It seems that we had no spring, and now what has happened to fall?  Both in the north and south we’ve seemed to bounce from winter to summer, and now, summer to winter.  Strange year.

BUT are you ready?

We all enjoy the spring and fall weather for riding.  In the fall bugs, heat and humidity are gone, and the snow, ice, and mud have not gotten here yet.  Just the opposite for spring riding.

So are you mentally and physically prepared for the change of time on November 4th, and what is to follow?  Are your blankets cleaned and repaired.  Clips oiled and ready for freezing temps?  Water heaters poised and ready for action?

I’ve just stocked up on hay to get me through to spring when we get our pastures back.  From everyone I’ve talked to, it’s going to be a hard time to find hay this year.  With all the rains this summer, no one has been able to get into the pastures to cut, cure, and bale.  This cuts down on the amount of hay that will be available.  I know down here we get at least three, sometimes up to five cuttings.  They just did their first cutting a month ago and they should be getting another one around now.  With the rain, everything grew well, but was let go to seed because of not being able to cut and dry before baling, and the same thing holds true for the northern states.  My friend just told me of her neighbor up in N.J. who had two separate farms bring her hay and when she opened the bales they were moldy.  So on her recent trip to Va. she purchased hay and her horse wouldn’t eat that either because it had mold.  The two local loads she sent back, the one from Va. she spread out in a back field.  It’s like spreading money on you fields.  Hay is going to be hard to get, and if you get it, probably expensive.

Please be aware of the hay you are getting.  Even if it looks good on the outside, watch the hay as you put it out and make sure it’s good on the inside.  You might want to stick your hand in the middle of the bale (not an easy task) and check for wetness or heat.  If there is just a little dust, shake it out, or spray it with water, but look out for that mold.

Be informed and get everything in order, then go and enjoy the cooler temps, and bug-less time of year.

Happy Halloween y’all.

Or not.

Well a friend messaged me on Facebook the other day that her new filly was dead lame in both front feet, could I come and look at her.  She’s over an hour away and my life, right now, is running on high-speed (wish my internet would) I told her it was impossible for me to come at this time.

So she wants a diagnosis on-line.  Seriously!!!!!????

We are still in the 90’s here, but we have a “cold front” coming in a couple of days and we should go into the 80″s, and possibly 70’s. (I love Florida).  Ninety is above normal this time of year in here, but then the whole summer has been breaking records.  We had rain all summer, which was a blessing to our pastures, but not necessarily for the horses.

The whole east coast has had way to much rain this year.  But that happens every few years.  However, with horses that creates a whole bunch of problems.

So I asked her – are you sure it’s both front feet?  She pretty much thought so, but I didn’t entirely buy into that.

I explained that my mare, once again, has soft soles from all the wet grass.  If her horse is ouchie on both front feet when she walks onto concrete or a hard surface, treat her for sore feet, use something that will dry them out.  If it’s only one foot, than I bet she’s trying to blow an abscess.

First of all she wrote me on Sunday, which I didn’t get until Thursday, so I answered her right there and then.  Duh!  Then I got another message on Friday that she called the vet who was due that day, and the mare blew an abscess on Thursday.  Did you follow that?  I’m not even sure I did.

Between the wet, then dry, then wet, you get the picture, horses can’t help but abscess.  Expansion, contraction, creates problems when wet is involved.  Of course horses can abscess for other reasons, but the most common one here in Florida is wet.  Not to mention hoof rot.

I remember Bob’s horse when he would abscess.  He’d wave his leg around in the air telling you “it’s broken, I know it’s broken.”  He was such a drama queen.  Get an infection in your finger from a splinter and you’ll know how they feel with an abscess surrounded by hoof wall.  Then there are some that you don’t know they have an abscess until it breaks.  Sometimes it can take a month or more for it to travel to a soft area where it can escape.  It will always travel the path of least resistance.  If a horse has a shoe it can travel to where the nail hole is, but if a horse doesn’t wear shoes, it goes to the next soft place, which is usually the cornet band. That is unless you can get your farrier, with hoof testers, to find the sore spot and carve the sole to find the entry point.  How do you know it broke?  The smell and black gunk seeping out it is a good clue.  Also when you see a horse go from dead lame to “what problem?” you can be pretty sure the abscess broke.

So I told her to soak it in Epsom salts, and pack it with Ichthammaol or Epsom Salt Poultice to make sure it’s completely drained.

I know I’ve spoken about the importance of healthy feet before.  It’s a common complaint and a common problem.  Why are people so surprised by a lame horse?  These are horses.  That’s what they do.  Leave them in a padded stall and they are still going to hurt themselves.  If you absolutely need them for something, they will be lame.

