Your Easter card from Eggsy Pony

otherwise known as Eggsy Pony & Friends newsletter

Happy Easter everyone

with love

from

Eggsy Pony & Friends xx

But, maybe that should read Happy Everything because some will be celebrating Passover and later this month others will be celebrating Vaisakhi, so:

Happy Everything

with love

from

Eggsy Pony & Friends xx

And here we are in April, we’re past the Spring equinox, the clocks have changed and we have light evenings again. Horse keeping is easier with more light, you don’t feel like you are racing the darkness to get everything done, and there’s more light to come. By the end of the month, depending on where you live, the days lengthen by about 2 hours. Marvelous!

Things are definitely beginning to feel Spring like now, the dawn chorus is getting louder, we’ve waved goodbye to our winter visitors, the Fieldfare, swans and geese, who have returned to cooler climes. Swallows and House Martins will be arriving soon. Nettles are growing again along the fence lines, cut them and leave them to wilt they make a yummy vitamin packed treat for equines. Violets have bloomed and gone again and when the sun shines bumblebees are everywhere. We’ve already had to rescue one from the water bucket, the nicest of creatures, bumblebees are always appreciative of the rescue and will happily sit on your hand drying their fuzzy bodies.

We’ve yet to see our first butterflies, but, it’s still rather cold at night and we’re getting a few frosty starts to the day, which is only to be expected in April. What wasn’t expected was the monsoon type rain we had the other day. Everything had been drying up nicely after a very wet March had left us with standing water in the fields and ankle deep puddles on the tracks leading to the fields. Then down came the rain, it didn’t last that long but my goodness it was heavy, back to “lakes” in the paddocks and wading through puddles to get feed down to the horses. Hoping that next week’s forecast rain is going to be more of the gentle April shower type!

Of course the big news for horses is that the Spring grass is growing, humans might be bamboozled into thinking the grass isn’t really growing because horses have a habit of gobbling it up as fast as it grows. We have to be careful now as the new grass is very sweet and can cause health issues such as laminitis and grass colic.

Old friend Hansel the goose is also enjoying some Spring grass, geese are grazing birds. We mentioned in an earlier newsletter that it would be interesting to see if Hansel exhibited any of the Spring aggression that male geese are so infamous for. The answer is no he hasn’t, without female companionship he has been as nice as pie. Well, as nice as a goose who doesn’t really like people very much can be.

On that note we’ll say goodbye, have a wonderful rest of the month and we’ll write again in May when the big event will be Eggsy Pony’s birthday. Happy month of April.

Love from

Eggsy Pony & Friends xx