Snow and Spinning

I hope you had fun playing in the snow this week. There was a lot of it! I shoveled the driveway on Monday. It took me 1 1/2 hours! Thankfully Tim helped for the last 45 minutes. It was a wonderful storm. We are so grateful for the winter snow in the mountains that will provide all the water we need during the summer!

There was so much snow that I couldn't drag the wagon to the barn.
I had to shovel a path from the house to the barn!

Scout and JJ love to watch and wait while I'm doing chores.
They keep an eye out for people or other animals that might come while I'm working.

There was so much wind and snow that the snow blew in through the slats in the hay barn.
It was a surprise because we looked at a lot of types of hay barns, and this one was supposed to keep the snow off the hay!

We are always trying new things on the farm. We will change the barn a little bit in the spring to see if it does a better job protecting the hay next winter. It's best when the hay stays dry all winter.

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The little chicks that were born in September are all grown up.
They are both roosters.
We already have a rooster so these two found a new home on Wednesday.

Chuck was an unexpected surprise in the barn this morning.
He doesn't belong on this side of the barn.
He broke through the fence.

Sometimes things happen that we don't expect. Sometimes we have to do extra work that we didn't plan for. It took a while to get all the animals back into the right areas this morning. It took extra time to shovel on Monday. 

When you have extra work to do, what goes through your mind? 

I decided that I could get mad and complain, or I could pet and give the animals some attention while I was herding them back where they belonged. I didn't mind spending the extra time working when I chose to think good things about the extra work.

I didn't mind shoveling the snow on Monday, either! I learned that it's all about my attitude and my thoughts! I learned that I can change my thoughts about what I have to do! I have all the power to make my day a good day no matter what happens!

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I decided that MissE and Chuck want to spend some time together. I think Chuck was tired of hanging out with the Curly and Side Kick.
I let MissE stay out in the pasture!
She is so excited to have a new part of the pasture to explore!

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Can you see the little plants growing?
I'm excited!
My family gave me an AeroGarden for Christmas.
The herbs are starting to sprout and grow!
It won't be long before I can use them when I'm cooking!

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Wow! It's cold outside! It's a nice day to do chores, then work on indoor projects.

I thought you might like to see some spinning so Matt took a few short videos for you to look at.

This video is really short. Can you see my foot pedaling? It's making the wheel on the spinning wheel go around and around. 

The wheel is attached to the pedal by a short cord.

When my foot works the pedal, the pedal pushes the wheel around.

This is what happens to the wool when I'm spinning it into yarn.

You'll have to watch very closely to see how the yarn winds onto the bobbin.
When the bobbin is full, I take it off and start a new bobbin.

Many years at Christmas I spin on a drop spindle at the Alpine Living Nativity. It's a lot of fun to answer people's questions and let them watch me.

Here is a 'fun fact' 

Did you know Mrs. Hahn used to spin, too? She did! She wanted to learn how when she was younger so we both took a class together on spinning wool into yarn.

If you have questions about spinning, I hope you write them down and send them to me. Or if you are reading this online, please ask your question in the comment section. I'd love to answer you!

Have a great 100th Day of School, and have a great week, too!

Then and Now

It rained a lot yesterday! Then it snowed last night.

It was a mucky mess in the barnyard last night when I went out. I was so glad that I have tall rubber boots to keep my feet dry!

I think a snow covered pasture looks as pretty as a pasture full of
green grass in the middle of summer.
Winter snow and rain bring the green grass of summer.

It snowed last night so it's hard to see the big puddles behind the barn.
Can you see the wet spots?
When I stepped in them the water went up to my ankles!
Chuck doesn't mind walking the the watery, mucky mess.
Curly and Side Kick don't like it at all!

I usually feed Chuck, Curly, and Side Kick by the fence. It was so rainy and snowy last night that I fed them inside their shelter. It was hard to get Curly and Side Kick to follow me through the big puddles into the shelter. They decided that they liked dinner more than they hated water on their hooves, so they followed me in and ate. 

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On a small farm like ours we do some things the old-fashioned way, the same way they did them a long time ago. Sometimes we do chores the way bigger farms do.

Feeding the animals is done the old way on our farm. I fill each bucket with the right amount of food for each animal. Some animals get more food than others because of the job they do. If a goat or cow is pregnant we give them more food. If they give milk, they get more food. If they aren't pregnant or aren't giving milk they get less food because their body isn't working as hard.

