[spacehorse]

I did an area that was always really mucky, especially after snow melt. I got old pieces of carpet and covered them with stone dust. They have held up really well. I could use some stone to add to them but other than that they made the area way nicer. I did another area and just dumped dust on, probably last fall and the area is totally covered in weeds again. I don’t think it would get muddy but the weeds came up through without the carpet.