Why is it so easy to forget an abscess from one year to the next?  Of course I’m pushing the senile envelope here so I write everything down.

I’m glad her new mare will be okay.  This girl has waited a long time to own her own horse, I wish her well.  She loves working with and around horses, and her knowledge base will increase as she goes, but hopefully she’ll remember the next time she thinks her horse has a broken leg that it might be an abscess.

I remember years ago when I came to Florida, long before there was a thought in my head about living here, I met some people, and they took us to a horse show.  It was the middle of winter, but all the horses at the show had summer coats.  My horses up north looked like woolyburgers.  Those horses didn’t look shaved, they just had summer coats.  I wanted one.  You could run your hand on them and they were smooth and silky.  My horse back home had so much hair you couldn’t even find the horse.  You couldn’t find that horse for six months.

Now these horses had several blankets on them when they weren’t tacked up.  But to me it was warm and beautiful out.  Of course at the time I didn’t realize that Florida winters were like our spring or fall back in New Jersey. Actually nicer than our spring and fall.

By the time I started coming to Florida to hunt, my horses were shaved.  So I thought that when I moved here my horses would not get a winter coat.  After all it was warm here.  Almost like summer up in N.J.

It doesn’t work that way.  They grew winter coats and had to be shaved here for hunting too.  Right now my two mares have way too much hair for the 95 degrees we’re having.  It wasn’t until later that I found out that they don’t grow according to the weather, but by the day light hours, or lack there of.

Our mornings are cool, but that sun is still up there in the sky all day on bake.  If we get an afternoon shower it cools things right off and it’s beautiful all evening and night until 9:00 a.m. the next day when things go back to roast.

I don’t think their coats are long enough to shave, but they are thick enough to sweat horribly.  Hosing helps, but the humidity is very high.

The other thing I don’t remember about up north is that they ever stopped sweating.  I know other horses around the country do, but I can’t ever remember the horses I knew doing this.

It’s weird.  The grass down here slows it growing in September and pretty much stops growing in October.  It just doesn’t like the cooler evenings, but someone forgot to tell the horses to stop growing hair until it moves out of the heat wave season.

Show people pile on blankets and keep lights on in their stalls at night to trick the horses brain into thinking it’s not getting closer to winter and that there’s a need for more hair.

The four geldings aren’t growing coats like the girls.  Must be a hormonal thing.  I just feel so bad for the girls.  The boys are sweating just as much, they just look better at it.  Kind of like the buff weight lifters, all shiny.  I used to think that was sweat, but then I found out they just oil their bodies to show off.  Kind of like how we put baby oil around the horses eyes and muzzle to make them stand out more.  Adding more character and to look more sculptured.

I thought men sweat, but ladies glisten.  Someone want to tell my mares that?  They aren’t listening or glistening, they are just plain sweating.

I went to the super market yesterday.  It is my most unfavorite job.  It seems to me to be the biggest waste of time.  You put the stuff in the cart, take it out and put it on the counter, put it back in the cart, take it out and put it in your car/truck, get home take it back out of the truck and carry it into the kitchen, take it out of the bags and put it away.  Only to do it again in a week or two if you are lucky.  It’s like when you just wash the floor and your husband walks in with grass, mud, whatever.  You just want it to stay clean for a little while.  Well if he goes to reach for something to eat I want to yell “Don’t touch that!!!”  I don’t want to shop for a while.

So yesterday when I was at the Deli counter I was watching the man slicing the Swiss Cheese I had asked for.  I told him (to save time) he didn’t have to put paper between the slices.  Well he would cut four or five slices and perfectly stack them, then go back and do that again.  Hello!  I need 1 lb. of cheese and I’m already on Social Security I don’t have that much time left.  Well he just kept slicing and stacking.  Each time he put another stack on the scale he would line them all up perfectly.  Another, older woman than me, came along and watched him restacking the cheese.  She looked at me and I rolled my eyes, she just shook her head.  We both watched him repeat this process for the entire pound of cheese.  Alternating rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.  He obviously was very attentive to his job.

So last night, while I was being attentive to the job of cleaning the stalls, I thought about patterns that I do.  What stall I start with, how I clean each stall, how each horses uses their stalls and pastures differently.

Did you ever notice that, or am I just crazy.  Okay, don’t answer that.  I have this one horse who will walk his stall in a counter clock wise pattern, while another one will only walk his stall clock wise.  Then there are others that will do a sweeping pattern back and forth with their heads to the isle way.

