As we’ve said numerous times in numerous posts, the Previous Owners took little care of the property. Another example of this is the state of our perimeter fences. When we were considering the purchase, there were horses grazing the land. We were told by the POs that they had made a deal with a neighbor to allow the horses to graze in exchange for said neighbor fixing the perimeter fences. (This neighbor should not be in any way confused with our Nearest or Next-Nearest Neighbors.) Well, said neighbor didn’t make good on his end of the deal, as once we entered escrow no further work was completed, and we had large sections of fencing with just a single wire strung between the posts and in one case, an old garden hose left to act as means to keep the horses away from the north pastures and house yard.
A bit about horses on the property and why they’re not a good thing–besides being messy at the backend and thus giant fly magnets, they weren’t managed or overseen in any way. Coupled with the sorry state of our fences, this meant they often got into areas they shouldn’t–specifically, the house yard. Leaving steaming piles of horse crap outside my office windows and a propensity for eating the ornamental plants made them very unwelcome. The horses were actually gaining access to our land via openings in fences between our land and that of our Nearest Neighbor, and then to his property via an opening in a fence between his land and that of our Next-Nearest Neighbor. A couple of weeks after we took possession of the house, we made first contact with our Nearest Neighbor as we thought the horses belonged to him. He kindly gave us the rundown of the situation, agreed they were more nuisance than they were worth, and closed off all the access points to keep them off all three properties.
We then had a few conflicting reports to mull over. The owner of said horses rode by one day and said the POs had allowed him to graze horses often on the land and the POs made it sound like a regular thing. Our Nearest Neighbor, however, said that was “a line of crap,” and it hadn’t happened before last year, as the horses had been grazing on his property and that of our Next Nearest Neighbor. The Mowing Man, who’s been mowing various properties on this partition for fifty years, also told us he’d never known the POs to have horses on the property, and the last time he’d seen horses up here was when the Doc owned Purgatory and was breeding Morgans and, apparently, Tennessee Walkers. So we concluded that the POs weren’t interested in spending the cash to have the land mowed as usual. (Sidenote: more on why mowing is important will follow in a separate post.) The horses-for-fencing deal was thus one from which we ended up not seeing any benefit.
Unfortunately the horses had already overgrazed and we were left with a lot of dusty earth interspersed with a lot of desiccated star thistles. Then in November the rains came, and now instead of tall grass, we have tall weeds–more on that and what it means in the next post.