It’s a swimming pool

I’m getting a little sick of the weather here in Oxford. I enjoyed fabulous, warm sunny days for the two months I was in Rome. Mind you, towards the end of my stay, it was getting way too sticky and hot for me. I actually don’t mind cold weather so I was a bit miffed to miss out on the snow in early June. But I don’t like rain, rain, rain.

When you have a property with paddocks and animals, you end up with muddy lakes in the paddocks and the animals grind up the mud – so much so that it becomes a thick mess you get stuck in. It rained for basically a whole week. Then we had a couple of days of sunshine before, wham, more rain. So any chance of the paddocks drying out a bit were sidelined.

Fortunately, we have a lot of macrocarpa hedges dotted around the property and the horses are basically living in one particular macrocarpa hedge to get out of the wet. It’s the largest hedge and is kind of like a mini-forest for the horses. Saffy loves running through it and I made a bed of hay for her to lie down on. Keeps her snug and warm.

But the paddocks. Sheesh. I spotted Rosie making her way to the water trough. Her hooves were going suck, suck in the mud. She stopped just as she was nearing it and I could just imagine her thinking: Why not drink from the puddles of water? It’s too much effort to get to that trough.

We haven’t had a bad Winter really. It’s actually been quite mild and there have been nights when we haven’t even bothered to get the wood from the wood stack and light up a fire. But the part of living here that I don’t like is the rain we can get during Winter. We need to harrow most of the paddocks but the heavy harrows would simply get stuck in the mud.

So nothing for it but to wait for Spring and hope that we have a long, warm Summer.