Winter 2020-2021 Pasture Management

 Last year (2019-2020) I experimented with allowing my horses access to one of my three acres of pasture all winter. It seems a bit silly after investing so much money in a dry lot (which is still well worth it to keep the high-traffic areas mud-free!), but it really makes the horses happy, cuts down on morning yahoos when I open the gate, and reduces the amount of manure I have to clean. I was quite happy with how well it worked out and how quickly that acre rebounded in the spring, so I thought I would post an update after this most recent winter. You can see last year's photos in a previous post. 

During the second year, I still found this a reasonable practice for my situation: two horses on three one-acre paddocks that get rotated the rest of the year and tend to be extremely lush in the spring. There were a few days here and there when I kept the horses in the dry lot after heavy rain or snowmelt to let the water drain a bit, but for the most part they had full-time access to the field. We had another average-to-above-average precipitation year here (not much snow though!).

I did make one really helpful improvement in 2020, which was adding a stonedust pad to the gate area of the "winter paddock." I'm going to do another post on that project very soon!

Here are some photos of how the paddock held up throughout the winter.

December 28

February 5

March 4

March 28. Not my traditional pasture photo, but I found it and was really impressed with how quickly the grass improved between this photo and the next one, only two weeks later. I think Z would prefer if it stayed a little muddy though!

April 11, after the first mow of the season

May 9, mid-mow

As you can see, the grass has rebounded extremely well again. This acre has been resting since the end of March (about 5-6 weeks) and the horses could have easily been back on it before now. I also should have mowed it again much sooner, but life got in the way.

Here's a comparison of the gate area in December 2019 (left) vs. February 2021 (right). I'm very pleased with how the stonedust has cut down on the mud and made the area much safer!