#5 Keep Your Tack Room Clean

Keeping your tack room clean or your space in the tack room clean is necessary to keep everybody happy.  It is respectful to keep your things in order, especially if you are sharing the space with other boarders.  Cleaning up hay and feed will also help keep the mice population down. 

I live in Amarillo, Texas and believe it or not the wind out here is worse than anywhere.  This makes it very difficult to do a lot of things, including keeping things clean.  There are several different ways to protect your tack and supplies but sometimes resistance is futile.  It also doesn't seem to matter how many barn cats you have, none of them seem to be mousers, and you will soon find that the mice like to visit your feed can on a regular basis and sleep in your saddle pads.  The more you can keep your tack room free of scattered feed and keep your feed covered, the better you will be able to control the mice issues. 

Dust is a major issue out here and I always have some towels handy to wipe down my tack before I ride.  The only real way to keep tack clean is to keep it in bags, but then your bags get covered in dust as well.  So, what's a person to do?  I guess its just part of living in the Texas Panhandle.

Sharing a tack or feed storage area can be difficult.  At barns where I didn't have my tack room, I would make sure my horse's name was on everything.  There is nothing more annoying than pulling up to the barn and finding your grooming supplies in somebody else's area or worse - on somebody else's horse.  If you are able to keep all of your stuff corraled, then you will never lose anything and your stuff will always be in your space.