We don't milk the cow and the goats the same way. We milk the cow with a milker, which is how big farms do it. A milker needs electricity and it is a lot of equipment.

We milk the goats by hand. I only need a bucket and a cover to milk the goats, which is how farmers used to milk cows and goats a long time ago.




The milker is hooked up to a vacuum pump. A vacuum pump is just what it sounds like. It sucks air just like a vacuum. The vacuum sucks the air out of the big, covered milk tank. Your vacuum sucks air out of a tank, too, which sucks the dirt into a tank or a bag.

The vacuum pump pulls air out of the tank which sucks the milk out of Echo's udder.




I don't need anything special to milk the goats. I need a pail and a cover for the pail to keep the dirt out if the wind blows the hay around in the barn.

This is the filter for the milker. A filter keeps the dirt out of the milk
just the same way the cover on the goat milk bucket keeps hay and dust
from blowing into the bucket.

The white filter was inside the metal tube. The milk goes through the hose,
through the filter, and into the tank.

There are advantages having the vacuum pump and milker. It's fast, and it works without me standing there. While the milker is milking Echo I have time to clean her stall and put some hay in her feeder. If I milk Echo by hand, like I milk the goats, it takes me about 45 minutes. I only need a pail and a cover.

The are also disadvantages to the milker.  It cost a lot of money. It was over $2,000 to get a milker set up like the one in the video. We need electricity to run it, so if the power is out I have to milk Echo by hand. It takes about 20 minutes to clean, and costs money for filters.

When my neighbor was young he had to milk 5 cows every morning before he headed to school. He had to milk by hand because they didn't have milking equipment for small farms 70 years ago.

We decided on our farm that it was worth it to get a milker for the cow.

We decided that it's best to milk the goats by hand. I could use a milker on the goats, but I have to clean the inflations and hoses between each goat. The inflations are the parts that attach onto their udders. It's faster to wash my hands between goats than it is for me to wash inflations and hoses between goats.

It takes about 10-12 minutes to milk each goat. That's less than 30 minutes, which is faster than milking the cow. If I used a milker it would take me 20 minutes to clean the milker between each goat, that would be about 40 minutes of cleaning, plus 6-8 minutes for the milker to milk each goat, a total of almost an hour!

A long time ago when more people had small farms, the boys and girls would often be the ones that would do the milking. Quin and Xander like to help milk when they are visiting.

It makes sense for me to use the milker for the cow, and milk the goats the 'old-fashioned way' by hand.

I hope you learn about the way things were done a long time ago, and the way things are done now.  It's nice to know a lot of different ways to do things. You will be able to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things if you know a lot of different ways to do things.

Questions!

Thank you for your questions! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas vacation. We did!

Yes, I have to work every day.
If I can't do the work, I have to find someone else who will do my work.

The animals on the farm depend on me to give them food and water every day. You depend on your parents to make sure you have food and water every day. If your parents go out of town for a few days, they make sure that someone else takes care of you.

This is a good question!
I go out twice a day to feed and water the animals.

In the morning I feed and water, AND I do all the milking. In the evening I make sure everyone has hay and their water buckets are full of water. It's important in the winter that the animals have enough food and water at night or they can't keep warm. If they don't keep warm, they can get sick.

We live in the middle of a busy city. We don't have many wild animals.
Some of our neighbors have raccoons and foxes in their yard, but our animals have been safe from the wild animals.

One of the other chores I do at night is to lock the chickens into their coop. Raccoons and foxes can't open the coop and kill the chickens at night. Sometimes chickens aren't in their coop. I have to gather them up and put them in their coop so they will be safe. Sometimes they are mad at me for locking them up!

Chickens don't know that I'm keeping them safe by locking them up while they are sleeping.

We don't have any plans to get pigs on our farm.
I would love to get pigs, but it's against the law in our town.

We have 3 cows.
Only 1 cow gives milk.

MissE is almost 5 months old.

She is so cute and friendly!
Another family loves her, too.
They already paid for her, but she will live her until Spring when the other
family has enough pasture for her to move.

Here's Chuck telling me good morning.
He's very friendly, too!
He's almost about a year old.

You remember Echo.
She is the cow that gives milk every morning.
She gives 4 gallons of milk every day!

We are kind to all our animals. We want our animals to be friendly and easy to work with. I do most of the work every day, all by myself. It's not safe for me to work alone with mean animals, so I make sure we have gentle animals on our farm.

I hope you make it a great week full of learning and growing and playing!

And I hope you remember that.....

Who did you help today?