Wednesday, September 29, 2010

OK, time for an update...

Yesterday morning I let the dogs out into the backyard as usual. When I called them in for breakfast, Lucy the dachshund didn't come. It's not like her to miss a meal, but I just went ahead and fed Alex. I heard Lucy's hunting bark (ridiculous excited high-pitched yip) and figured she'd treed something and that's why she didn't come in. I took the trash out to the garbage can, and there was Lucy in the front yard. Ugh, she got out somewhere. I caught her, toweled off the mud, chastised her, put her in the house, and continued on with my morning farm chores. I went to the backyard to see where Lucy had escaped, but the two gates looked fine. Must be a hole on the fence. I walked along the fencline with Alex following along until I came to the lowest part of the yard where the fence was laying completely flat covered in mud! The rain over the previous two days had washed so much silt down from the goat pen and the backyard that it had built up against the 2x4 welded wire fence and pushed it right down! (Thanks to the previous owners who had built the fence using landscape timbers as fence posts...the people who had our last farm did the same thing...FYI, you can't do this...)

So now I get to walk the dogs on a leash until this weekend when we have time to fix the fence...

Then we get home last night and Maggie and Sandy (two horses) were in the backyard. It had crossed my mind to check the fence after the storm, and I did check on the other pasture fence, but not theirs. We caught them and put them in the other pasture with the other four horses. Then I went to see how they ended up in the back yard. Turns out, when the backyard fence fell, it shifted the corner post which is shared with the pasture. There is a gate latched on to that post, and the latch had pulled loose. The horses figured this out, went out the gate, down a small hill through the woods, across the backyard fence lying in the mud, and right into the grassy backyard.

It's always something, isn't it?