Kidding season 2008

Kids kids kids. Lots of kids. Since January 25th we have had 11 baby goats born. It's been busy. Of course the goats did most of the work. But there are times when they need help.

First was 201 who gave us a nice big buckling. It was born with about 4 feet of umbilical wrapped around it. We didn't think anything of it and when it dropped off 3 days later all was well. But day 4 the kid just layed around sleeping. Not much activity. Day 5 it started shaking and shivering. I took it to the vet on day 6. So our $20.00 goat cost us $120.00 in vet fees. The baby had an infection due to the umbilical (and what it was dragged around through). We administered antibiotics, milk and fluids. We made sure it was comfortabe, even having it in the house (a VERY rare treat for any of our creatures) We even began milking the goats, which we hadn't done before to get it colostrum. The milk-benefical bacteria mixture that is present in the milk of a new mom. After all our efforts on day 8 the baby died.

Next up was 5. 5 is a smallish Spanish (mixed breed) goat. Very hardy, doesn't require much effort to maintain. Usually. Kristi was home from work sick on Monday the 28th of January. 5 went into labor in the morning and it was quickly apparent that something was wrong. The normal way a goat is born is that a water sac appears, then a front hoof or two and then the nose. In this case 5 had been pushing for a half hour and the kid's head was out but the feet weren't Kristi was able to get her fingers inside of 5, find the legs and get them to come out and then she gently pulled the kid out. She saved the kid and likely the mom too. Kid and mom are both fine. Another buckling.

6 was next also on the 28th. Even though they usually don't follow any numerical order. A perfectly normal birth and a big perfectly normal buckling.

12 had a small buckling on the 29th. She's a good mom. Had the baby all cleaned up and ready to show the herd in an hour.

9 had twins very quickly on January 31st. I say quickly because I was watching the goats and thought she was being awfully chatty for her. We went to watch a British comedy on DVD. So 40 minutes later we go back to check and she has had twins! One male and one female.

On February 1st 215 kidded. Our first twins of the year. One was slightly larger than the other and the smaller one had both rear legs bent backwards at the joints. It looke painful and the kid was just basically dragging them around. 215 didn't like the look of that so she was rejecting it. So we would supplement the kids feed with our "new kid" formula. Watching the new kid is is getting to feed from 215 but is isn't her favored kid. We think she'll condescend to take care of it.

Now it's 213's turn on the 2nd. She took about a half hour. She strained mightily to get the first one out. She was up instantly taking care of it and the second kid just plopped out on the ground unnoticed. She is taking care of both. Two males I think. I'll have to double check that. One oddity about 213's kids is that Delores, one of our rare named goats has taken a fancy to it. She follows it around sniffing. She lets it try to nurse even though she's dry. She's pregnant but not due for a month or so.

Today it was Blank's turn. When I went to feed the animals at 4:40 this morning she was laying down outside the barn in the same spot she was last night. That's a little unusual but not too weird. I fed everybody and she stayed out there instead of coming in to eat. Now THAT'S weird! I took her a scoop of food and looked at her butt. She had the amber goo coming out. So she's ready to kid! Kristi had come out to the barn by that time, no doubt wondering what was taking me so long. She was able to help me wrestle blank into a stall. Blank got a huge bowl of food and treats for her trouble. When we got home from work she had popped out twins! Both are big kids. She even cleaned up the afterbirth for me.

Next up I think will be 8. I put her in a stall this evening.

Canned alive

8 pints pasta sauce. Three more trays of sun-dried going into the hopper. My advice to those who would can fresh tomatoes or processed ones.. when squeezing the seeds out of them after parboiling and peeling them, SMELL the tomatoes. If they smell 'off' or not like a tomato is supposed to smell, then throw it to the chickens.. or, uh, put it in the compost bin. They're not going to make your sauces taste as good as they could. We've had a lot of rain and picking tomatoes when they're just turning orangish or reddish is best, as they will ripen just perfectly off the vine and taste just as good, despite the fallacy of the marketing hype that tells us all that only vine-ripened tomatoes are worth eating. Bah!

