I have no experience with sheep, so I can't say if gravel would be a problem, but if you decide against using gravel, would a few bales of wood shavings help? They would soak up some of the extra moisture and provide some traction.

Sorry, I would not recommend pea gravel. You will not get much benefit from a load of pea gravel. The stones will just disappear into the muck. I have lost gravel trainloads of rock into my barnyards!!

We have learned since then, went to a different process. We scraped the yard off (dirt yard), laid out an area, then laid down a piece of geotextile fabric. We covered the fabric with crushed limestone. These were smaller stones, 1/2" sized. We put a good layer over that fabric and ran a power tamper over it to pack the stone firmly.

The fabric prevents stone mixing and disappearing. Rough edges of stone pack down pretty solid with the tamper, make a hard base to stand on. Stays pretty solid with hard use, we have horses on ours.

Pea stone is round, slippery in deep footing. Can easily get caught in sheep hoof with mud footing. It does sound so good, just does not work well in my observations, experiences.

We plan to scrape our paddocks every couple years. You will develop a layer of decaying vegatation from feeding hay outside, horse poop, over that time. Really turns mucky when wet. We scrape that muck off down to firm dirt, pile muck up to dry, then reuse later elsewhere.

We rent a skidsteer/Bobcat with a scoop/bucket to scrape with. Renting is not really expensive. You probably don't need to have it year round, so you don't need to buy one. After scraping, the loader helps you move the crushed stone too!! Renting machinery is a great way to do a top-notch job, at a low cost. Save your bodies!! Easy to drive or use, for either gender driver.

goodhors
did I understand you righ? Are you going to do this in your stalls. We are looking to do something to cut down on dust and mud in our horse barn. I was thinking of something like this. There is an area right out side of water trough that has been mixed with some of what looks like limestone sand and it is wonderful when wet...a few months ago we were begging for rain now I want it to stop...

My first post was for Carol's outside barnyard. Laying out an area to cover with crushed limestone, so sheep can get up out of mud, lay down in a dry area. She will have to clean stone area off eventually. After use by sheep, the poop and hay will make some wet areas if left on the stone. Leave mess longer and stone will be covered with start of barnyard mud. Any kind of vegetation, will turn to dirt eventually. Mix in water and dirt, you get muck. That is why the shavings, sawdust, straw over mud, doesn't work for very long. Just starts breaking down, back to organic matter. Muck part is just one nasty step back to dirt.

Scraping the whole barnyard, or paddock area, will allow her to lay the fabric evenly, get solid base under rocks. However she can lay the geotextile fabric on mud, fill rock over it, tamp it down. I do not consider driving a tractor, the Bobcat, over stone to be tamping WELL. You really need to use a power tamper, which we also rent. It provides a better, even pressure, does not dig holes in piled stone like a turning tire might.

For our horse box stalls, we laid down a 12" tamped base of gravel. I think they call it 'Road mix' at least here locally. Coarse rounded rocks with large and small rocks mixed with dirt/sand. This is for good drainage at the bottom. Tamped down. Then there was a layer of coarse sand only, about 6" deep when finished tamping. Leveled and tamped. Then a layer of the crushed limestone, larger sized. Inch to inch and a half sized rocks. About 6" deep when done tamping. Tamped level and covered with rubber mats.
The limestone gets hard, but drains well with larger stones draining into sand and gravel layers. Limestone helps prevent any smelly stalls. With tamping stone hard, there is no shifting under the mats with horse moving around.

Yes it is kind of a lot of work. However, we never have a smelly barn, floors stay flat, even, with horses barned part of every day. Mats are 3/4" thick, stay in place well.

Tie stalls have the same base under them, but we put board floors over the stone instead of mats. They also drain well, used part of every day. Both mats and boards are easy to clean up well on our daily basis.

I just hate dirt floors. They are never really clean, always a bit wet or smelly even with lime sprinkled about. Cement is do-able, just a very hard surface for standing on very long. No drainage with cement, even if you should pad it with mats. Boards are not too bad. Those tie stall horses have shoes though, so boards wear and must be replaced about every 8-10 years. I would not have boards in box stalls, where mares and foals are, too slippery for silly babies bouncing around. We bed with sawdust, not slippery at all on mats or boards with shod horse. I only have straw for the first week after foaling, then back to sawdust. Foals often will breath in sawdust when born or get infected navel because it is more sticky than straw. Neither is good for the foal.

Put your stall base dirt in while building if possible. You can drive the machines easier. If your barn is built, you probably will need to dig by hand to get down that deep. Check with a rental place, they are using a lot of those little machines now in suburban yards. Maybe one with a little bucket and arm, could dig in a built barn. We laughed at them, but my friend rented one, dug herself a LOVELY fish pond. The whole machine was about golf cart sized! Had a long arm to reach deep with. Rental place delivered it, gave her a driving lesson, she had a blast! Had to fight her husband off, he wanted to drive it too! I NEVER get to drive the Bobcat, husband loves to play with it. We rented a little Back-hoe with a arm behind. Trenched and laid tile in the round-pen to remove surface water. It dug about 180' of trench and filled it back in, in very short order. The time user was having to level the trench bottoms by hand. Bucket had frost teeth, so trench was too rough for tile until smoothed out. Machine fit in the 60' pen well, moves dirt, dug nice little trenches. our own backhoe was just too huge. This is a permanent round pen. Solid posts and fence walls so you don't want to bash them with the big machine. The rental guy came back and picked it up when we called him. I do hose the machines off when finished, saves extra cost of cleaning them. Rental guys love that!

