Purchase of Lady Luxury, Lucy, LuLu Bean

Elaine and Dax, Grace and Sugar, early 2004

The story of the purchase of Lucy starts way back in mid-2005 when we first moved into our current home, Prairie Corner Farm. Laura (me) had decided that it was now time for Elaine and Grace to join Pony Club since we finally had a horse property and enough room for everyone to keep a mount affordably.

Elaine was 12 years old and had been taking lessons and showing our Appaloosa, Dax, for about two years or so already and was content. Grace was almost 11 years old and had been using a friend's older quarter horse mare, Sugar, for two years and had lots of success, but we were unable to bring her with us to our new home. So Grace would need a new mount.

Elaine and Dax, Grace and Sugar, early 2005 with Egon

We started shopping early on for Grace and were having trouble finding something appropriate. The problem seemed to be that all of the horse sellers that we called were blatant liars who didn't care at all if my child got killed riding their rank animals. Week after week, I would call the listings and ask the same questions: This will be a horse for a 10 year old child who is just an advanced-beginner rider, a very petite rider. Would your sale horse be safe for her to ride? "Oh yeah, fine sure come and check him out!"

We'd arrive to find either a crazy Western horse that had no idea how to trot or canter, was used to having his head tied to his chest or a 16hh+ Thoroughbred straight off the track who still had his racing plates on. Suffice it to say, it was a long stretch weekend after weekend being disappointed at not finding a nice child-safe mount.

Garden, month #1 (May 2013)

In my previous (and first!) post I wrote about our pond and its initial maintenance after eight years of almost total neglect.

Likewise the property here has been generally neglected. If you were not a horse or had stuff in the barn, you were pretty much neglected over the past eight years. We have almost eight acres with a house a barn and shed that we purchased in June 2005 in order to bring home our horse, Dax from the boarding stable.

Immediately after our arrival here we added several good riding horses:
Clyde a trail horse for Michael, Lucy a Pony Club pony for Grace, and Dodger a trail horse for Kane. Suddenly we had four horses not just one and two girls in Pony Club.

What happened next is five years flew by ... we lost Dodger to old age and then Lucy to cancer. My older daughter brought home a lovely thoroughbred cross for eventing and then my younger daughter brought home a large pony for dressage and a smaller pony for games. I brought home a finely bred Hungarian WB gelding for training in dressage and eventing. Finally we brought home the most wonderful rock star rescue pony ever, Junior, for Kane.

For eight years when we weren't cleaning the barn, cleaning tack, stacking hay or picking up manure around the paddocks and transporting it to the manure pile we were trailering to Pony Club events, riding, schooling, trail riding, showing and just generally enjoying being riders and barn owners. It was really fun.

But, boy, the poor property. I loved gardening when we lived in Des Plaines in 2000 to 2005. It was so pretty and we had probably 100 different species of plants. Here we had weeds, and thistles and dandelions and weeds. Tall weeds, short weeds, lanky weeds and mat-forming weeds.

Something needed to change and change it did. Spring 2013 came and both of my daughters were off to college. Kane's pony Junior has passed on from very old age. Things are loosening up around here and it's time to get back into the garden.

After a week off work the first week of May here is what I accomplished in our garden by the goldfish pond.

Little shade garden under the tree

Shade garden, notice weed infested berm

Agent, supervising

Cleaned out the garden shed

Cleaned the shed, bought tons of plants for garden