Maestro time and farm chores

As expected things settled down a bit post show season for Maestro. He didn’t jump much besides doing the Canter for the Cure derby in the field and I started thinking a bit about what I want to work on with him next. As my trainer said the other day, he now has a gas pedal and power steering. So I feel like I can continue growing his skill set in other ways. One of our most irritating (to me) struggles is our lack of nice upward transitions, particularly into canter. I’ve never had a horse that just locks up in response to my leg asking for forward and obviously my methods are not getting the desired results. Thankfully after L posted a DVD review the other day I asked her for book suggestions. Later that day Dressage 101 was ordered and I read a couple of sections over the weekend. I’m already very sucked in and excited to learn more from this book!

Now that I’m signed up to do a Mark Leone clinic next month (I rode Stampede in one of his clinics previously) we’ve been getting back to some jumping in preparation. All I can say is wow what a different horse I have riding indoors. Last year riding inside I struggled to get the strides and up until right at the end of winter our lead changes were fairly messy. I’m happy to say both of those things are much improved. I actually almost left out a stride on a bending line last week (oops!) and knock on wood our changes have been nice.

How Maestro feels about indoor season.

I also clipped Maestro this past weekend because he has been sweating so much. The worst of it is on his neck, girth area, and a bit around his ears, so I tried to be strategic just like last year. We will see if I end up having to remove more hair later. I don’t like taking away their natural source of warmth so I do as little as possible.

The weekend before last was a long weekend for the husband and I where we planned to get some outside work completed. The pastures needed the poop cleaned up and we still needed to clean up the one pasture that the horses have never been on because we burned the old barn innards there (or attempted to) and left a bunch of metal and uncooperative large tree stumps behind. So I poop scooped, we created a new smaller wood pile for burning, and picked up an insane amount of old metal fence mesh and stall parts. Since we were creating a new burn pile we then picked up a bunch of junk from the yard around the house as well because why not. Then we rented a 20″ wide split seeder (we could not find anything to rent that we could pull behind our tractor or mowers) and husband walked around seeding three of the pastures while I continued on with other things. We also decided to get gravel for the area around the barn where we were getting mud since I needed that before we put out the winter hay feeders. I guess I need to do a mud and barn aisle renovations post because I still haven’t posted about the grid we put down in our barn aisle! Either way, our weekend got us plenty of exercise!

I’m tired just thinking back to that weekend! We would have done more stuff this past weekend (like using recycled poop dirt to fill in low spots on the property) but it rained pretty much the whole time. The chestnut boys are happy to have hay outside now that the grass is dwindling though. I’m hoping things at least warm up for a bit before we go into full winter because so far this fall weather has been quite chilly. Stampede literally went from fly sheet to turnout sheet in the same week and has been wearing his turnout since. I’d really like to give everyone one last bath so they aren’t covered in fly spray remnants all winter.

So that’s some of what’s been going on here. More to come!