Last year I figured out that on our 3 acres of property, that I actually had a good trail area to ride my horse Legend.  It has been a dream of mine to just leave my house and be able to ride for miles....but I live in California and I work in town.  I could accomplish that in two ways.  Either I could move out of state and find lots of places where you can just ride, (those of you who can are so very lucky).  Or my hubby and I could quit our jobs, move about an hour to an hour and a half out of town and buy my dream home.  We would just have to become some type of work from home tech people except out in the boonies you can't get wifi so I am unsure how this would work.  I have looked and looked and looked.  Well my third option would become a multi millionaire and I could afford something close to town with property that backs up to more property.  

I trail ride.  It's my thing.  Lots of horse people rope or barrel race, jump or do dressage.  I trail ride.  Before you say oh, Legend is only a trail horse, I would love to take you for a trail ride.  Legend is a trained trail horse.  He knows how to get me up and down hills, over logs, can side pass benches and large rocks.  He can ride by dogs, bikes, cars, boats etc.  It's his job to see things on a regular basis and not freak out.  He also has to get me up and down hills with both of us under his 4 feet.  It's harder than you think.  My back yard happens to be a redwood forest full of hills, downed trees and a lot of different terrain to navigate.  It's not miles in fact it's just a few acres but in those acres we can get a lot of practice in.  In order to do that I had to clear a lot of brush and blackberries.  If you have never lived with blackberry bushes, you are somewhat of a blessed person.  Blackberries are some of my favorite things but the bushes are horrendous.  You can't kill them.  They have gnarly thorns and they are invasive.  If you are not actively trying to kill them, they are actively taking over your property.

Enter the goats.  I never understood why people would own goats.  They seemed like something not worth feeding until I came into the realization that either I could be down in the forest with a weed eater for weeks or I could get a couple goats and see what they could do.  I had a friend with two male goats.  He kindly gave them to me.  One was not fixed.  If you have smelled a unfixed male goat before it is not pleasant.  They actually pee on their face in order to attract female goats.  It's totally disgusting actually.   They also only have one thing on their mind.  We named that goat Spade and Spade gave us a goat education. For future notice, if you get a unfixed male, you can get them fixed at a older age.  It takes about 5 minutes and a friend with a bander.  We lived with Spade several months not fixed.  That was probably the biggest mistake I made.  There are many other funny goat stories while we went through the learning curve of owning them that sometime I will have to take from my face book page and add to the blog.  I ended up falling in.love with the boys and now have Pinterest pages dedicated to the care and how to make life fun for goats.

When they aren't down in the forest for me, (which I have to say they did an amazing job.  They created a ton of trails for me.  I highly recommend getting goats if you are looking to do things like this), they now live by my arena which also has had a black berry infestation issue.  What started out as here, let's make a small area has now turned into how can we make their area bigger and their life better.

I am super cheap.  I hate spending money on something that I can make or repurpose.  If you know anything about fencing, it's really expensive.  You will spend thousands.  With goats, they are escape artists and I have one other eek factor.....I own five dogs, three are German Shepherds and they would love to get in with the goats.  The fence has to be strong enough to keep both of them on their respective sides.  This is where pallet fencing comes in.  I did a bunch of researching and found lots of people who use pallets for fencing.  I found a place locally that has really nice pallets and I can get as many as I want on a regular basis.  There is only one thing about pallet fencing that I don't like.  I hate the way they look.  They look like pallet fencing.  

We set up one area as a trial run to see if it would work.  It indeed did work.  We used metal t posts and pallets.  You put a t post into the ground every two pallets you secure together.  On the first video it shows you quickly how the fence is screwed together.  There are a ton of videos out there about how to do this and it's really simple.  I will say the first fence we did 1 t post every three pallets.  That would have worked ok for the goats but the dogs jump and are harder on the fence.  We did have a dog break through because of it.  This time we changed that.  

So here is some pics and video of phase one of the goat fencing project.  This is where most people would stop.  It is in fact a functioning pallet fence with a pallet gate.  Being that I love to repurpose things, I cannot stop there being that I do not like the look of it and I live in a beautiful area and I want to see if I can in fact create fencing from pallets that is not only cheap and painless, but is also attractive.  Making this fence attractive takes the "fast" part out of it.  This is probably why most don't go further because it is completely functional.  I just am not ok with just functional.  I would be if you couldn't see it but it's in the front of my property so now we are going to attempt to put paint on a pig so to speak and see if we can't actually make this fence functional and beautiful.  

So here is the video of the functional part.  You also get to meet Spade and Caramel who are worth watching the video just for them.  I explain in the video what I am going to add.  I am going to basically trim out the fence to get rid of the pallet look and hopefully bring it to really cool fence look.  I believe I will probably stain the fence as well once it is finished again for the look of it.

I hope you enjoy the video and the project.  Oh, and hubby and I bought ourselves a John Deere small tractor for our 25th anniversary and my hubby today was saying it's the best present we have ever bought each other.  We love the tractor and it helped us out today with moving pallets, trees and anything else we could use it for.

Watch later this week for phase 2!    

​More goat stories! The boys have been home for a few days after eating down blackberries in mckinleyville for many months. One major upside is Spade no longer has his jewels and man, those suckers should have gone a long time ago. If you haven’t had goats, intact male goats literally pee all over their face and beard to attract females. Their pee smells like...well really bad goat. There is a reason why they say horny as a billy goat because it’s all they think about 24/7 so most of your interactions involve some sort of goat pee. Him with no balls actually pees for normal reasons and no longer on his face. This is a massive improvement for everyone else.
Today I decided to put them in the front yard. We are home so I can watch my two old dogs. I’m thinking it should be pretty peaceful and there’s stuff I don’t want to mow. Now I own one German Shepherd that has a ridiculously high prey drive, (read this as if it moves and breathes, she’s on it. Balls she could care less but animals are different). She has been going nuts completely obsessed with the goats. They’ve been in the trailer and it’s almost made her insane. We put her and our other female in the kennel. They’ve never gotten out or been able to get out. We’ve put them in there for 8 years now. I’ve never had an issue. She sees we took the goats out and probably 20 minutes later Marty jumps up and runs out. Os has managed to get out of the kennel and the goats are tied in the yard so they are sitting ducks basically. Somehow her and the other female pulled the door on the kennel open enough to squeeze all 90 plus pounds of her out. She didn’t bite them at all but she was wanting to herd them. Both Marty Pronovost and I are yelling at the dogs and trying to decide how to fix this. The dogs don’t have collars on so we grab goats and our daughter comes out. Now we have a pit bull in our house that can’t be with the other females either. Yes, we should call our house a zoo. Alona goes to put her dog in the house and Marty stops her before disaster number two which would be a pit bull German Shepherd dog fight. Those we have seen and they are ugly. She finally gets both dogs back to the kennel of which now has several bike locks on it and a few other things to make sure they can’t escape. No animal died today.
Meanwhile, Spade has decided that the front deck is pretty cool and I’m fairly sure he would like to be with us on the couch. Hunter is trying to decide if Spade should be allowed on the deck or not. He’s old though so doing anything about anything is a lot of work. Oh, and Carmel is in the back there laying in the sun eating grain. Goats are back home!