Planted twelve pepper plants that were in small containers and not doing so well. Mike had prepped a 4 x 4 area and I added finished compost to the top of it and then stuck the plants in that. It's been raining so water will come from the top and let the water take the nutrients from the compost down into the soil where the roots stretch.

Also added compost to the watermelon and the gourd plants just outside the garden. I saw one of the apple gourd plants today that I planted in the specialty gourd area and it had a tiny little apple gourd on it! Woo hoo!!!!

For harvesting gourds, you have to wait until they dry or the stem turns brown before you pick it, otherwise the gourd will pucker and the whole thing will rot. Once the stem is dead, the gourd itself has also begun to dry and won't rot after you remove it from the vine. I could also just leave them in the field and let them dry, but I don't. I use the greenhouse during the late summer just to dry gourds. The greenhouse, at that point, is too hot for anything else.

While I was doing the inside work on the tomatoes today, I thought of this beautiful woman who is about to embark on the journey of her life. She is going to homestead in Virginia. I was thinking back to a time when we were doing all the stuff to prepare ourselves for farm life. We bought a cream separator (and used it, but ironically, not on the farm, yet). We had chickens in a fancy neighborhood until the roosters started to crow and we had to off them. We grew a small (18 foot by 14 foot) garden and learned to can stuff. We learned how to test the soil and how to make compost and compost tea... and a lot more. We were preparing, but nothing can prepare you for farm life, really, unless you were born on a farm. Luckily, this woman will have had some experience as a child on a farm and be better prepared than we were. My bones ache just thinking about what she's up against.

Tired.

gourdacious grounds and then there's more.

Saturday: 5 pints tomato/spaghetti sauce. 10 jars (1/4 pints mostly) sun-dried tomatoes. Two more batches in the hopper.

Sunday: 6 pints salsa - combining the stuff I made a few days ago but didn't can, with the hot mix I did today. EXcellent flavor combined. Salsa fresca and cooked salsa together.

On Saturday, I put compost on a bunch more gourd plants. The gourd society here is pretty picky about their gourds and if I don't get them thick enough, I'll be run out on a rail. Which is what happens at their meetings, and which is why I don't go to them any more.

Most of the plants are doing okay, but the ones in good soil by the house and in the garden (where they shouldn't be) are so healthy that I know the gourds need this extra boost of compost. I also took a smelly, maggot-infested container of natural fertilizer that had been soaked with rain and will add a bunch more water to it, then sprinkle the fields with it.

Mike cleaned out the barn on Saturday and fixed a few things like the front-yard-gourd-area-to-the-street-fencing. Then we were able to move the orange portable fence out further and watched the goats go nuts over the new area to browse and eat.

On the ground, underneath where the broody hen was nesting (she had only one egg this morning, but about ten the day before - which means we need to set our trap again and catch the possum or raccoon that's been getting them), Mike found a snakeskin, probably from a rat snake or corn snake. We have a few snakes around these parts.

Today, Sunday, I've made a cooked salsa by throwing things in that I know go with it. I also look online for recipes, but never use them, only cooking times, ideas about what goes in them and general prep instructions from many sources. This is how I think the Internet is most useful. A ton of ideas from which to create your own unique flavors. Also making lemon bars and since baking is much more a science sometimes than an art, I use a real recipe and just one.

Mike is making tomato bread (what else!) and smoked some tomatoes on the grill, then let me have them to dry. They smell wonderful and fill the house with the smell of oak wood.

One of our little goats, Thirty, which is Ten's kid, is having problems with worms, so Mike and I wormed it. Mama goat, who we thought we gave a good dose of worming stuff to before, seems to have worms again. Poopy butt, swollen jowls, lethargy. All signs of an unhealthy goat.

