Take a Virtual Tour of an Urban "Farm"
This page is still under construction.
For those of you who are blessed with large, green pastures-- or even just a LARGE dry lot -- you may find our virtual tour to be amusing.
We are in the process of assembling the photos needed to properly illustrate the way ponies are kept in our urban location.



A view from above the top pens, looking back across the house top to the hills beyond. Working down from this area, the pony pens are terraced down the slope, in five levels, with the bottom level the same as the arena and house. You can see the red tile roof of our house just over the top of the shelter in the middle.

Since this photo was taken, another small pen was added on the right, where the shadow falls on the grass. The grass is still high in this picture, which was before I turned about 60 chickens loose to help with fly control. Anyone who knows chickens will understand that it didn't take them long to dispatch anything green in their sight! What was once my little "urban pasture" up at the top is more dry lot these days. The fly problem is minimal, but so is the vegetation!



The next three photos span the bottom level, left to right, from the street-side edge and around our little arena. The right photo shows the pen on ground level, which is beyond the pipe fencing at the far end of the arena, separating it from a very small backyard. In the left photo, starting at street-side and working to the right, are the first terraced pens. You can see a red-roofed structure in the middle, which is a small stall that separates two pens on the next level up. That level also has a 12' x 10' structure which is our tack room.

In the photo on the right, you can see the red rooves of five structures. Starting from the right, the first is a stall for the pen on the right, which is on the first teraced level above the arena. This is where Lwcus lives. The far left structure in this photo is on the same level, the other stall, which is seen alone in the photo on the left. Proceeding up the hill, the next red roof is for checken and small animal cages, then the hay storage at the top. All structures in this area are built no larger than 120 square feet, as anything larger would have required building permits.



The photo on the left shows pretty much the entire arena. The arena is slightly larger than a standard "bull pen," barely large enough to work the Section A ponies under saddle, and a real stretch for our C, who is always moving on a curve. Though we have used this space to break ponies to cart, it is only adaquate for initial hitching. For serious cart work, we have to hitch the trailer and haul ponies and equipment to a local arena, where there is adaquate room to trot and maneuver... also room for a runaway, if that is in the cards for us that day!

In the right photo, I am standing in the driveway, outside of the exterior gate, looking towards the pony areas. You can see the street on the left side of the photo, curving up the hill. As you can see, the arena and pony areas are immediately adjacent to the public streets, so all landscaping goals of anything planted streetside beyond the white fence is to obscure visibility for people living and driving in the area.

!!!!! NEWS FLASH !!!!!!
We are thrilled to announce that we have purchased a farm, and that Gaslight Farm will be relocating its base of operations to Roseburg, Oregon in January 2009. We will split our lives between both locations until our little urban farm in Yorba Linda sells, at which time we will reunite as a family on our new farm. The greatest joy of all is that our son, Ben, his wife and three children will be moving up to join us. They have lived in AZ, close enough to see the grandkids on holidays, but now we will all be able to enjoy watching them grow up on a daily basis and share our ponies with them. Life is wonderful!