Hope that is the correct information, on stuff you wanted to know. Ask again if I answered the wrong question. Ha Ha, I do that sometimes.

My question wasn't about inside the barn, it's about the barnyard/corral area outside. It's a low spot that drains the upper pasture and gets runoff from the barn roof, and the topsoil has turned into pure muck, pocked with puddles. The area is about 70 feet by 100 feet, so I don't see how I could put fabric and stonedust down and tamp the whole thing without spending a lot of money.

I tried filling the area with wood shavings one year. It worked great when the material was dry, but after a rain it became a deep peaty bog that offered absolutely no support when you stepped on it. Your leg would disappear into the boggy layer of wet shavings until it hit the firmer layer of mud underneath. Learned my lesson, I dug the shavings out.

I don't feed hay there, because the hay mixed with mud made an even stickier mess. And there's not even much manure, the animals mostly just walk through the corral on the way to pastures.

Maybe I could create a deep swale in the middle, and fill it with river rocks.

Where I live we get between 60 80 inches of rain, I have road base in my horse and goat runs it keeps them dry. In my stalls I have rubber mats over road base. It has worked well for me.

Acorn 60-80 inches of rain! Oh my gosh I would not know what to do. I am fretting over a few inches....It is black clay and boy does it get sticky...

Carol, if you can manage to rent a Bobcat and clear out the old, messy muck, dig a ditch/swale to some sort of lower area, and then bring in and spread either crusher run or coarse sand, it would be ideal. However, this being the real world, if you can clear out a drainage ditch/swale as far from the barn as possible, so that as much wet as posible goes elsewhere and doesn't GET to the barn, and then put down coarse gravel in the area closest to the barn, it should improve things. I don't think pea gravel would work, I think you want either crusher run, with screenings and different sized gravel, all mixed together, or the coarser gravel, from half inch to one and a half inch, OR coarse sand or the screenings. Any of these would allow for drainage and a more solid footing. I don't think the river rock would be a really good idea, unless it was a deep ditch rather than a swale, with the larger rock as a base, topped with smaller gravel. I would worry about horses slipping on the larger rock, or the sheep catching a hoof in a gap.

However, it WILL take more of whatever than you would think - my driveway is crusher run over red clay - it took a LOT of loads of crusher run in 2-3 stages over the course of the year of construction to build a solid drive- and I have added several loads on several occasions in the 5 years since, as the softer spots have "eaten" the gravel and the clay has come to the top. Granted, this is a single car, making a few trips a day (if that, some days), but it's about the same thing - traffic, wet, and a sub-surface that needs to drain.

When my brother built his run-in shed, he put multiple loads of sand in the shed and outside. A small, adjoining paddock got crusher run and screenings - it has more of a slope and needed better drainage. It's all held up pretty well - 3 years later, he needs to add more sand in the low-lying areas outside - as some sand has gone away in the wheelbarrow as he has cleaned up the manure from inside and out, and the horses have stood around and ground it all together, so there are now puddles. He was able to put the shed at the high point of the paddocks, though, so the drainage is away from the shed and not toward it. It sounds as though your barn isn't at a high point, so you need to make it as 'high' as you can.

Carol - Our barnyard is a muddy mess every fall until it freezes, but worse this year with too much rain and no freezing. Our neighbor does hauling, bobcat work, landscaping, etc. He gave us an estimate for digging out the area around our barn with an outward slope (to drain water away from the barn), filling with large stone (can't remember the size number) and laying crushed limestone on top. Said he did it for a gal with horses and it's holding up great. Our neighbor did something similar and said it's made a big difference around his barn.

The cost has been what's kept us from going ahead with the project, but after this winter (monsoon season) we're going to find the money!

I should look into crushed limestone over large stone.

Is it really essential to dig out all of the existing mud before putting down stone? We already had this area excavated once, to create the swale and move runoff away from the barn. If we have to scrape off all the mud, we'll need to go a foot deeper.

Well, I'm NOT a soils engineer or earthmover, so I may be wrong, but I think that adding anything to the soft, mushed up dirt/mud (which probably includes a certain amount of manure, even if the animals only pass through the area) will only cause the additions to sink in and get mixed together with the dirt, effectively disappearing. If that's what you have to do, then I would go with the largest size gravel - up to 2 inches - that you can, since that will "disappear" the least. I don't know that you HAVE to take all of it, but if you can take away the 'soupiest' top of the stuff, that might be OK. If you know a friendly local contractor/earthmover, then ask if he could come and advise you on what would be the best thing to do; he has the expertise and the local knowledge that I don't.

I DO think that digging a ditch/swale as far from the barn as you can, and draining away from the barn, even to a dry-well, would help. It sounds, from what I understand of what you have said, that that won't be easy.... but dealing with the present situation isn't easy either. There's NO guarantee that this fall/early winter will never happen again....

Carol - I think my neighbor said he wanted to dig out from the cement pad at the end of the barn about twelve feet from a depth of six inches sloping to a depth of twelve inches. The only problem is that the mud by the cement pad is knee deep on the nine month old calves, so maybe he'll dig it out and backfill with some of the clay before he lays the stone. Dibbit is correct. Stone - even the very large stone - will get "swallowed" by the existing mud.

Last year we watched the new owner of a piece of property by a creek put in a drive through the flood area. Yes, he built it up a few feet, but we knew he'd have trouble because he didn't put down big rock first - just dirt then gravel on top. He's messed with it several times since because it doesn't drain like it would have with big rock as a base...