In the afternoon, we got another fifty feet of fencing installed, pulling down the old field fence and attempting to put up newer stuff. This ridiculous neighbor ( a mile down the road a bit) stopped by -- mind you, many people stop by to give us reports like "I've been here 27 years and never seen nuthin' lahk it.." or, "this flood was really unusual". All reports amount to the same thing -- that the flash flood we had wasn't typical. But THIS lady... "this fence goes down every single year..." Uh. Huh. Mind you, we've been here three years and only once has this happened and everyone else says it hasn't happened for a long time. The lady had expensive hair, a nice car and one of those really fake smiles that say, "I don't belong in the country".

We are both exhausted, but managed to go to Home Depot, to the grocery store and to Tractor Supply to pick up some goat feed. Mike is making chicken wings for dinner and I just don't know how he has the energy to do it.

On the way home, heading down the driveway to the house, we watched the goats. They have access to the area we set up that goes beyond where they were able to eat but have not gone out there all day. This is probably because they don't have to go far to eat grass. But they were, at the end of the day, in this newly created area. We think that because they weren't allowed to go into it until yesterday late in the day, they just didn't go there in the morning. Creatures of habit, they are.

7 pints salsa
5 half-pints sun-dried tomatoes and one more sheet drying. The dehydrator we're using will not be able to keep up. Luckily, I inherited one a few years ago and will be using that one, as well soon, if our tomato crops keep producing like they are now.

Last year, I was busy doing stuff for the sesquicentennial at the school where I work. Of course, that meant that the farm suffered immeasurably since I was not around and not processing what we had grown and not tending to the growth in the field. There were times when I had to throw out many of the tomatoes because they were rotting on the counter. But not this year.

Mike asked me to count the tomato plants we have this year and I laughed. This year, I cut all the bottom leaves off so the plants would grow tall. By the time they did, we had not yet put the cages on them (which would have been a bust, I think, considering how big the plants are and how much fruit is on them. The small cages that I used for a few of them are just bent over with the weight of the fruit this year). So the sprawling plants, ladened with goodness, take over the garden, produce so much that I'm running to keep up with it. I think he wants to quantify what others know as a tomato plant, but it's hard to do when the tomato plants are producing probably twice or three times what someone else's plants would do.

I will probably do a few more batches of salsa then switch to spaghetti sauce. These are things we use a ton of during the year, although we haven't had spaghetti in a long time. I think it's too common a food for Mike. :) Or maybe he had too much of it as a kid. I know I did. But the same sauce we can use for his homemade pizzas and that's worth it. He's such a good cook and what I offer up to the whole cooking business is my uncanny ability to can ably. Say that ten times fast.

I also provide many of the herbs we use, both dried and fresh. And, of course, I planted the garden with plants I grew from seed while Mike did the peripheral stuff, like build huge compost piles for me and do the tractor work to prep the fields. It all works and we work very well together.

Now, if we could only get some raw milk for cheesemaking.

6 half-pints sun-dried tomatoes.
Gathered about 15 lbs of tomatoes this time. Processed about seven pounds, which includes parboiling and then squeezing the juice and the seeds out of them.
Cut and put into the dehydrator another two trays of tomato halves, with salt and home-dried herbs. The six half-pints came from four trays processed yesterday.

Mike prepped the salsa that will be canned this evening (against his will).

I came home yesterday to find that one of the goats -- Eight's kid, wasn't around. Her other, older kid was lying with her, but the whether with the whiter head born late last year wasn't. I looked around, circling the barn about three times. Only the other goats of the same age and body size are females and tagged -- 26 and 32, specifically, were there. I fed the goats and fowl, then headed for the back backwoods (versus the woods directly behind the house) always scanning the landscape for a white and brown goat body, this one being about 50 pounds worth. They're easy to spot if they want to be spotted. Otherwise, they disappear. After traveling through many spider webs and discovering that the whole place is overgrown again and the wood Mike cut last year is still on the ground in the far back, I headed back to the house, noting that the trash from March's flood was still on the ground, as well. Picking it up is on my growing list of things to do.

The kid wasn't anywhere to be found and I was about to scan the front area where the goats are not currently allowed when it just showed up. Don't know where it was, but it was confounding that it just appeared, to say the least. It's too hot to bury another goat right now and I just don't have the energy.

