Re rain gutters … they will tear off if the snow/ice load and slope of your roof overloads them. Great idea if you live where snow isn’t an issue. Good luck:)
How large an area is this? We had a muddy spot develop at a 16 foot gate entrance from horse hoof traffic – the native vegetation couldn’t hold up.
We installed a few rubber ring mats across this spot, which prevented more mud and allowed the grass to recover. Vegetation recovery eventually hid the mats almost entirely.
I could see these mats perhaps working elsewhere.
Our sacrifice dry lot opens off the barn, and is simply a layer of gravel, no real site prep other than a french drain we installed in the part adjacent to the barn (where the horses like to urinate). The gravel is just spread on top of the native soil. Every several years, we order another dump truck load as a refresh – not that much trouble, and much, much less expensive than if we’d scraped off the native soil, built a compacted base, etc.
This works with our soil and weather (no really major winter weather, no super deep sucking mud).
Oh, I just remembered what they do at a friend’s barn (Oregon: wet weather!) They bought old astroturf, and laid it out in the horse pens. The ground gets wet, the water does take some time to run off, there is mud under the astroturf, but the horses don’t sink into mudholes, because the fabric of the turf takes some of the load.
Anybody tried that?
My family tried the wood chips for years to beat the Oregon rain + mud. They didn’t remove it in the spring, so it would just break down into even more mud.
What ended up ultimately helping was buying an old used dump truck and living down the road from the quarry and putting tons of rock/stone in.
I imagine if they ended up scraping it down and putting geotextile grid, it would have stabilized the surface a bit faster and that’ what I’m planning on trying with my own property this spring.
