Creating a new horse track - discussion 2 - a recurring problem in the horse world !

This is a continuation / amendment of a thread I started a week or two back. I hope this is in keeping with permies culture / conventions?

Things have evolved a bit since I started the last thread, so the newer summary is:

We need to create long, narrow tracks to keep our horses healthy. For the sake of discussion, let's say we're gonna create two, side by side tracks, each about 20 feet wide and 1000 feet long. So on the order of an acre total.

(As a recap, these long tracks are now seen as the best way to use an acre of land for horses. Much better than anything like a 210 x 210 foot square acre)

The current thinking is that these tracks should have nothing growing on them! So here's the challenge:

I'm trying to really embrace the permie worldview. So I'm not thrilled with creating an acre of bare dirt   Seems like I'll ultimately be destroying a lot of topsoil and so on?

One reason for the no-growth advice is that Spring grass can be dangerous for horses, I know, very weird. (And in fact, two of our horses are in distress because of too much sweet Spring grass  )

If humans could discover which plants might both protect the dirt, AND not get eaten by horses, we could build a better world for humans and horses. (As an aside, my wife creates popular, super-horse-friendly horse training videos. She has thousands of students and followers. So if we can cook up a solution, it could have a BIG impact around the world!)

Any thoughts, questions, brainstorming would be awesome!

I imagine that spring grass is super sweet for the same reason that maple trees run sweet sap at the end of winter. The plants are taking sugar out of their roots and pumping it up so that it can put out a lot of new growth. Would it be an option to simply keep the horses off most of the grass until it has grown to its summer length?

Harold Skania wrote:I imagine that spring grass is super sweet for the same reason that maple trees run sweet sap at the end of winter. The plants are taking sugar out of their roots and pumping it up so that it can put out a lot of new growth. Would it be an option to simply keep the horses off most of the grass until it has grown to its summer length?

That's what we've been doing, but the downside is that they move less   For horses and humans "motion is lotion".

So ideally, we're trying to find a year-round way to keep them on their tracks.

Most dirt tracks that I have seen do not have anything growing so that the track can be maintained with a tractor.

These are raked daily to remove poop and debris that might blow onto the track.

If you wanted to plant grass the native grass called buffalograss would be good. Where I live it stays very short so would not be effected by the use of a tractor.  Whether it can have staying power due to horse running on it is questionable.

What about clover? How is that for horses?
Or having dirt tracks, but then strips or islands of different herbs (people call them weeds!) between the tracks; nettles, cleavers, Robert's geranium (Geranium robertianum), plantain, dandelion, creeping buttercup etc etc.? My horse enjoys eating cleavers and dandelion and nibbles at the other mentioned species. Variety is key, and the horses could use the plants as their nature apothecary. So moving on the dirt tracks and nibbling from the islands?

Anne Miller wrote:Most dirt tracks that I have seen do not have anything growing so that the track can be maintained with a tractor.

These are raked daily to remove poop and debris that might blow onto the track.

If you wanted to plant grass the native grass called buffalograss would be good. Where I live it stays very short so would not be effected by the use of a tractor.  Whether it can have staying power due to horse running on it is questionable.

Agreed, most of the tracks I've seen are bare, i.e. no plants.

I was thinking that it might be more "permie-compatible" if there were plants to help fix / maintain the soil. But I'm gathering from your response, that you wouldn't be too worried about that?

Thanks!

Nina Surya wrote:What about clover? How is that for horses?
Or having dirt tracks, but then strips or islands of different herbs (people call them weeds!) between the tracks; nettles, cleavers, Robert's geranium (Geranium robertianum), plantain, dandelion, creeping buttercup etc etc.? My horse enjoys eating cleavers and dandelion and nibbles at the other mentioned species. Variety is key, and the horses could use the plants as their nature apothecary. So moving on the dirt tracks and nibbling from the islands?

That's a cool idea! My description of the tracks was a bit simplified. We do include what we call "turn-outs", i.e. places along the track that are wider. Those might be good places for the islands of herbs you mentioned.

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