Watched more LOTR and washed several loads of dishes after processing and canning tomatoes. Another 30 lbs of tomatoes sits on our counter, ripening.

black sweat pants, stickerbur dance.

Farm life is beginning to be easier, but only after three years of being here. Every evening, Mike and I sit and ponder this fact, ponder life or the universe or other stuff, but of course, that involves sitting outside with the goats, or with the dog and various chickens scratching around and sometimes a peacock checking us out. Today, all the creatures want to be around us - especially since we have chips and my homemade salsa, but most particularly, the corn chips. Corn is a universal food, loved by all and eaten by nearly evrything on the planet in one form or another. It's very popular with our breeds. I just wish I could grow it successfully.

But that's another story.

Farm life is good because of the fields of gourds and literally tons of vegetables which happen to be mostly tomatoes and peppers at the moment (with errant gourds growing in and around them, as well) . It's a good life, too, because the animals are all pretty healthy.

We have the growing of tomatoes down.. that we have. It's the weed populations and it's why the black plastic didn't work and it's what we need to do next year that's eating us -- and all the bugaboos that we have to work out next year. All these improvements from last year creates a mysterious mix of success that we have and continue to have, but yet, never really have totally. For example, had the weeds not taken over, had the gourds ALL germinated properly, had we had the sprinklers set right.. you know the drill... something can always be done a bit better.

But it's always an adventure.

In the Texas heat - mild for this time of year, it's eighty degrees outside but feels 100 with the humiidty-rampant air that sucks the last breath out of you and leaves you wringing out your shirt in the yard to dispense with the water/sweat accumulations.

Today, I planted about a fourth of the first part of the 'acre' of gourds again today while Mike repaired fences. The germination wasn't what it should have been and the blank spaces in the field need to be filled in. I know that in Texas, you don't plant anything past the first of July and expect it not to fry in the summer heat, so I'm running out of gourd-growing time.

I also added compost to many of the existing gourd plants that seem to be a bit puny. Hopefully, they'll come around before it's too hot and begin their long, long vines that will stretch, eventually, across the full acre. We have great compost, piles of it, in fact, but it does no good if it's not sitting on top of some plant or the other.

I have been feeling the effects of the steroids that are used to combat poison ivy (Dexamethazone) and frankly, have lost a large part of the last two weeks because I've been so out of it. The drugs make me crazy, make me pant and panic a lot, tend to make me feel 'drunk' and make me act like someone I'm not.

The nurse I called on Friday felt like I needed to go to the hospital emergency room in Bastrop because I simply ca told her how the drugs were screwing me up. She had already told Mike that I shouldn't drive and should not do anything else, for that matter, except drink lots of fluids. I called the doctor's office simply because I could, for the first time, do this without wanting to bite their heads off for what they did to me.

I drove home the back way on Friday -- and barely, really, made it without killing someone or myself. Or maiming someone since I know I'd go to jail if I did anything more.

But alas, the effects of this fiasco are almost over. I will never, ever call the doctor on a weekend. Somehow I think they were punishing me because I interrupted their dinnertime and thus gave me these potent steroids for retribution. You don't want to mess with their dating time.

Anyway, back to the farm. We seem to have a bead on the goats' health and that's important. And it's Father's day, so Mike's on the phone with his dad, no doubt regaling him of all the things of the farm, since Mike's dad lived on a farm in his youth.. and soon it will be time to make dinner. And then relax for the rest of the evening. Or finish the second DVD of the Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring long version. Both my parents passed away in the last ten years, so there's no need to call anyone. Game over, obligation over. I miss them both, especially my father. Take care of yours. It's an important lesson to learn, but you don't have to learn much. Honor those who brought you to this world and love them for who they are, not for what you think they should have been.

5/29/2007 14 pints of bread and butter pickles
6/17/2007 5 pints of salsa
6/17/2007 1 pint sundried tomatoes
6/17/2007 2 half pints sundried tomatoes.

