Origin:Our Daily Schedule Blog Post

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves, let’s take you on a tour of The Vollick Holler and tell you about our daily chores.

On weekdays, Adam wakes up around 5am to go for a bike ride or practice yoga. I sleep in a little later than he does and wake up at 6am. This gives us both a minute to ourselves before we wake Velvet, our 3 year old daughter, up at 6:30am. We used to let Velvet sleep in longer, but she was refusing to nap at Nature School, so we started waking her up earlier. It’s a schedule that works great for us and Miss Judy, her Nature School guide who we love!

After we fix ourselves a cup of coffee (Adam’s really into this mushroom coffee substitute right now), I head out to the barn to throw the horses some hay.

6:30 am: Velvet wakes up. One of us will tend to her needs and the other will go feed the animals.

In the spring, summer, and fall, the horses live outside 24/7 for the most part. In the wintertime, we bring them inside when the sun sets so we don’t have any slip and fall accidents out there when we’re all asleep. (How we manage the horses during the winter will definitely be a future blog post! Last winter was brutal.) I like to let the horses in their stalls every morning to eat, so I can do a wellness check on everyone. Before I let everyone in (they are good boys and walk right to their stalls when I open up the pasture gate) I throw hay in their stalls and refresh their water buckets. Another reason I like to bring them inside and separate them at mealtime is so I can be sure our 21 year old senior horse, Chuckie, is allowed to finish all of his food in peace. My spunky heart horse, Jonesy, and Velvet’s miniature horse, Play-Doh, love to bully Chuckie and steal his food so we keep them separated. 

After my wellness check on each of the 3 stooges, I set up their morning grain and soak it. We give our horses a high-quality forage diet with beet pulp and timothy/alfalfa hay cubes included, so it needs to be soaked with fresh water to avoid choking. While their breakfast is soaking, I check on the ducks and chickens.

My dad and I made these awesome automatic feeders for super cheap this spring that fit almost a whole bag of all flock feed in them, but I always double check that they are full and that there’s no funky wet feed at the bottom of the spout. (Ducks must always have water available to them while they are eating, and we find that the feeder closest to the duck’s swimming pool occasionally gets funky.) We refresh the birds’ drinking water and the duck’s swimming pool every 2 days or as-needed, which is honestly a pain in the butt! Stay tuned for a future blog post on a better swimming option for the girls once we figure out a solution! After making sure our 5 chickens and 2 ducks have what they need for the day, I collect all the eggs. Right now, only our ducks are laying, we got them as ducklings about a month and a half before we got the chicks, so the hens should start laying any day now!

Usually, around this time, the horses’ breakfast is soaked and ready to be fed, so I go back to the barn to drop their grain off before I go inside to get Velvet ready for Nature School. I feed our cat Salem on my way back into the house and then I transition from Farmer Jess to Mom mode.

By the time my feeding excursion outside is complete, Adam has fed our dogs and our daughter! I usually get Velvet dressed for the day and then Adam and her rush out the door to get to Nature School in Kingston Springs on time, at 8:15 the latest. It’s a 40 minute commute, but we really wanted her to be around more kids her age and the typical classroom-style pre-K did not jive with her. Shocker! Our kid prefers to be outdoors all day! (She’s definitely our kid.) Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a Nature School closer to our farm, but we love Kingston Springs and whoever drives her gets to catch up on NPR and enjoy the pretty drive while Velvet sings in the backseat. (Our girl is always singing!)

Writing all of this out makes me realize I need to do an in-depth blog post about what we feed the horses and why! I had to stop myself from going into full detail a few times. (I am very passionate about the horses’ diets!) I’ll add it to the to-do list.

All-in-all, morning chores take us between 45 minutes to an hour. 

It’s important for us to consider how much time our current setup takes us each morning before we add onto the farm. We know our future plans for the orchard, garden, and more horses (just kidding, Adam! Or am I?) will require us to shuffle the way we do things, but what a nice problem to have! As the saying goes, there are only so many hours in a day. 

Do you have a hobby farm or homestead? What do your basic morning chores look like every day? Tell us in the comments below!