Wednesday 24 October 2012

Foot Fettling


This pair of horses live in the overflow carpark at the Chateau of Chenonceau. The overflow space is usually closed because the main carpark takes several hundred cars and there is no need for visitors to park way over in the horse paddock. However, when it is really busy and the chateau needs all nine hundred of its car parking spaces, the horses are corralled into a corner behind an electric fence for the day.

They are joined from time to time in the summertime by horses resting while their horse-trekking vacation riders are picnicking nearby. In early October they were visited by the farrier, who came to check and trim their feet. He was assisted by one of the Chenonceau security staff, someone I normally see scanning tickets at the entry.

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There is a Fungi Foray on Saturday 27 October in the Foret de Loches. Meet at the Pyramide des Chartreux (the interesection of the D760 and D9) at 2.30 pm. I am planning to be there and there will be expert mycologists to identify all the mushrooms picked at the end of the afternoon. The focus will be on fungi in general, not just foraging for edible varieties.

5 comments:

Tim said...

Thanks for the reminder about the fongalfurry...
In answer to your "how much rain" from yesterday... I have recorded three lots of 55mm in the 'go and empty it' rain guage over the six days to Monday... and later on Monday connected the much neglected weather station up to this machine... once the graphs were up on Cumulus it was showing 235mm from the 22nd September to the 22nd October. Now, the reason that I bought the plastic guage-simple is that the rocker in the remote weather station is often wind-assisted... but in this case I don't think it has been. The rain started around the 26th of September and when Joan arrived at the beginning of October, I had just thrown out 48mm... so that makes 213mm...
....
....
ie...
WET!!

I shall be rebuilding the whole weather station set up this winter... to repair the whirly [which currently has two cups, not three], to mount the temperature sensor inside a shaded cabinet so that the readings are more realistic... and putting the baffles around the underside of the pluviometre... along with a spider and mason bee excluding grid.

Susan said...

Tim: thanks for the rain info -- so it is looking increasingly likely that we've had more rain than those to the immediate north and south of us. It has to be about 3 times the monthly average.

Anonymous said...

Very docile, if they were standing for the farrier with no one holding the halter. And that bay looks a bit thin, do you suppose they get grain as well?

Susan said...

Anon: I think the horse was tied to a tree. They are in good shape although getting a little bit old and arthriticky now -- we saw one of them having a roll the other day and it was a little bit stiff getting up and down. I don't know if they are supplementary fed.

Ken Broadhurst said...

Confirming: I just added up our daily rainfall totals and it comes to 141.5 mm since October 1. The late September rain was fairly insignificant. You all in Sud-Touraine really got dumped on, evidently.

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