Paddock Paradise 4 - The Accidental Smallholder

Sunday 1 August, 2010

by Rosemary at 8:24pm in Equines No comments Add your own

This weekend, we finished the electric fence in Sheepfold that creates the track for the horses. It's the start of our paddock paradise, but there's a lot of development to go. I've been in email correspondence with Nick Hills www.cloverroseequine.co.uk about it and hope to visit his place in the not too distant future.

Nick is a natural hoofcare specialist who has developed a paddock paradise in the Highlands. Looking at his website, ours looks a bit "soft" but Nick's happy to offer advice on improving the set up.

The track is 4m wide and about 400m long, so 1600m2. If my arithmetic is correct, this is only about 0.4 of an acre. There will be three ponies on this area so it will be interesting to see how it bears up, especially in the winter.

We were going to strim the grass prior to putting the ponies on, but stressing the grass will cause it to produce more sugar, thus increasing the risk of laminitis. Instead, we're going to leave the grass long, use grazing muzzles for part of the day and take them off the grass for part of it too. Fortunately, the sward is full of plants other than grass and a lot of the grass has already gone to seed, thus reducing the nutritional value.