Happy Birthday, Echo!

Welcome back!

Do you know someone with a birthday today? I do!

It's Echo's 3rd birthday today!

She had her first calf when she was a little over 2 years old. She should have her new calf close to the end of the school year. She will be 3 years old when she has her second baby. Animals grow to be adults much faster than people do.

Cows don't get cake for their birthday.

People can eat many different kinds of food.
If animals eat different kinds of food they can get sick.
Echo's birthday treat is a loaf of bread, a few stale rolls,
a cut up banana, and a few carrots.
She gets bread almost every day, so that isn't very different.
She gets banana peels almost every day, too.

Does it look like Echo liked her treat today?

Here's a picture of Echo when she was a baby.

Echo just finished eating a delicious dandelion. 

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It's not a surprise that Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog, is wrong about spring being 6 weeks away. He's wrong most of the time. 

Did you know that there is a tortoise in California that can predict the weather, too? Her name is Maxine. She came out of her burrow on February 7th at 12:06 pm. Maxine thinks winter is over.

We find about 10-12 eggs every day.
We find a duck egg almost every day. I think Quin's duck is laying the duck eggs because she's the youngest girl duck that we have and they usually start laying before the older duck does.

Spring is right around the corner according to the ducks and the chickens!

We'll have to wash these eggs off. Sometimes they are dirty when we pick them up.

One of the good things about Spring is that it's warmer outside.
One of the bad things about Spring is it's muddy in the pasture.
The chickens and the ducks don't mind. They like the puddles.

We like the chickens because they lay eggs. We also like the chickens because they clean up the little bits of grain that get spilled inside the barn, and around the barn yard. Chickens love to scratch the dirt and dig. They help spread the poo around so we don't have to clean it up in the barn yard. 

The turkey helps clean up the grain, too.
Can you see him in the back?
He would much rather share breakfast with the goats because the
grain is easier to get in the feed tub.

The chickens like to share breakfast in the feed tubs, too.

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We plant seeds when we think Spring is close, too.
I planted some herb seeds a few days ago.
I'll let show you some pictures as they grow.

I'll be planting some tomato seeds soon, too. We have special lights and a set of shelves that help us start growing seeds indoors before we can put them in the garden. It's too cold and wet to plant seeds in the garden right now. If we plant them inside then they will be ready to go in the garden about the same time you are out of school.

The goats love to play in the spring. They love to bang their heads together. I'll try to get a video so you can see them playing.

Once in a while one of the goats get hurt when they are playing rough. Clover's leg got hurt this week. She had to spend 2 days resting in a stall by herself until she was strong enough to play outside again.

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No, we don't have any fish right now.

This picture is from last year.
We had fish in the fountain during the summer.

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Stew is 4 years old.

Thank you for the questions!

I hope you have a wonderful week of learning and playing and enjoying the nice weather!

Welcome, First Graders!

Hello! I hope you are enjoying your new school year.

There is lots to learn this year, for you and for me!

I love to learn new things even when it's hard work. We learn often learn new things on the farm and when we are working at our other jobs.

Today is your first visit if you are in First Grade. Some of you may be back from last year, too! Welcome!

You are always welcome to ask questions by writing me notes, or by leaving a question in the comment section after the post. I do my best to answer them.

The name of our farm is Welcome Home Farm because we love to welcome new animals and new visitors. We hope everyone who visits is happy while they are here.

The first thing I do when I go out to the barn in the morning to start my chores is to let out the chickens.


How many chickens did you count?



I say hi to Echo, our milk cow.



Next I give the goats some vitamins. Clover loves hers! When Clover is happy her tongue sticks out! Clover is the brown goat.

I get the milker hooked up and I start milking Echo. I'll show you more about that another day.

Do you see the chicken? She comes in every morning to clean up the bits of grain that Echo drops while she's eating her breakfast.

Then I milk the goats.

This is what Annie looks like before I milk her.

This is what Annie looks like after I milk her.
She gives about 1 gallon of milk each morning.

I give the cat a little drink of goat milk.
She waits patiently under the milk stand for her treat every morning!

These are two baby goats. They have grown so much this summer! They were born in the spring.
Serenity is the goat on the left. River is the goat on the right.
They stay with Echo now so they don't drink milk from their mothers anymore.

I hope you enjoyed your first visit today. I'll introduce you to more animals next week.

Have a week full of learning and adventure!

Stumpy is Getting Trained

Welcome back!

Sometimes we send dogs to a school to be trained for work. We send children to school so they can learn, too.

Often we train the animals on the farm to do things ourselves. We don't send them away to school.

We need to train Stumpy, Echo's calf, to lead. We've been working on it this week. I'm hoping to get a video of it for you next week. I can't take a video while I'm training so I tied Stumpy to the fence. He is learning to be well behaved on a lead.

