Friends from around the country are calling us as this heat sets records, so for those who may be wondering what we do at Promise Ranch in the summer when we aren’t riding, well we scoop POOP and pine shavings (bedding), 25 lbs. per day per horse (luckily they eat less in the summer) and then every two weeks we take it from one location in the stalls, which is called stripping the stalls (fun huh?) and we move it to the desert where we use it for mulch on the trees, luckily we are on 6 acres with 100’s of trees and plants on drips as I’m trying to grow a forest (against formidable odds) and one benefit of having horses for our trees is that I can use their bedding and manure to help mulch a lot of trees . The mulch holds in the moisture and fertilizes the trees as the nutrients slowly leach out of the bedding and into the soil if you place it out about 3 feet from the base of the trees.
Our daily routine, kind of mundane but tolerable in the heat, is to give the horses a cold shower every night and then they stand in front of the fans and drip dry while cooling off, then they go and roll and we do this every night. The fans in the barn area run from 6 am until 9 pm and the barn temps don’t get above 95 with the fans running and the 10 mph breeze (which is a big relief as well) that moves pretty religiously thru our area all day and night as well.
But for those of you who don’t know what stripping stalls is all about, it’s the very necessary task of taking the bedding down to the base granite and letting it dry out and then putting new bedding down. Over a two week period the bedding picks up moisture even though we pick up manure daily and dump it we still need to strip stalls every two weeks we (I) go down to the base and get all the urine and wet bedding up as well and let everything dry out so we can put down fresh bedding. In this heat it drys out quickly and within hours we can lay new fresh shavings as bedding and then two weeks from now, we do it all over again. 🙂
It is now the 14th day of above 110 and we are on track to break a record of 18 days above 110, gratefully, the temperature at Promise Ranch each morning at our higher elevation 2980 feet, is about 7 degrees cooler than these temps in the photo and in the morning it is still about 82 degrees. So we walk Shadow and clean the stalls early AM and this is me at 8 am stripping stalls and then I’ll jump in the pool and Lori and I are going to a movie. This is basically life in Phoenix during July and until the monsoon hits, hopefully sooner than later.
Just checking in from Promise Ranch, enjoy the ride, ya know, even this is a good one 🙂 signing off now and until it rains,
Lucian, Lori, Masquerade, Diamond, Sandman and Shadow