Twice a day we're walking the tomato patch collecting a hundred tomatoes. Going to be a banner year for us. We can all our own tomato products including sundried tomatos, whole, stewed, barbecue sauce, paste, sauce, salsa, tomato chutney, spagetti sauce oh and tomato soup too. We're getting far more tomatoes out of far fewer plants this year. We are scurrying around looking for recipes to can too.

This weekend has been rainy, unusual for central Texas in June. So we have only done a few hours of outdoor work. I did some tractor work to level out the ground where the fence repairs are still going on from the March flood. I also collected some gravel and put it down on the driveway where water pools up. I cemented in a new gate post for the section of fence along the gourd field that collapsed during the same flood. Kristi collected many pounds of tomatoes, watered everything in the greenhouse, collected all the rotting tomatoes and pelted the goats with them. 216 in particular had tomato seeds all over her. Kristi also put down a cart load (1200 lbs) of compost on the first section of the gourd field. These are the plants she started in the greenhouse. I loaded the cart for her with the tractor being careful not to over do it. The first time I used the tractor to load the cart I flattened both tires because the compost was too heavy.
Once the ground dries out a bit I'll go try to hammer in 3 fiberglass poles for the gourd fence and reattach the HT wire to the gate post. That will be one minor repair done after the flood.

Storm's coming. The sky is black to the north, you can hear the occasional
thunder and it's moving this way. Kristi is fussing over her garden. We've
changed the position of the portable electric fence and the goats are
greedily eating. At the same time I can take credit for mowing even though
I am letting the goats do it. I am sitting on a chair in the driveway
entering this blog post via my Palm Treo, sipping wine and swatting at gnats.
The wind is starting to pick up feeding the upcoming storm. Soon I'll have
to bring the goats in and go inside for the night. Temperature is dropping
quickly now.
We've been watching our roadrunner pair building their nest. The are so
used to us we can walk by them and they hardly move. They've been buidling
their nest and practicing mating rituals for a couple of weeks now. I'm
thinking we have a bird-friendly place what with chickens, turkeys, pea
fowl and guineas. I'll keep the fence where it is for a few days, until
the goats have mown it down to the ground. Filling their bellies and
robbing me of the 'pleasure' of mowing. And sweating. And sneezing. Then we'll
move the fence to another overgrown location. At present, with 11 inches of
rain over normal so far this year and more expected in a few minutes, I'm
not lacking in locations for grazing.
___

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.

chicken killing time

Last weekend, we exhausted ourselves by killing and processing 20 chickens on Saturday. What this entails --

We bought 30 more cornish crosses after the flood (we'd actually lost quite a few before the flood due to putting them into the regular chicken coop and not realizing that the regular chickens just wanted to kill them by pecking them apart).

These chickens we bought nine weeks ago and have been feeding them all along. These chickens, when nekkid, look just like the store-bought chickens that come in nice little packages for you.

farm along spring roads

The pear tree in the front, along a line of fruit trees (several plums, two peaches) bore great fruit this year, unlike the other fruit trees. No plums to speak of and one peach that rotted in the fridge. The other seven or so were probably eaten by squirrels.

I looked through old posts and found none that have shown the disastrous grace of the flood we had on March 12th, the first day of spring break in these parts and as I work for a school, that was the first morning that I had off... and I worked most of it at the farm, probably about 10 times harder than if I'd gone to work!

Here's what happened (email sent):
We've been inundated. Woke at 3:30 because a goat was screaming - a goat we normally don't hear at night. It was raining, but Mike went out to check on it - in his underwear, an umbrella and shoes thrown on. Since he was going, I knew it was safe to go back to sleep. Five minutes later, Mike is on the back deck and sticking his head in the door. "Help. We're underwater!" Up, up up we go until that night. Exhausted both of us.

The barn was under 3 feet of water, which means goats that are not more than a foot and a half high were trying to stay afloat. We got them on top of some hay bales, but barely and Mike had to yank one or two of them when they'd fallen off the edges of them. Remember that their moms are wanting in the stall with the hay in it as well and we let them all in there. The hay was wasted and useless after the flood and so whatever they ate of it now would not be a bad thing.

