what a weekend

A tragic loss: On Saturday, as we were getting ready to sit with the goats (which means a Geraldine on my lap, Mike scratching 71, recoil, 205 behind the ears), I went into the chicken area, saw that the peahen only had one of the pea-chicks with her... and then I found it... a peachick was dead inside the chicken waterer, a water tank made of metal that has a 1 foot side to it. Dunno how the creature actually got there (the peachicks are about the size of a racketball), considering. I used a red scoop and took it out of the waterer, then showed Mike before I tossed it into the wooded area. Very disappointed that one of them had bought it. So just in case we needed to put water out (a shorter, more accessible waterer) for the peahen and her chick, we did... but not until a day later.

Then on Sunday, a day we've spent not doing much of anything (well, I made a pecan pie, kahlua, tortillas and several other things), we were sitting out with the goats again, and up drives our neighbor. He is a very large man with a mustache and owns some sort of contracting business - a home-building type of sorts. His wife was with him, a lady that seemed to come directly from Spain, including the attitude - she seemed put-off to be there, despite the fact that she wanted the chickens. When people come to the farm, Mike greets them because I'd prefer it that way.

I caught up with them in the barnyard, where he was heading to the chicken coop. We still had one red rooster from our disastrous Cornish-cross year. The rooster was a little rough with our chickens and we were glad to get rid of him. We were able to give these folks that one as well as two hens (for eggs). The hens are still quite young and their eggs aren't quite large, yet, but they will be. These are the Cornish that evaded capture when we tried to 'harvest' them and they had scooted to the forested area behind the barn, literally flying over a six-foot fence to do so. So it was a weekend.. and the neighbors were interested in paying for them, but Mike and I both figured they did us a favor... the red rooster was probably preventing the red hens from laying and was just a pain in the ass, pulling out feathers constantly and stressing out the poor hens. The neighbors said they wanted the roo to eat, but didn't want to say that directly in front of their kids. We got the hint. Now it's gone and our hens can breathe a sigh of relief -- there's only one barred rock rooster left and he does a good job. He had been beaten up, as well, and we suspect the red rooster did it. C'est la vie. Goodbye red roo. We won't miss you.

Anyway, and for whatever reason, the hot tub works tonight and we're going to use it for the first time in ages.

Update - we put bromine tablets in it yesterday and the foam from it causes me to gag and cough and generally not do well this evening when we tried it for the first time. Ah, well.. tomorrow. I know my bones will like it and my muscles will relax once it's back up and running. It's been way too long.

Another picture of the geese

(For Esther S (from work), who graciously gave me seven of these wonderful creatures a few months ago...) I'll upload more as I take them.

The Peahen's brood!

Woo hoo!

I'm about to leave work right at 3pm today and I get a call from the outside, so I pick it up.
"The peahen has chicks!"

Woo hoo! Last we knew, the peacock wasn't able, because of his lameness, to mount our peahen. So this is wonderful and cool! She'd had four eggs under her for the last four months, but we think rats or a snake got two of them, so to have any alive is a true miracle. She laid them directly on the dirt inside the barn - against a barn wall, unprotected and in a stall that the goats can access. We're thinking that putting hardware cloth around her stall and feeding her like crazy might keep the rats and the snakes away and protect her and her brood a little more. I'm THRILLED! This is SO cool...

Fresh air, a dead chicken and a little ranting.

The geese are so BIG already! But these are so easy to handle, it's a wonder why people don't just adore them. They only go after folks if backed into the corner or provoked. These were 'hand raised' and are just wonderful to work with.
Here, they're trying to eat Mike's shoelaces.


Last night I was in the barn looking after Seventeen, who's got a nice cyst on her jaw. I wanted to pick up the eggs in her stall that the errant chickens laid (they refuse to stay in their own enclosed area behind the barn) and smelled this awful odor. Could it be a rotten egg? We really haven't had many of those, but when we do (like, for instance, when we occasionally have to collect them from the top of the tack room), we throw them far out into the forested area so the smell doesn't carry. Or we bag them and trash them.

But this smell was horrendous and one egg couldn't have produced something this vile.

I looked around and behind the milking stand that's also in Seventeen's stall, I saw a BUNCH of tail feathers of a chicken. Then I did the only natural thing I should do -- I ran into the house and got Mike.

He grabbed the shovel and I retrieved a small white trash bag. We've done this before... finding little dead bodies after the raccoons have had their way with them, or when an attack has been spoiled, but a few seconds too late. It's one thing to kill the chickens for our own edification, but it's really something disgusting when another creature kills one - and leaves the body to rot in the barn.

I fear for the peahen and for her eggs. She is on the other side of the barn in an open stall, laying on four eggs. All day, all night. (at least this time they're not chicken eggs). We've lost one peacock to a raccoon attack and don't want to lose her. She's one of few left that were here when we bought the farm in September, '04.

But I am suspicious. If it WAS a raccoon that attacked the chicken in Seventeen's stall, why didn't it come back and finish the meal? Could it be that this chicken, when I was rounding up the others, also died like the one that had a heart attack in the small coop the first day we started processing? It was possible.

