New Year, New Event Season
Happy New Year to everyone! It’s certainly been a very wet winter so far! I have everything crossed that this years event season will be much drier than last year!!!
All the horses have been in work most of the winter with the odd easy week here and there, with the amount of rain we have had they have had to spend more time than normal being in, so the horse walker has been put to good use as an extra way to keep them moving and occupied! We had 2 new arrivals just before Christmas, two little colt foals from Shannondale Stud. We bought them to run with Hugo and to hopefully be future stars!
Last week we had a visit from Dengie’s Performance Horse Nutritionist Claire Akers, not only to have foal cuddles but also to look at all the horses diet’s and condition pre-season! As always she was full of fab advice and knowledge! All the horses that hold their condition well (aka the fatties) are fed Dengie Ulser Lite with a performance balancer plus some Dengie Alfa-Beet (I love feeding a sloppy feed in the winter to try and increase the horse’s water intake). Gino and Candy who are harder to keep condition on are both fed Dengie Healthy Tummy and they love the mix of the chopped and pelleted alfalfa. I’m a huge fan of trying to feed mainly fibre (the balancer is the only “concentrate”) to the horses and they all get ad-lib haylage…not only does this help keep them occupied it also helps reduce the risk of ulcers and it helps with temperament especially at this time of year!
I have been to a few dressage and jumping shows over the winter and this will start to increase from this month onwards as we build towards the season starting! I’m still trying to decide if I should start in March or wait till April, last year my first eight events were all cancelled, so I really hope we have a better start to the year!!
