Sunday we "harvested" the rest of our chickens for the year. We came out with a total of 28 birds. One had been killed by a raccoon and one was dead in the barn stall when we went to collect them in the morning. We are going to leave up our festive chicken harvesting area till next weekend when we intend to harvest our first goat. We have a couple that are a little older and we need to stop them from getting any older. No doubt that the older ones will be a little tougher but we can always stew them or braise them. I love cabrito, Kristi not so much. I need to make something that is especially delicious. Then it will be something to look forward to. I have some research to do before we do the deed. I have no idea how to butcher the kid to get good cuts. No doubt I'll make a mess of it the first time or two. To celebrate, we're getting our freezer repaired tomorrow. Gotta have a place to put the lil baby until we can stomach eating him.

Saturday Kristi cleaned out the backyard goldfish pond. She also pruned the overgrown trees that obscured the view of the pond. Now we can see it from the house. It looks great. I mowed the back yard and as I was finishing I saw a chicken running around with a snake! By the time I saw it the snake was dead. It was about 12 inches long, probably a grasssss ssssnake but I didn't get a close look. The hen was pretty protective of her booty. It's amazing just how much a chicken can eat. Kristi reminded me of one of our first chickens that ate a HUGE beetle larva that we found in the compost. It was about 3 inches long and as big around as your thumb. She swallowed it whole.

We've been having fun moving our portable electric fence around and letting the goats mow the grass and weeds. They do a nice job. What's great about it is that we are doing slightly less work I (it does take some effort to move the fence and get power to it) and the goats are going to bed with full bellies. Yesterday we herded them into the driveway since the grass was getting long due to the recent wonderful rains.

I repaired my creek water pump once again. The male adapter that goes into the pump and connects the piping system has broken twice. Saturday I bought a rubber coupler hoping that the rubber would absorb some of the vibration that is fracturing the plastic. It didn't work though. The pressure was enough to blow the rubber coupler apart. So I bought a broken horse stall mat from TSC for $10.00, cut a chunk off of it and put it under the pump. I ran a full tank of gas through the pump and it didn't break. So far so good.

We're a little disappointed with the new gourd field. We only seem to have about 20 percent of the plants that we expected. So we will likely have to put some more seed down while we have the creek water available. We also have to put compost down for all these hundreds of plants. That will help the shells to grow thick.