About 3 weeks ago I posted about our Percheron Mares being pregnant. Touchy is due in April-ish and Belle is due in May-ish. I say "ish" because horse gestation varies in length and we don't know the breeding history on these two ladies. Also, babies come when they are ready and don't really care when their "due date" is.
We have an amazing barn on our property, which is honestly the primary reason we bought this property. The barn is originally a large tobacco barn (very common here in Kentucky). However, several years ago the barn was added onto. In the first part of the addition we have a large hallway with 6 standard size horse stalls. On top of the horse stalls is a large hay loft. In the second part of the addition there are several large hog pens (which we use as birth stalls for our sheep and goats), a built-in milking stanchion, and an area with three large feed troughs for horses or cattle. The part with the feed troughs opens to the large pasture and provides shade and covering for our large livestock as well. Once the rainy season is over and we get the barn cleaned out I will post pictures. It really is an awesome barn! However, we realized as birth approached and it is still quite wet and muddy in areas of our pasture that we needed to build a safe place for Touchy to have her baby. Standard size horse stalls are not big enough to accommodate birth, especially when we are talking about a draft horse!
As I've mentioned before money is tight, so we got creative to use what we had on hand to make us a birth stall. We sectioned off an area of our tobacco barn that is probably around 12'x24'. One side is against the anterior wall and another side is against the tool crib, so we only had to fence 2 sides of it. We didn't have a gate so rigged something up for now. We had a partial roll of fencing and some t-posts lying around, which made this project affordable as we didn't buy anything new for it. We used half a barrel as our waterer and then utilized another piece of the partial hay ring I posted about a few weeks ago as well. We set it up in the corner of the stall just as I did in my previous post.
Here is the almost final product. It was late when we finished and by the time we got the horse in it it was too late to snap a good pic. We rigged up some lighting though so hopefully we can get some good pics of Touchy enjoying her birthing suite later.
