HELP ! Very muddy gateway

Michellehenry

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23 January 2009
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Given the weather I am sure a lot of us are suffering with this. YO will be digging up gateway and putting down hardcore if and when it ever stops raining long enough for the ground to dry out. Until then , the mud is a good eight inches deep and it is diffilcult getting in and out of the gateway. Anyone have any ideas as to what I could put down to help alleiviate the problem until hardcore can be put down ??
 
If you are on shavings\paper try emptying your wheelbarrows into the gateway to soak up some of the moisture etc. and make a path.

Its not a good long term solution as it will make things smelly and slow to to dry in the summer, but if you are going to be digging out anyway....
 
what about shavings from your bedding? I don't know if this would work but when we went to BSJA Scope it was very wet and some people put down used shavings in the mud outside their temporary stables.
 
AS the weather and ground is so wet and muddy I empty shavings and aubiose from the stable (used of course) take out as much dung and put that on muck heap the rest to make pathways thro the mud. I get a digger in the summer to move muck heap so can scrape off the shavings then too.
 
In North Bedfordshire the mud is very Clay like, so it's horrendous now.

Try wood chippings, the sorts that landscapers end up with after they have shredded cut down trees. It's a good temporary measure (and it smells nice). Look in local yellow pages and ring a few tree cutters to ask if they've got any free or cheap loads you can have.
 
Same here. We tried digging off the worst of it to put some hardcore down at the weekend and it was impossible. And then my friend had the bright idea of running the hose on it to make it liquid, and then we could move it more easily. '@Phsah' I said (or some word like that) 'it'll never work'. Strangely enough, it did. We were able to scoop the then liquid mud down the hill, exposing a more solid base underneath, which we quickly dumped a load of hardcore and gravel on. Of course, it sounds a doddle, in reality it took about 4 hours of backbreaking slog to create the teeniest little path. What it NEEDS, I kept telling her, is some lovely burly workman with some machinery like a little bulldozer and a buckety thing to move the hardcore.
 
My horse trashed the front area of his field stable and it was several inches in mud. I got a lorry load of wood chippings delivered from a tree cutter man and that has been brilliant because even where it has got mixed in with the mud, it has remained 'firm' mud that you can stand on without sinking in still...even with all this rain! You need the chippings, basically shredded trees rather than wood bark stuff you use in gardens.
 
We've put the straw from mucking out in our worst gateway and it has worked a treat. We skip the poos out and bung them on the muck heap and the rest has gone down in the gateway. Means we can safely get in and out and the horses aren't completely plastered in mud either.
 
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