Welcome to my RAGE against winter. I absolutely know that I am not alone in feeling like this, but I truly believe this is the first year I have ever felt quite so much disillusion with horse ownership through winter. For us at least, it seems to have been a particularly wet winter, and the mud seems to have at times seeped into every pore.
As you know, my horses live out, and it's something which I'm very proud of—to be able to provide my horses with this luxury 365 days a year I know is rare. However, to do so has come at a cost, both monetary and time-wise. I have, at considerable expense, built the horses a 'loafing area,' a hard-standing space so that they can come 'in' off the field (and the mud) to a nice dry-ish area overnight to eat haylage and have a break from sucking their legs in and out of the mud just to walk across the field. I also built them a field shelter so that when they are in their loafing area, they can get under cover if it is raining too.
However, I am not rich (though like many of us, I wish to be), and of course, I have had to make some sacrifices along the way in the construction process in line with my budgetary constraints. The fact I built the field shelter from scratch rather than buying a pre-fabricated one is probably quite telling. But here lies the first of my list of challenges that I am going to tackle this summer to make winter 2025-26 more bearable.