Categories
Animals Chickens Ranch

Moving the Chicken Coop

Spring cleaning has officially begun out here. We’ve done a lot of work reorganizing our hay shed. One of the biggest challenges so far was moving the chicken coop.

Last Summer, I built our Chicken Coop of the Ages, and created a “run” for the chickens to run around in:

Chicken Coop
Chicken Run
This has been in the front of our Hay Shed for the last year, and the chickens are making a mess. It’s also taking up extra space where we would like to put hay, so we have decided to move it to the back of the hay shed:
Chicken Run

First we had to clean it up:
Chicken Run Before

Then we built a roof out of wooden planks and a lot of chicken wire. We had to sew lengths of chicken wire together to make a “roof.” We used rocks to hold down the chicken wire where it met the ground (on the left):

Chicken Run After

Then I cut a hole in the wall at the back of the hay shed, and we moved our (extremely heavy) Chicken Coop of the Ages to the back of the hay shed.

Categories
Horses Trips & Activities

My Trip to Valhalla Farms

I recently took a very exciting trip for almost 3 weeks to Valhalla Farms in Wellborn, Florida. This was my first time to Florida and to Jean Brinkman’s 600 acre farm.

Valhalla Farms

As a lot of you know I breed a type of horse called a Trakehner which is a Warmblood horse originating from Prussia. Jean Brinkman has been breeding Trakehners since the early 70’s and helped start the American Trakehner Association (ATA), which is amazing! I met Jean in November of 2008 at the ATA annual meeting in Los Angeles which I attended with a few of my horses. I told Jean I knew I had a lot more to learn about the breed and she very kindly invited me to come to her farm to learn. After I got home from Los Angeles I figured out the best time to go down there and arranged the trip with her.

Erin Brinkman & Imminence
Erin Brinkman & Imminence

I was gone from April 3rd – 21st and had an amazing time! Flying into Florida was the only horrible part about the trip. I left Montana at 9:00 am and didn’t arrive in Jacksonville until 5:00 am the next day due to the storms over Jacksonville. I stayed in a hotel at the airport and got maybe 5-6 hours of sleep then took a shuttle to the Jacksonville Equestrian Center to meet Jean and her Dressage trainers who were competing for the weekend. It was definitely a great introduction to the trip seeing the talented horses and riders from Valhalla at their best.

Iris & Aura
Iris & Aura

Competing for the weekend was Erin Brinkman on Imminence a young newly approved stallion owned by her mother Jean. Erin was also there with two of her dressage students so I was able to watch her coach them and compete on one of the horses. She placed 1st in all of her classes for the weekend which was very impressive! Also competing for the weekend was Iris Eppinger and her working student Anna Franklin. Iris was riding Prix St George on one of Jean’s mares Aura and did very well! Iris also rode a client’s horse Etoile who was purchased from Jean and the owner kept the horse in training at Valhalla. Anna rode her horse Walden at 1st and 2nd Level and won 1st place. To say the least there were a lot of blue ribbons hanging around our stalls.

Categories
Grub Club Montana Summer

Grub Club Ventures Outside

(FYI, Grub Club is our Thursday gathering of friends. If you’re ever in MT, swing by.)

We finally had fairly decent weather for our grub club, so we decided to build a campfire. For the first grub club campfire of last year we burned a dog house, so we had to come up with something fun and cool that we could do/burn…

Ashton and Anna's Grub Club Photos

Are those Pizza Hut boxes?

Ashton and Anna's Grub Club Photos

That’s right. We made a Pizza Hut Fort! Donald came up with the structure idea: using card stacking methods to build the different layers.