When it rains...

Doug has an obsession. It is irrigation. He spends countless hours every spring and summer working on the irrigation system on the farm. It is used for watering the crops and the yards and pasture. In the past year he has been developing a nice motocross track and he needs to keep water on it to keep the track in good condition. So this has been a challenge. Getting water delivered to where it needs to be is something people in town don't give a lot of thought to. You just move your sprinkler a little to the left or a little to the right and manage to get the entire yard watered without much more thought. And the extremely fortunate don't give it any thought at all because of the underground watering systems. This year we indulged in a really nice reel sprinkler system called microrain. The one we got is specifically designed for horse arenas, sports fields and hobby farms. It takes care of up to 4 acres. Doug has toyed around with it and perfected it's pattern of spray every since the day it arrived about a month ago.

He must have been on a roll because after he got the microrain running and moving around the farm he also picked up a 2000 gallon water tank from my dad. We put it on our Chevy 10 wheeler (a large wheat truck) and he set it up with a booster pump and outfitted it with an impressive design of PVC pipe running here and there out the back end of the truck. This sucker can pump some water! I feel fortunate that he has spent a good amount of time trying to get my arena back in working order. Last summer we had a problem with gophers so he plowed it up to break up their underground network and getting it back to a smooth, level surface has proved to be a bit of a problem. But the thought is we can get some moisture on the ground, pack it and then just drag the top layer for riding. And what a nice surprise! The water truck works great for watering his motorcycle track. In addition to the suburban/lawn mower we can use this "water feature" as some billy bob entertainment when visitors come to the farm.

This morning after Hadley headed to preschool for the day Kate and I headed out to work on replacing the top layer of hot wire around my pasture. Cruiser has NO respect for a hot wire and takes full advantage of a fence when it is not working properly so I decided to replace it with new wire to make sure it was in good shape. After completing it I turned him out and he did exactly what I thought he would. Took a few laps around the pasture at the gallop and then settled in on the north side for a snack on the OTHER side of the fence. He reaches over and pushes all of his weight into the white tape but imagine his displeasure when he got shocked. HA! Why is it such a sick sense of pleasure to see a horse get shocked when they have been pushing on the fence for months?? So he took a large jump back and seemed to think the grass looked pretty good on his side of the fence after all. But given enough time he thought he might give it another chance, just in case there had been a mistake. HA! Shocked AGAIN!! So I think we can safely say he will be minding his fencing manners for some time to come.