Nonetheless, poor Seventeen was having to live in the stall with a decaying chicken. It should be better today and the "fresh" country air should come back -- at least without the chicken.. the smell of the barn is something else entirely.

On a totally unrelated topic, I stopped at a local Mexican grocery store yesterday on the way home and bought five quarts of strawberries and two bunches of grapes. Both were on sale. Both have wine potential.

It's funny to me how easy the strawberry wine was and how tasty it was. This world has pushed everything to the nth degree where you feel you're doing something wrong if you're not part of some expert group (like a wine club or a wine-growing forum). But really, this isn't how all this started. The lesson of the growing of grapes and smashing them for wine.. or the experiments that made strawberries or plums into wine -- these are things that we all can still do, especially since the Internet can bring us the most basic recipes (and the most snobby complicated ones that require special yeasts and particular types of fruit).

What happened to just plain ol' food and plain ol' living? Making one's own wine was out of necessity and poverty, not out of some desire to best the neighbor or to perfect long traditions of smashing grapes with feet or just simply letting fruit ferment to get a drinkable solution.

Okay. Enough ranting for today. Maybe.

Brisket and Barbecue

We haven't written about our new livestock guardian dog, a great Pyrenese named Brisket. Now Barbecue has a friend. Well, sort of. We literally rescued Brisket from this asshole in the city where we live... I couldn't believe the way this man was manhandling the tiny puppy who was not only shaking with fear, but infested with fleas, sticker burs and who knows what else. Mike looked at me and kind of gave me a 'do we really want this dog' look.. to which I replied by opening my eyes really wide and shaking fervently. The man was asking 75 for it and we gave it to him and got out of there. I feel like we did our good deed in rescuing this puppy. The dog smelled of oil because the man had kept it in what looked like a horse trailer that held some kind of old fire engine in it. The water bucket was at least a foot taller than the poor dog and the food was scattered everywhere. The man picked the puppy up roughly when he showed it to us. The dog just seemed so helpless and terrified. It would take a few months before it trusted humans again. It would take a few weeks for the poor dog to realize that the container that held his dry food wasn't edible and how to eat out of it. I just feel like kicking the bastard that sold it to us. REALLY hard.

Then we got it home and tortured it by giving it a bath and flea treatment and combing the sticker burs out of it. Poor thing.

But Brisket we have for livestock only. Barbecue seems to want to protect only us. Brisket stays in the barnyard while Barbecue stays in the front and back yards. It works. Except when they both want to keep us up at night by barking non-stop.

The photo shows the poor dog with Eight, a goat without horns that Brisket seems to be very fond of.

I saved Brisket from the brutality of Nine the other day because I heard a yelp in the barn and went to check it out. Nine was in another stall and Brisket was in the corner of one. I put him into the middle of the barn, he went across the way to yet another stall and Nine followed him, then just began to bash the living hell out of the poor dog into the wall behind it. Brisket hasn't forgotten and steers very clear of Nine and her kids right now. When I saw Nine ramming Brisket into the wall, I pulled her goaty tail and swung her around, yelling and screaming at her. STUPID GOAT! But then again, Brisket has to learn which goats play nice and what he can get away with. Soon, he'll be as big as they are and they won't mess with him much. I can't hardly wait for that time. For now, we will take care of each other. Brisket lets me pet him, now, something he hasn't risked for many moons.

Strawberry Wine and a taste of the future

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Success! Strawberry wine and goat cheese! Yay. I was beginning to give up hope with regard to ever producing good-tasting wine from the fruit that we buy or grow. But last week I experimented with strawberries and made a REALLY good strawberry wine out of a quart of them. VERY tasty.

I bought 3.5 lbs of plums and found an easy plum wine recipe online. It takes about two weeks to finish, so I'm hoping this works, as well, now that I know that if the balloon goes down, it's ready. And then mead. Would love to make mead that actually tastes proper. Last time I tried making it, it turned into vinegar. I didn't test the pH.

But the best news is about the cheese... I made cheese with curds and whey (with my new rennet that we processed from the stomach of the goat we killed) and it worked! I bought a small cheese press that's REALLY cheesy-looking and chintzy - it would never work for a commercial cheese production kitchen. But nonetheless, I was pressing and turning the handle to create pressure after I wrapped the curds in cheesecloth and put them into the pvc pipe that has a wooden base (never use wood... too much acid in the whey which has already stained it). The curds 'gave' as the day went on and then finally, I released the press and put the whole thing in a tupperware and stuck it in the fridge. The reason it doesn't stay on a cool shelf? This is Texas. Between the cockroaches, fruit flies and other assorted bugs, it was just best to keep it cool in the fridge.

Anyway, I had to wait for almost a week and then when I opened the container, it was cheese! Not imperfect cheese, but cheese that looked like cheese and tasted like milk and a hint of cheddar. Oh, it was wonderful! So now I am going to seal the other half of it in wax and really put it on a shelf to age. I hope that works.

So two successes in a week. I hope there are a lot more. I'm counting on it.