A lead is just a farm word for leash.

He's so cute!
He has a halter on, and he has a blue and green lead rope.

The lead rope is a special one that goes over his nose and around his ears. It's the best way to train him. When he gets good at leading we'll just clip a lead rope to his halter.

If he pulls really hard the rope around his nose gets really tight. He doesn't like that! He would rather follow me than pull back and have his nose squished!

River and Serenity, the goat kids, love to play with Stumpy.

It's so much fun to watch them play. I'll try to get more videos of them this week.

Did you notice the dark spots on the top of Serenity's head?

Here is a better look at River's.

Goats are usually born with horns. We don't like our goats to have horns because horns are dangerous. Imagine what would happen if your mother let you play with your friends while you were holding knives or scissors! Ouch! Someone could get badly hurt!

Every year when goat kids are born we have to 'disbud' them. That means we get rid of their horns when the horns are very, very small. They don't grow back. If they don't have horns they can't get their heads caught in a fence as easily. They can't hurt each other when they play. And they can't hurt people or children when they are playing.

It only takes a minute. They are up and playing with their friends as soon as they are done! Annie, Misty, and Clover are all fine! They were disbudded when they were about 5 days old, just like River and Serenity.

Cows are often born with horns, too. We will take care of Stumpy's horns in a few weeks. He'll be fine, just like the goat kids.

Echo is a wonderful cow.
My friend called her a 'fairy tale cow' because
she does things that most other cows won't do.
She lets the baby goats have a snack!

The turkey hen didn't want to get off her nest, even when her eggs didn't hatch.
Silly turkey!
So I put a bunch of chicken eggs under her.
We'll see if she can hatch out chicken eggs!
She started sitting on them last Saturday.
They should hatch in 21 days.

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Do you see the tape measure around Misty?
That's how we 'weigh' the goats.
But Misty and Annie are too big for the weight tape!

We have to use a regular tape measure to see how big they are around. Then we put the measurements into a special app on my phone and it tells us about how much the goat weighs.

These are the two places we measure on the goat.

These are Misty's measurements.

This is about how much Misty weighs.

These are Annie's measurements.

This is about how much Annie weighs.

An average First Grader weighs about 45 pounds.

Misty and Annie each weigh about the same as 6 First Graders!

The goat kids weigh much less. Serenity weighs about 20 pounds. River weighs about 18 pounds. They will grow for about two years and weigh about the same as their mothers. 

Goats and cows grow much faster than people do!

You might be wondering why we can't weigh a goat on a regular scale.

It's very hard for them to put all 4 hooves on a bathroom scale and stand still. We would have to get a large animal scale and they are very expensive and very big.

Most goat and sheep owners use a tape measure. It really does tell how much they weigh, which is often a surprise for people that don't live on a farm.

Someone did a lot of math and weighed a lot of animals on a big scale so they could figure out how to make a chart (or an app) that tells you how much a goat or sheep weighs.

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One of the best things about living on a farm is that children love to visit.
Here are my grandsons heading out to the barn to do the chores with Papa one morning.
Sometimes they come early in the morning, or stay overnight.
They love to help with the chores.
Their favorite chore is finding eggs.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Hay Delivery

Welcome back!

I hope you have enjoyed the nice weather we have been having. We've been getting some things done around the farm because it's so nice outside.

I thought today would be a good day to answer some of the questions you've sent me.

No, we don't have a daddy cow. A daddy cow is called a bull.
Bulls are not very nice, they are hard to handle and we don't
like to keep animals on the farm that might hurt children who visit.

We have a steer, named Remi. He's not a daddy cow because he can't have babies.

He gets very excited every time he hears the tractor!

We have a mommy cow named Echo.
She's not a mommy, yet!
Her calf is due on March 25th.
How many more days before she has a calf?

No, we don't have pigs.
We aren't allowed to have pigs in our town,
that's the law.

This is a good question!
We have flat head shovels, spades (shovels with a round end), pick axes,
manure forks, rakes, pitch forks, garden forks

We also have a tractor!

Bryon, Matt, and Tim shovel the manure and mess from the stall to the tractor.

Our tractor helps move the manure and yuck from the stalls to the mulch pile.

That is a lot of manure!
We use it on our garden and we share it with anyone who wants it for their garden.

Our tractor can unload hay from the truck.

This is a good question!
How much hay do you have?

This is what the barn looks like when it's ready for more hay.

How many bales of hay can you count?
How long do you think this hay will last?

Animals Grow, Too!

Welcome back!

Your teacher told me that you learned about bullies last Friday. I'm so glad!

People can learn to be kind to each other, but there are times when animals can't. When that happens at our farm we have to send the animal away to another farm.

