Goats Love Macaroni!

One of my goat's favorite treats is old noodles. Sometimes my friends bring me old pasta noodles that they don't want to eat. 

https://youtu.be/XE-MUhxJD9A

I love hearing River crunch the noodles. I think it's so funny!

Do you have a cat or dog that likes to eat hard noodles? Your teacher does! 

River has sore hooves all the time. We're not sure how she foundered, but she did. I give her some aspirin every day. She loves taking it. I think she knows that her hooves feel a little better after she eats it.

https://youtu.be/dytQoGtDY_g

Sometimes it's hard to give animals their medicine. Sometimes it tastes horrible! I'm so glad that River likes aspirin because she has to take some every day.

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Yes, I like having chickens!
I love watching them run around in the field. I think they are funny when they run.
I also like that they scratch up bugs and eat them all summer long.

Chickens usually eat chicken food.
We feed our chickens higher protein in the winter.
It helps them keep warmer in the cold winter months.

We feed them pellets because it doesn't go to waste.
Some chicken food looks like cornmeal. It's good for the chickens, too.
My chickens scratch and push it out of the feeder. That wastes the food, and the mice love it!
I'd rather not have too many mice in the barnyard.

About once a week I give them the same food that the cows and the goats get.
I add some calcium so that their egg shells are strong!
The white powder is calcium. I mix it in, and put it in a different feeder for them.
They think it's a special treat.

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No, we don't build forts for our pets.
We make sure they have shelter in the barn or in small shelters around the farm.

Like many farms, we have an old truck parked in the back. It doesn't work.
Sometimes the chickens and turkeys like to hide underneath it.
Maybe they think the old truck is a fort.

We're fixing up that old green truck this year. We hope that we can get it running again. It would be so much fun to drive around and use on the farm!

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If you've been keeping track on your calendar you know that Sadie is supposed to have her calf on March 28th! We're so excited! We're making sure everything is ready for her. She'll have a clean stall, and Echo will have to use another stall for a few days.

Today I brought her into the barn to start training her to stand where I milk the cows. 

Have a great week!

My Friend's Calf

It's so much fun to have friends that also have farms! We get to share the happy days and the sad times with each other. We get to help each other out when we're having trouble on the farm, too.

My friend just got a new calf.

It's different than my cows. Her calf is a Holstein.

She's black and white, like most milk cows. My cows are brown and tan, not black and white.

Her son brought her home from the dairy because the dairy didn't want her. She probably needed more care than they wanted to give her.

She was a little bit sick when she got to her new farm. Her poo is runny and doesn't look like it should.

She also has some blood showing in the whites of her eyes.

My friend thinks that it must have been a difficult birth for the cow. This calf needs a little extra care and special milk right now to help her get healthy and grow to be an adult cow. 

Dairies don't have time to take care of sick calves so they usually sell them.

She's really sweet, so my friend is happy to take on the project!

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My friend found a big animal track at her farm this week! We're trying to figure out what animal is prowling around her barn. She wants to keep her animals safe, so it's always a good idea to be able to know an animal by the footprints that it leaves.

We think it might be a wolf or a big dog because we can see claw marks. Big cats, like mountain lions, don't usually leave claw marks. She's asking some other people that know more about animal tracks than we do. 

I'll let you know when she figures it out.

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I think Gracie is trying to hatch some eggs. I see her sitting on this nest pretty often.

She's been on the nest at night, too. She's usually in the chicken pen with the other turkeys, but not the last few nights!

I hope she's sitting on turkey eggs! It would be so much fun to have baby turkeys again!

Sometimes turkeys are good at staying on their eggs and hatching them out. Sometimes they are terrible sitters. 

I'll let you know if Gracie stays on her eggs, or gets bored and wanders off.

Just do the next right thing, Gracie. Stay on your eggs.

Yay for Snow!

 

Yay for snow!!

Lots of snow!!

Some people are tired of winter, and very tired of snow. I'm not! Every flake of snow is a drop of water and we really need the water in our area.

We need water to grow crops for people, and hay for animals. If we don't have enough water in the winter, we may not be able to grow enough food during the summer.

It's rough on people and animals if there isn't enough food.

So when you see the snow covering the mountain tops, and snow in the fields you can be happy, too!

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Last week I promised to tell you about a project that I thought was going to be a BIG project, but it turned out to be less work than I thought.

These are our grape vines.
I've never taken good care of them.

My friend said that it's hard to kill grape vines. She also said we'll get more grapes if I trim them.

I was secretly hoping that there might be a 'grape vine-trimming fairy' just like there is a tooth fairy.

There isn't.

I was going to have to do the work.

I set my timer for 90 minutes and decided to get as much done as I could in that amount of time.

Grape vines all trimmed and ready for spring!

I was so surprised! I finished in 60 minutes!

That's a big pile of grape vine trimmings!

Next time I have a big job to do, one that I think will be too hard or take too much time, I think I'll jump in and give it a try. I won't worry about it, I'll just do what I can do!

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Do you remember the chicken that got it's foot stuck under the fence? I had her tucked away in a warm dog crate so she could heal.

I thought it would take 3 or 4 weeks for her to get better.

I checked on her every day. 

She's so much better! She can walk around without much trouble. Her head wound is healed, but she still needs to grow feathers in the bald spot.

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It takes 21 days for chicken eggs to hatch.
That's the same as 3 weeks.

It takes 28 days for turkey eggs to hatch.
That's the same as 4 weeks.

It takes about 28 days to hatch duck eggs, too.
When I first saw these hidden eggs, there was a duck sitting on them.

Do you see her tucked way in the back?

She didn't stay, and she wasn't sitting on the eggs the next day. I was hoping she had made herself a nest, and would hatch out some baby ducks.

I'll keep searching and hoping that the chickens, ducks, and turkeys find a nice hiding spot to sit on their eggs and hatch them out. It's always fun to have baby chicks on the farm! 

It's even more fun when the mama hatches them out and takes care of them.

Have a great week!

New Shovel!

 That's a funny title! Who gets excited about a new shovel?

Me!

It's a gold colored manure shovel! 
I thought it would be funny to use a gold shovel to pick up cow poop.

I'm so excited because it is much nicer than my other plastic manure shovels. I think this one will last a long time. You might want to get one if you have horses or cows. (Forever Fork)

I use a pitch fork for picking up frozen piles of manure.
I broke a few other plastic manure shovels when I was picking up the small pieces of manure.
This one seems just as strong, but its also a little bit flexible so it shouldn't break for a very long time.

It sounds gross to us, but the chickens love to scratch through the manure to see if there are any pieces of grain inside. That's how some of the manure turns into small pieces that I can't pick up with the metal pitchfork.

Last year I got a new wheelbarrow.
I pick up manure from the stalls and the fields everyday.
It's really helpful to have good tools to work with since they are used so often.

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What does it look like the animals are snacking on?

If you think they are snacking on old Christmas trees, you are right!

Our neighbor sells Christmas trees every year. He brings them over here for our animals to snack on. They love their very late Christmas tree treats. The pine trees are good for the animals, too. It helps keep them healthy.

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The other chickens saw the hurt chicken. They were picking on her.
She couldn't run away to someplace safe, so I put her in a dog crate where she could have
food and water. 
She's still getting better. I think she'll be fine, but it may take a few weeks.

I'll answer a few more questions next week. I'll show you a project that I worked on that I thought was so BIG. It turned out that it wasn't as big as I thought.