Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock
- Posted by Alayne Blickle
In the winter, keeping horses off saturated, rain-soaked soils and dormant or frozen pasture plants is critical if you want to maintain a healthy pasture next summer. Soggy soils or dormant plants simply cannot survive continuous grazing and trampling in winter months. Horses are particularly hard on pastures—the pounding of their hooves compacts the soil, which suffocates plant roots. In addition, when the soils are wet horse hooves act like plungers by loosening fine particles of topsoil to be washed away by rain.
A winter paddock is meant to be your horse’s outdoor living quarters. Your horses should be confined to this area during the winter and early spring, plus during the summer before your pastures become overgrazed
Create a free account with TheHorse.com to view this content.
TheHorse.com is home to thousands of free articles about horse health care. In order to access some of our exclusive free content, you must be signed into TheHorse.com.
Start your free account today!
Already have an account?
and continue reading.
Written by:
Alayne Blickle
Related Articles
Stay on top of the most recent Horse Health news with
3 Responses
re: Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock
Actually, Marnie, my climate is a cold climate (Idaho) with real winters. And I just returned from teaching classes in Fairbanks, AK. We had several articles last winter in Smart Horse Keeping about dealing with the conditions you mention and I plan to
re: Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock
I’m a little dissapointed that this article only addresses horsekeeping in moderate climates. In the future please remember that there are many horse people in cold climates where the ground is frozen solid under several feet of snow.
re: Fall in Place: Create a Winter Paddock
Helpful article. Good job!