Mike went to get a rope from the greenhouse, about 40 yards from the house. Not sure if he was thinking clearly, but we were going to try to haul each goat across the flooded, rushing divide between the flooded barn and the side yard to the house which was, thankfully, on higher ground.

When he came back to the barn, I'd already gotten rope from the garage, attached it from a huge tree next to the house, then to one of the heavy wooden fence posts and then tied it off to a beam in the barn. We used this lifeline from the barn to the house to carry, under one arm while we hung on because the entire neighborhoods flooding was going straight through the property on the way to the creek in back.

The water was rushing so fast from uphill that if we'd been caught in it, we most likely would have wound up in the electric fence or drowned. Much like a torrential river. But the lifeline allowed us to carry the smaller goats to the yard, which is above flood level. I pulled one of the nannies, after one escaped and headed to another high point where a stack of rocks had been piled, away from the barn, but not where we needed her. I got the second goat with Mike's help
through the water so that the little ones would have one adult goat (the
rest were in the water in the barn) to control the group. This seemed to
work and now we had the mom controlling the young ones underneath the shed roof where it was drier. Most of the goats either followed or stayed on the hay bales in the barn.

We lost our five turkeys that we were raising for later in the year,
along with 30 cornish cross chickens that died in the flood. The chickens
were roosting and I think all of them survived. It was still dark outside, so
we had to wait until it's light to assess the damage.

Because it wasn't light, we just decided, since goats and people were settled, that we'd sit calmly and read the paper. It was going to be a long day. We had to salvage the stuff in the tack room (most of the feed was spoiled because we'd stacked it on the floor) and the hay we got out of the stall, after giving much of it to the goats. They couldn't go to their stomping grounds and eat because they couldn't get there! The entire front area was flooded and the side was also, leaving us pinned in, essentially.

The sick goat had to be buried as well as the cornish crosses and Mike found the dead turkeys in the stall where they were flooded. We had to go in search of things like feed buckets, stools, anything that floated out of the barn. The whole back wooded area was so misshapen and looked like something out of the Star Wars swamp scene when Luke first meets Yoda.

I cleaned out the tack room a few days later. It was filled with mold and bad feed and stunk to high heaven. It costs us a great deal to replenish the feed and the hay, but eventually, we got through it and now we're more prepared for it. The lifeline from the house to the barn is attached to the midpost, we carry a better flashlight and have hooks for buckets along the barn stall walls. I put in cinderblocks in the tack room so the feed remains above flood level. THe hay in the hay stall is now also up higher and the boards underneath it will support stranded young goats if need be.

We were pretty lucky not to have lost all the young ones. One of the stand-offish goats I took care to sop off after the flood and the rest of the goats were actually a lot tamer, if not very upset over what happened and a bit in shell shock. They were actually good for a little while, not digging into my thighs with their horns to move goats out of the way during feeding time, etc... But now they're the same goats they always were.



--

Later -- one goat that had fallen ill with bad worm problems drowned, but we think she had already died before she drowned. Our casualties were, in fact, numerous enough to have to find a dry place to bury them -- the old pet cemetery was across another point of water that fed into another part of the creek on the other side of the property. The rain went downhill into the 'j' of jiffy lube's symbol, curved around and then headed back to the creek. Luckily, the house was spared. Many neighbors would later tell us that the water hadn't gotten that bad since 26 years before. We just moved in three years ago.

While we were struggling, with a flashlight and whatever house lights we could use to see into the barn area so we could find more animals, we noticed police flashing lights at the top of the property, sending people back the other way. The creek was flooded and anyone heading into it along where it joins with the road and our property would have simply been swept away.

The damage to our fences was almost catastrophic. The entire dogleg fencing went down in a big way, took out long-standing posts in cement and basically has killed that field for the goats since it went down this day. It's now June. We still haven't fixed the fence, but we're well on the way to doing so. Just a few more small events need to happen and we bought the correct fencing this afternoon. SOON!