Some of them have a certain way of eating their grain in a bucket.  They will eat on one side and slide more grain over to that side, but not just dive into the other side.  But don’t mess with their bucket.  If you shake it and bring all the grain to the middle, you get that look like “why did you do that?  I just had it the way I wanted it.”  Then there is how they eat their hay.  How they separate it, and eat in their own special way.  Then I have one horse that will take his hay and put it in his grain bucket to eat it.

When I walk two horses into the barn together they have their preferred sides.  I remember this with the team horses when I was a teenager.  How ever they were put in the shafts is how they had to be stalled and led.  When leading Zoey and Friday, Zoey always wants to be on Fridays left.  No matter where they are in the pasture when they get to the gate Zoey will always come along Fridays left side.  Copper and Lou, the same thing.  Copper wants to be on Lou’s right side.  I thought this might have something to do with Copper’s aging eye sight, but Zoey doesn’t have old eyes.  Thinking back, when Magic lost her left eye I thought that she would like a horse on her blind side to protect the side she couldn’t see.  Actually she wanted the other horse on her sighted side.  I guess she wanted to know what that horse was up to.

Okay so you know that God sends me the crazies, but really, did you ever really look at the patterns your horses do?  Or, for that matter, patterns you do?  I just think way too much when I clean stalls.

Okay, so just when you thought you had it all down pat, you get a curve ball.

This will make all you people up north scratch your head.  I know you are still doing Winter, but we in Florida are dealing with an above average temperature early spring.  Now that will make you crazy, or at least your horses who still have their winter coats.

My mare Friday gets a thick, plush winter coat.  Have no idea why.  Way too much hair for Florida.  She’s supposed to be a Canadian Warmblood (whatever that might be).  You look at her and say Thoroughbred.  Her brain is the only thing that says there is something else mixed in there, and perhaps her coat.

Now a friend picked up a Percheron a few weeks ago.  He came from one of the southern states but I can’t remember which one.  He had way too much hair, so she decided to clip him to resell him.  She’s been in business for years and is no stranger to working with horses.  So she went out and bought a new set of clippers for the occasion.  They didn’t work, so she brought them back and got a different set.  They didn’t work either.  She went somewhere else and got a third pair.  Nope.  She couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong.

I didn’t give it much thought until I went to clip Fri.  Now I already have three Sunbeam body clippers, and six pairs of newly sharpened blades.  Been doing this whole body clip thing for about forty years and I was ready.  At least I thought I was ready.  Usually I would clip horses in the fall when we would go into Hunt Season.  Was taught never to clip them in the spring because their summer coats would be starting to come in and you’d mess them up.  Made sense to me, but watching poor Fri soaking wet every day just made me do it.  She was shedding, but not fast enough, the horse was suffering.

Got all set up with brushes, clippers, oil, blade wash, and extension cord.  Usually the clippers go through the hair like butter.  Went to make my first pass and they stopped dead.  Adjusted the tension, nothing.  So I changed blades.  Nothing.  So I changed clippers.  Nothing.  Got a few small cuts, but basically nothing was happening.  So I thought maybe when he sharpened the blades he didn’t do a good job.  So I called around looking for new blades.  Well there has been a run on blades and I finally found a set at my feed store.  Went down and found out that everyone is now using clip-on blades.  My clippers are older and need the old-fashioned screw on type.  But he ordered two sets for me and they would be in, in two days.  Hello, I have a horse standing there with three racing stripes on her neck.

So I went home and thought about the situation.  What was the problem here?  First my friend, and now me.  The next day I went out to the barn and started to run my hands over Fri.  She appeared dry and fluffy until you sent your fingers down to her skin.  She’s got that downy fuzz under her coat and that was damp, not wet, but damp.  So I turned two fans on her and got her neck and shoulders dry.  Clippers went right through it like it should, but stopped if I went anywhere near her ribs.  So her neck and shoulders were done, but that was going to be about it for the day.

Day three.  I got up early, turned the fan on her while she was eating to get the dew dry that was on the outer hair.  Put her on the cross ties, turned two fans on her and went to work.  If I hit and area that was not totally dry I ran the clippers in the direction with the hair and took off the top half of the hairs, let the fans do their job, and when the under coat was dry, took it down to the skin.

The longest I have ever taken to do a large draft horse with a patterned hunter clip was three hours.  This Thoroughbred took me three days, but I must say that I had a great learning experience on clipping a damp horse.  When I went to the hair dressers the other day I was speaking to her about my dilemma.  She said “Yes the clipper people have always told her that they wouldn’t work on wet or damp hair.”  Well duh, now you tell me?

I saw my first Robin two weeks ago, so they are on their way north.  When your turn comes to be blessed with beautiful Spring weather, and it will, enjoy it.  I am totally loving it here, and so is Fri since she’s sporting her summer look.

Nothing worth sharing should be taken to the grave with you.