We had a rooster named Charlie who got very mean. We had to send him away so he wouldn't hurt anyone any more.

Charlie was a beautiful rooster, but when he got mean we had to send him away.

I hope you all learn how to be kind to one another, and to talk to each other if you are having problems.

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Here are some photos of Remi and Echo that I took last year, and some photos of them from this year.

Here is Matt with Remi on the right side of the photo,
and Echo on the left side of the photo.
This was taken last year.

Echo wasn't supposed to grow any bigger, but she did! She is 2 years old.
If you look very closely at Echo's head you will see a white horn.
That's the spot where her horn fell off!
You got to see and hold her horn a few weeks ago.

Remi was supposed to grow, and he did! Remi is 1 1/2 years old.

This is Shorty. She isn't staying with us very long. She is a very nice cow.
She will have a calf (baby cow) near 18 October 2016.
That's when you will be in 2nd Grade.

Echo is going to have a calf, too! Her baby will be born near 25 March 2016.

Whose calf will be born first?

Shorty isn't staying with us very long because she is for sale. We hope someone will buy her and take her to a new farm, soon. We hope the new family will be kind to her!

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I took some photos of the turkeys. The baby turkeys are almost the same size as their mother!

The turkey on the left is the mother, the two on the right are her babies.
They were born 1 September 2015, right after you started First Grade.

This is Chuck, the baby turkey's father.

Look at the turkey babies and their parents.
What parts of the baby turkeys look like their mother?
What looks different from their mother?
Both turkeys had the same mother and father. Do the baby turkeys look like their father?
Do the turkey babies look like each other?
What is the same, and what is different?

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Here are two of the chicks that have grown up.
This is their favorite place to sleep at night.
They don't like to sleep with the other chickens.
We have some silly chickens on our farm!

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I thought you would like to see a picture of the cuddliest dog in the world.
We love him!

One thing I don't like about having dogs is all the hair in the house!

Do you have a pet? Does it live in the house, or in the backyard, or in the barnyard?

What do you like best about having a pet? What is your least favorite thing about having a pet?

If you could choose a pet, what pet would you choose to have?

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Next week I'll show you how we trim goat hooves. Do you trim your fingernails? We have to trim goat hooves and cat claws. Trimming fingernails is a much easier job.

New Cow Shelter

Welcome back!

Wow! That was a big wind storm we had last night! I hope everything is okay at your house and school. We didn't have any problems here because we have already prepared for winter.

This is the new cow shelter!
It faces south because during the winter the wind blows snow and cold from the north.
The door faces south so that wind and snow don't blow inside their shelter.
We're so excited that Echo has a nice place to have her baby in March.

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Last week I promised to show you how we keep the water from freezing so the animals can drink it all winter.

We use electric water heaters and electric buckets for the water.

Do you see the round piece of metal at the bottom of the bucket?
That is a heater that keeps the water warm enough that it doesn't freeze.
The animals are a little sloppy and they've dropped hay into their water.

This bucket has an electrical chord that plugs in.
The bucket has a heater inside the bottom, you can't see it
because it's enclosed inside the plastic.

This is a special hose.
The hose has a heater in it!
It keeps the water from freezing inside the hose.
That's important because if there is ice in the hose we can't use it.
If we can't use the hose then we have to carry buckets of water to fill all the barrels.
That's a lot of work! We would have to carry 14 or more buckets of water every day
to fill up all the barrels. 

Water is important for healthy animals. If they have enough clean food and water they can stay warm and healthy during the winter, even when they live in a barn with no heaters.

There is also a heater in the water that the chickens drink, but the chickens don't mind eating snow if they aren't in the pen. The cows, sheep, and goats don't like to eat snow or peck at ice to get their water so we make sure they always have water, not ice, in their barrels and buckets.

Heating water takes a lot of electricity so this year we put solar panels on
the roof of the barn. That should help keep our costs down.
We have a great place for the solar panels.
Not everyone has as nice a place for the solar panels as we do!

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Look how the chicks are growing! They are only a little
bit smaller than their mama hens.

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Many of you have asked if we have horses. No, we don't have horses. The neighbors have horses, and I thought you would like some pictures of them.

Here is a photo of a horse that lives next door to us.

Here is a photo of the other horse that lives next door to us.

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Last week someone asked your teacher for another video.
I hope this one is fun to watch. It's the cows eating their breakfast.
Who else is eating with the cows?

I know that you are going to have a fun party next week so you won't have Farm Friday at school. I'll post something anyway so if you want to see the farm while you are having Christmas Break you can show your parents.

I'll show you some of the other things I do when I'm not out working with the animals.

Have a wonderful Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate the next few weeks!