Young Jack D had a farm e-i-e-i-ohhhhhh

For Jack's birthday I had decided to make him a farm play board. I had seen them in shops for outrageous prices and had also seen some friends make one. How hard could it be? I did some covert research using Jack as my decoy then set to work. I painted the board in sufficiently realistic greens and browns. I drilled holes for the fence posts and screwed eyelets into the fence posts. I constructed a shed and a cattle grid and made some gates (though I was never very happy with them). I completed the farm just before everyone arrived and set it up in Jack's room so that he a Scarlett could play with it when they woke up nice and early on Sunday morning.
This is how it looked.And this is Jack and his farmand this is how the farm looked after about half an hour of playing.

The gates (balsa wood) were dispensed with post haste. And the tractor just kept on driving through the fences. The farm now has a considerably smaller amount of fence posts than it started with, no fencing wire or gates but the shed is still standing and the number of animals seem to increase daily. So many of them do seem to have very realistic jatz crackers (as Noel would say) so I guess that's not surprising. And I took Carol's advice and added a Zebra and a Tyrannosaurus Rex just to mix things up a bit and Jack seems pleased with this. The sheepdogs and Rex seem to play together very nicely.