Corn snakes mating

Last time I talked about hacking back the plants that were fouling the electric fence. Well, Kristi has come down with an increasingly bad case of Poison Ivy. Ouch. She's smearing goop of several different types, anti-itch stuff Calamine lotion. None of it helps yet you have to do something. Two weeks and it should run its course. As of today, one week is done.
The new electric fence works great. To solve the problem of getting power to it I used a long roll of insulated wire and ran it from a section of fence that was working. Of course that fence was on the far side of the gate that the goats need to go through to get to the temporary area. So I would coil the wire up and leave it out of the goats path. Entice all the goats by shaking my feed bucket (this drives them wild) when they were all right up next to the fence, swarming and jumping like sharks in chum, I flung the gate open and ran for the area I wanted them in. All 35 goats stampeded right after me. Once they were in there they quieted down and started eating. I will admit that I sat in there with them for a couple of hours watching them eat, but I had an ulterior motive. This portable fence looks different than any other fence that contains the goats. That means that they are going to test it. Our vegetable garden is only 20 feet away from where they were so there would be some temptation to go eat all those pretty plants. Sure enough, one by one goats would brush up against the fence and get a strong jolt. I snickered at each one. With all the trouble the goats are to maintain, and all the problems they have caused us I get a cruel pleasure watching them get shocked. Billy goat backed into the fence, got zapped and he immediately bolted into the center of the field and was looking around, craning his neck trying to find what creature hurt him. While I was watching at least 10 goats came into contact with the fence with various reactions. Alas I had to cut my fun short as I had to bake a cake.
We are continually coming up with new areas that we can move this fence and have the goats do our mowing for us.
It looks like our chickens are about ready. So this weekend will be the unpleasant and necessary chore of "processing" them. We are slow at getting this done so it will likely take both days to do 30 birds. Then we can clean out the barn stall where these chickens are and that will help reduce the flys.
I had another run in with a corn snake on Wednesday. I had blown my buttercream frosting having overcooked the syrup beyond the softball stage, I was using an old candy thermometer that came from somebody elses house and it didn't read properly. That meant that when I added the hot syrup to the egg yokes the syrup immediately solidified into hard lumps and the eggs were ruined. You'd think we would have a virtually limitless quantitiy of eggs with all our chickens wouldn't you? Well it's extreemely rare that we run out but sometimes they aren't in the house. I went out to get some from the coop and as I reached for the door, I saw a corn snake slithering toward the door. Without thinking i reached out and grabbed it. By this time it had gotten about half way into the coop. Now it's dark outside and I couldn't see the largest part of the snake which was already in the coop. I had grabbed the last third of the creature. The first two thirds was entwined in a wire rack that was originally a hay feeder for the goats and is now used by the roosting chickens to sleep on. I couldn't pull the snake out through the wire and it was struggling to get away. I couldn't turn the light on without letting go and then it would be loose in with the chickens. What to do? I reached down and grabbed my phone, turned it on and speed dialed Kristi in the house. So she came out, turned the light on and I was able to extricate the snake from the wire rack. Kristi pointed out that this snake was smaller than the 2 that we had seen mating the other day. Great so how many do we have here? No wonder Eatz (cat) is always freaked out. This snake was more aggressive than the others have been which basically would patiently wait for me to let them go. This one struck and tried to bite me. I adjusted my grip to right behind it's head and went to release it. I'm sure it's back stealing eggs already.

Next post - chicken processing fun.

