I’ve read that 8 to 12 inches of wood chips will prevent mud but I find myself thinking it would just get mixed up into the mud. I’m thinking of the area outside my shelter, which gets muddy in the fall and then freezes in a choppy mess. I now only have two geriatric horses so there will be much less traffic. If I put the wood chips down within the next week or so, the ground is still dry and fairly hard. Any opinions on whether this would work, or be a waste of money? The mud is not enough of a problem to justify the effort and expense of a proper gravel base so I’m looking for a relatively low cost, low effort solution.
I would not advise this - a chore to remove when it turns messy - IMHO
I had some success with putting down some thick stall mats and topping with a little hay for traction during the wet/ frozen days.
Area must be flat ^ for this to work.
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Yeah, I’m worried the chips would turn into a huge mixed up muddy mess that would never dry. I wondered about mats but where I live we are frozen for about 3 months and one of the horses sometimes takes off so I worry about her slipping on the mats.
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Yes, that’s why I throw down hay or used bedding / topping the mats for MY traction as well as horse zooming safety ~ it’s messy but easier to toss in manure spreader once spring arrives ~ yes ugly but SAFER - IMHO
Good Luck !
- the ugliness remains til mid-April - putting it together here in the next ten days - frozen November - March/April
We use hog fuel here in the PNW. Cedar bark mulch. It only works if you take care of the underlying drainage issues. The best mud control in a field that I’ve seen was dumping a huge amount of fairly large gravel/small rocks near the gate. After a year the grass grew up over the rocks and the ground was super hard and stable.
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Chips can work if applied heavily. A very thick layer and that does get scattered over time. The problem is they are organic and will break down in time, making mud into slime and holding the wet. But they are cheap, a quick solution.
If you have a loader bucket to scrape them out with in spring, the mess would be gone.
Our best solution to mud is scraping mud away down to hard ground, then laying geotextile fabric, dumping crushed concrete on top to cover and fill the hole. Fabric prevents stone sinking into mud, our crushed concrete then seems to “lock together” to form a hard surface for walking or driving over. Use rough crushed stone, so it can lock together, like the concrete or limestone. They can crush it in any size you want. Smooth stones do NOT stay in place and can be quite slippery under a horse or YOU, or driving on it. I had to cover the drain tile covered with peastone with rubber mats because horses were flinging it on me when they ran to the gate!
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My friend has used these for years with good luck battling the awful muck that comes with living in the muddy NE. She will place down a layer of wood chips in areas with the most traffic. Every few years she scrapes it out and reapplies. I was always amazed how she had no mud at all while my herd would be walking in ankle deep mud In high traffic areas.
It seems like a very affordable solution if you have heavy machinery. If you don’t, I am not sure the maintenance and reapplying it is worth it.
In really bad storms she would sometimes lose them to water runoff.
It really depends on the lay of the land (literally). If you have a small slope, like less than 10 degrees, but still a slope, the water will eventually move away from the barn and woodchips will help keep the horses dry and above it. But if the land is dead flat, the water sits (particularly if your ground is saturated) and the woodchips will get stirred in. If your slope is greater than 10 degrees, the woodchips will eventually shift to the bottom of the slope.
As with many things horse related, “it depends”.
We did wood chips with great success in San Diego, but the ground was clay (very muddy when wet), little rain (so rarely wet), and only a very small slope.
Thanks for the input, everyone. After looking at the area again this afternoon, I’m thinking eaves troughs might go a long way to solve his problem. Maybe I’ll look into that.
Interesting thread. I have one muddy area that I have been adding shavings to. I am sure I will need to redo perhaps in the spring, but so far there is a huge difference. We will freeze here for months. I will add chips after reading this, and perhaps some dg.
I think this is the bottom line. Of course they will work, for a while (so long as they don’t get washed away, etc.) But eventually they will start to decompose and then you have a mucky organic mess. If you can scrape it back spring/fall and/or totally regrade every other year, I imagine it makes a useful dry area.
I think the underlying soil makes a difference as well. I have very dense clay. When it is wet you can lose a small pony in it. It would take a lot of wood chips to firm that up. I’m sure it could be done, but perhaps not as easily as other soil types.
https://www.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/media/woodchip_factsheet_draft_2.pdf There is research on how to construct a dry area for cattle. Like every other option it requires prep for the base before application $$$
I am considering a test area at some point but I already own the machinery for this type of work. Not sure it would be feasible to hire out.
What is an eaves trough?
Echoing everyone else—
Just say no!!!
Something I learned on COTH: adding organic matter to mud = more mud!
I got to live this firsthand at the last farm we rented. Every winter my landlord would dump several loads of coarse wood chips in the muddy area along the barn. It was great… for a few weeks. Then the mud just got deeper and deeper and deeper.
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I believe it is another name for a rain gutter.
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The sad truth is that the only real solution to mud is better drainage and re-directing water away from the site. We’ve been successful in a very difficult situation (nearly flat land, clay soil, repository of a small mountain’s worth of run-off) by excavating the existing mud, laying perforated pipe wrapped in drain cloth which daylighted at a lower area, and backfilling with 3" drain rock then pea gravel. A lot of work! But it held up, and since it was right in front of the run-in shelter there was no way to keep it usable otherwise.
Rain gutter is another term. The things that hang just under a roof to collect the rain water that runs off the roof.
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Since I don’t have easy access to machinery to scrape down footing, I will avoid organic matter. I was surprised to learn how inexpensive it is to install eaves troughs so I’ll try tat first and see if that solves the problem. Thanks everyone!
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One thing that really makes a difference too is bonafide hay and manure management. If you aren’t picking the areas that have heavy traffic often, and/or you’re feeding near gates and the fence line, this is further introducing organic material to the substrate which breaks down and traps mud. If you aren’t consistently removing manure you may as well not bother putting down stone dust or gravel because the manure and hay will just break down and contribute to more mud.
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Ah ok thank you
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