The gravel trucks rumbled last week with some A gravel (a recycle type with some ground asphalt in it). We put four loads on the road and two loads next to the house where we park our vehicles. A little bit at a time will make the wet seasons easier to cope with. We also took delivery of two loads of "dirty" pea gravel, which is good for horse footing but not cleaned free of sand. Cheaper and just as useful for keeping the horses out of the muck on supportive but conforming footing. One load made a mound for a hay feeder "high spot" and the other was deposited just outside the horse's pen...... that would be because the truck got stuck. Although our trusty tractor was able to pull him out, it seems I left doing this job until a little too late in the season. Now we will have to wait until the ground freezes so that we can use the tractor to position the second load of pea gravel for another feeder and to extend the horse's loafing area. How do I know this???? That would be because of the culvert installation caper. We created a nice trail through the bush for the horses to get on to the trail system without using the driveway, which has minus two inch blasted rock on it. That surface is good for locking the road bed together but difficult for the horses. They are fine on natural rounded stoney ground, but the blasted rock is quite sharp edged. I managed to lay my hands on a WONDERFUL twenty foot length of twenty-four inch diameter plastic culvert (there is nothing like a really nice culver to make me happy), which we cut in half to use for the trails. We used the tractor to dig it into the existing ditching which goes around the main field, but got the tractor stuck when we came back with the front end loader heavy with fill to cover it in. Fortunately a four-wheel drive tractor with a loader is easy to free up when you empty your load and push yourself out with the loader, those muck ruts will need to be dealt with next year. That means we will have to find a way around the wet spot in the trail (we already jump the ditch itself) until the ground freezes and we can get the culvert properly installed late this fall. Given that, I definitely KNOW that we will not be moving the remaining pile of pea gravel around in the paddock for a while.
