today's lesson is how to clean stalls I know it's not rocket science but maybe some of things I'll show you today and might help some of y'all up and if so great everyone has a different situation I'm just going to work with the situation that I have the stalls that I have are just mildly dirty because I did clean them this morning and did not have courses in them all day so this will go rather quickly um when you point a clean stall I usually work with a just a regular pick and make sure it has all its tines or it could be very frustrating and I've got a muck bucket in a little Rolly cart and now some people with bigger barns might have the manure spreaders or something they might drive a tractor through it's still helpful to have at least too much bucket that you can pick up and throw in the back of the manure spreader as you go Plus these are things that you can easily put inside the stall if a horse is in there while you clean the stall without running into problems so I'm going to clean a few different stalls and show you what I do our stalls number one do we leveled our stalls and put rubber mats in all of them and the rubber mats are great because means that you can use fewer shavings and also keeps the minuta near the urine is less of a problem when your rubber mats and you also don't get the big holes if you have horses that paw so I highly recommend if you don't already have rubber mats to level you'll your stalls up then you can put a layer of road bass or something that you can tamp down really nicely and then put on your rubber floor mats and you'll have really nice tools I'll last you for years so this stall again not very dirty but I only do that clean in the morning turn my horses out and then when I bring them in I have clean stalls now this stall doesn't have a whole lot of shavings but one thing you'll see you know we do have an Internet and I'll take some of the shavings to soak up the urine so that I can fit in here now for horses the stall I would just once around them being careful not to pop them in the face back on the stick I don't use a whole lot of bedding in most of my stalls because I know what sources lay down which ones don't and they're not in for very long but for one our horses I do put a lot more in and we'll talk about the reason why um just realize the more bedding stall it does keep it clean cleaner but you also have a lot more waste when you clean the stall and throw it away so depends if you have a big poop pile or if you're throwing it away in a dumpster how many shavings you really want to deal with and I just use regular wood shavings nice pine shavings I'm not a big fan of the newspaper so pine shavings are my preference now whenever I have urine but install after I clean it I take a powder I use sweet pdz okay so I usually use the powder form a sweet PVC it comes in granules but I don't like anything that could be edible for horses that they might accidentally ingest so I just after I'd clean this scuse me clean the urine spots I spray powder and what this does is it neutralize do be home yeah so that you don't have a stinky bar now I need a little bit more and if it really still wet um I might just leave it exposed for the day to dry before covering it with shavings otherwise I'm just going to have a wet spot of shavings sitting on top of them stop I just leave it like that for it to dry and then cover it with some shavings and we're good to go so that's all is actually good for right now for that particular horse now some reasons that you might want to have a lot of shavings in a stall our horses The Hideout a lot making it sores hock stores especially if they're laying down a lot in a stove it doesn't have a bedding and usually those stores are on their back pocket I will show you when we get some honey on the outside of each one of they're hot that's usually from laying on the installment that a lot of heavy but like I said my horses are not in for a long long time so I go easy on the bedding I can go rather quickly when I don't have I'll just play very dirty stalls now do you try to shake up clean shavings so I have as little waste as possible and max I mentioned shavings are expensive so I hate to have to throw away a lot of my shaders this one again is going to need the sweet pdz whenever I'm in my stalls cleaning I always check their waters as well I don't have automatic waterers I just have water buckets and mine are actually heated water buckets it's winter time here but I'll look at them and I usually clean them once a week I just emptied out and I'll take a paper towels or food clean towels and I like that otherwise they'd start smelling like a fish tank and the horses won't drink out it well snap they're clean and I'm in here cleaning if I see hay in the water I'll just scoop the hay out because that'll help keep the water cleaner longer but like I said I usually come once a week and that's always good I'm just gonna leave that horse isn't gonna come back in tonight huh one thing also when you're cleaning in the morning if you have a regular schedule which I'm sure you do um you'll get to know your horses and you know that's it time is with my horse pooping normally he had a lot of horses on flip you know don't have a good four or five tips tonight to pay all the time you bring them in and what time you get up to do chores my kevie life could be more depending on how long you're in but if you come in and see home you know this horse usually has four or five picks and I only see one well that's indication that maybe there's something gone maybe there's a tummy ache maybe you should watch them horse neighs but not open without it being like a little colic or something so keep your eye on the poops and urine is really important and also sing are they drinking enough especially when you have wild changes in weather we're one dates you know zero degrees and then two days later you're back up into the 50s that could be hard on your system and you get a lot of kollek's when the weather's fluctuating a lot um when we have that I always try to bring all my horses in at night to level out the difference is in cold so that it's not so dramatic on them um first I clean those as well and if there's if there's snow pack and the roots are frozen and you might have to take a shovel instead of a thick so you can actually get the ice the frozen poop out same thing if you're if the urine freezes if you don't have enough shavings um you might have to dig to scrape out the frozen urine in the winter time on each individual stall and I unplugged them as much as possible because they're very expensive to run and you also don't want to run them when they're empty because it'll probably burn out your bucket now what I do I'm fortunate enough in my setup that I have a dumpster outside my barn so I'm able to haul away everything I clean out of the stalls so I'm very lucky that way I know added people up similar setups even some of the larger farms might have like a trailer bed set up that they dump the poo in and then they haul it away so I get one more stop this is the one that has more okay yeah when you bed your stalls and you're putting down shavings and you might want to think about whether they're geldings or mayor's because um the gallery is obviously they're going to urinate more in the middle install and the mayor's are going to urinate more on the outside so that'll help you decide how you want to throw your shavings I don't put a whole gob in the middle because I don't want a horse like the geldings to urinate on a big old pile and I have to throw it all away the next day so I might go just a little bit thinner where I know they're going to urinate enough to soak it up but not so much that I have to throw away such huge amounts of shavings and they also try to go up on the edges because then as I clean each day after I take out the mess I can scrape some more clean shavings from the sides and I don't have to bring back the shavings in quite so this run is starting to thaw you can see we got a lot of snow and so I will scrape up everything I can to keep it clean now when you have a lot of snow mixed in you can see this is going to break the times if I try to use that so I'll show you a little trick pretty mucky here sometimes you have to wait for just everything the thaw before you can actually clean it up so we've got a little bit of a melted a good muck beats are essential for this I'm going to try two different angles see if I can get this obviously there's ice sometimes you can use you don't have a shovel with you you can use your heel and see if you can break it loose but that's just too solid so I just go scrape off the top when I can I always took my outside buckets they're heated as well to make sure they're full and not frozen over I check a morning and night we also check for dead animals because surprisingly we've had birds and other animals that appear every now and then inside a water tank and when that happens we have to dump the whole thing out clean it out and refill it because you don't want any of that stuff get in your horses system so um oops I've got one more over here I mean when you scrape the heavier manure in snow try not to skip up too much now because it'll make your bucket really heavy and you can always use your butt to help out as well okay as a part of cleaning as well um after I clean you know when you clean your stalls normally your I always get pretty dirty uh either from feet and manure and also when you leave your horses in and out their feet India in your own ways and I try to sweep as often as possible daily is best and by keeping your barn swept you'll also reduce rodents because they won't have bedding or feed to come in and they also make sure that I don't leave anything where animals birds are going to fly in start eating as well and making messes in the barn so yep so that's really it for style cleaning I'm sure Betty has their own way but if this helped anyone out that's great and doesn't take a whole lot of effort but it is a great way to keep an eye on the well-being of your horses because you you're seeing their bathroom habits their drinking habits their eating habits make sure they're eating and you know if you have it clean well bet is stall for your horse every night their feet will be better and they'll be healthier overall so that's it for cleaning stalls and happy riding