Side note: for people in Washington State, most places I've seen use the 5/8" minus or 5/8" clean. The minus has gravel dust in it and is cheaper. The 3/8" is too small and just turns to mud. Believe me, found that one out the hard way. Anything bigger starts to hurt the horses feet.
Luckily my buddy Bill was over to help out. One man on the tractor to scoop the gravel, one man on the wheelbarrow to move it into the stall. Why don't you just drive the tractor into the stall you ask? Good question. The way we've got the thing oriented, the tractor gets really unstable if we try to take a bucket full of gravel down the hill. So we're back to the wheelbarrow method.
We started off with me on the wheelbarrow, and Bill on the tractor. He got a bit carried away with this load.
After watching this video a few times, it's a good laugh, but I really need to get a roll bar welded onto old blue. Another thing that we think caused the endo was there was low air pressure in both of the front tires. After we got the back wheels on the ground, we got out the compressor and filled them up. It performed much better after that.
I did about half on wheel barrow, then we switched. Here's how it looks from the tractor point of view. It's definitely the better of the two jobs.
It took us a little over 2 hours to fill and rake out the gravel for June's run. Most places got 3-4". Some places that were extra wet got about 6" of gravel. At some point the soil has to reach it's saturation point of gravel and then it should become like a gravel road. At least that's the idea. I'm hoping that point comes soon. The last batch of gravel we got was over $600.
Here's how things turned out:
I'm told the other benefit for the horses is foot health. When you have a horse that walks all the time in muddy conditions, they get foot injuries. So it's best to keep ahead of it.
One more thing off the list for now.
See you next time~
