Category: Animals

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.

Continue reading “Moving the Chicken Coop”
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.

Continue reading “My Trip to Valhalla Farms”

Categories
Horses Montana Ranch Snow Work

First Montana Thaw and Website Updates

After the horrible winter weather we had in December, January was pretty mild. We had a couple below zero weeks, but there wasn’t any snow or wind or anything else that would be considered “bad weather.”

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January. 😉

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

Continue reading “First Montana Thaw and Website Updates”
Categories
Animals Chickens Ducks Horses Mocha Ranch Rosco

A Winter Morning

We woke up this morning as we always do, and we went out to feed the animals. This time I brought a camera to take pictures of all of the ridiculous animals.

Because of the weather, we’ve been keeping the below three horses in the “large paddock.” Today, we let them out to run around in the field. They ran around for a good 10 minutes.
Ashton Anna's Horses

Ashton Anna's Horses
From left to right is Maple, Onora and Aspen.

While I was out in the pasture I took a picture of our house in the snow:
Ashton Anna's House

Continue reading “A Winter Morning”
Categories
Animals Cows

1/2 a Cow

First off, if you didn’t know, our neighborhood is awesome. Everyone is very down to earth and nice. One of our neighbors, raises cows. Yes, it’s the same neighbor that herds his cows in front of our house. Our horses have gotten better about the cows now that they’ve seen them a number of times, but they still need some work.

Anyway, to get on with the story, we decided to purchase half of a small cow from this neighbor. We talked about it last winter, and last Thursday (day before Halloween), we get a call saying, “Your half a cow is ready to be butchered. How would you like it cut.” We didn’t have any sort of warning, but it was too late to do anything else, so we told them what we wanted, and today (Monday), Anna went and picked up 3 heavy boxes full of meat.

Here’s some pictures of the tiny fridge that Anna purchased filled with most of the meat (about 30lbs had to go into the kitchen freezer):

Freezer Closed
Freezer Open
Freezer full of cow

We got:
81.85lbs of Ground Beef
106.84lbs of steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.
Totaling 188.69lbs of Beef

The cost of the 1/2 cow including butchering came to about $723 (approx. $3.83/lb). Which not a scream of a deal, but the cow is grown on the pasture right next to my house, so it’s 58x better than what you would by in the store. =)

(Random side note: We just realized recently that both Anna and I (Ashton) have “O” Blood Type, which thrives on meat. Good thing, too.)

That’s all from the Farm today,
Ashton Anna