Friday we went to TSC for feed. Our Cornish cross meat chickens are getting
very big now. We have 29 left of the original 30 having lost one to a
raccoon. They are ravenous eaters and currently go through a bucket and a
half of feed daily. It's very likely that they will be "done" next weekend
with a finished weight of about 6 lbs. While we were pushing around the
cart loaded with 8-50 lb sacks of chicken and goat feeds I spotted
something we had discussed getting. It is a portable electric fence. It
comes with poles that you stick in the ground and 165 feet of 6 inch square
plastic mesh. The mesh has tiny wire embedded in it which carries the
current. We have many potential uses for a portable fence. One use is we
have many areas that get overgrown with weeds and yet are difficult to mow.
For instance, there is a fence that separates the front yard from the
garden/gourd field. Alond that fence has been left the remains of past
projects, tomato baskets, soaker hoses, T-posts, wire, plastic pipe and
planting pots. If I were to try to mow this area it would foul and possibly
damage my mower. Also if I mowed the area all that vegetation would just be
wasted. With the portable electric fence, we can create an impassable
barrier for the goats which will allow them to graze on the grass and weeds
and prevent them from destroying the gardens. So we buy the fence get it
home and we are anxious to set it up and fill the tummys of the goats. We
unroll the fencing, push the posts into the ground and unroll the netting.
Everyting goes up smoothly. I fastened a long wire from our permanent
electric fence across the driveway to electrify the portable fence. I check
the fence with our fence tester to be sure it's charged. Here is where we
run into one of those little challenges that adds seasoning to rural living.
The fence is dead. Huh, I said. I check the connection. I check to be sure
the new fence isn't grounding out anywhere. Then Kristi checks the
permanent fence along the driveway that we are taking the power from. Dead.
Shoot. That just made this a bigger project. Now we go hunting around the
fenceline for what might be sapping the charge. We trim trees, shrubs and
vines from around half the property. No luck. We found a wire that was
diconnected. We felt joy that the problem was found. Of course it wasn't.
we cleared more brush along the street and finally ran out of energy just
as it was getting dark. We quit for the day vowing to finish it up first
thing in the morning.

It rained the next two days....
___

Friday afternoon the new stove was delivered. We were ready. We had already removed the old stove. I had trimmed the trees down the length of the driveway knowing the truck would have trouble with them. It did. However I should have kept going. The large pecan that the roadrunners nested in last year interfered with the truck and the dead or dying pecan in the barnyard scratched it up too. I helped the driver's helper (making me a driver's helper's helper) and we had everything unloaded lickity split. The helpers was looking around and wanted to know what kind of creature could make SUCH a NOISE. I hadn't heard it but I screen out about 95 percent of the noises there. Just ask Kristi. I'm going to pay for that last if she ever reads this. What he had heard was our peacock. He was in good form at the top of the barn. His call is clearly audible over a mile away which causes me to wonder what our neighbor's think when they don't know what kind of creatures we have. Anyway the stove and associated parts and attachments were all unloaded before the driver even made it out of the truck.
I knew when we got the stove that there was the possibility of a problem with the wiring. Now we replaced the stove with the exact same one. Well exact except for all the differences. So I'm using the word exact incorrectly but that's just the kind of guy I am. Always pushing things. Even the language. Sometimes I push THAT to the breaking point. I am on the record for wanting to replace the old stove with a restaurant style stove with high BTU burners. Six of them. The kind of burners that bring a 10 gallon pot of water to a boil quickly while you stand there in an impatient mood watching. However as usual circumstances butted in and pushed my desires aside. They're always doing that. I wanted the restaurant range which would have required installing a propane tank since we don't have gas. That would have meant digging a trench for the pipe, pouring a pad for the tank a bunch of plumbing and no doubt some pretty extensive modifications to the center island in the kitchen. The circumstances as I've mentioned in a previous bog entry was we were down to one burner that was working unreliably. We needed something quick and something that wouldn't require reworking the whole kitchen to get it to fit. So we got the same thing over again. BUT. There's always a but. Our old stove was 47 inches. The newer version of the old stove is 45 inches. Ha ha ha. That means that there is a 2 inch gap at one end. From a convenience standpoint you can now grab a spatula easier by sticking your hand directly from the top of the island into the drawer without having to open it. I'm guessing this will become another project. I have so little to do and I need things to occupy me. Back to the wiring. We did indeed have a problem. In between when the first stove was made and the second stove was made the code must have changed. We have 3 wires coming from the electrical box and the stove has 4 wires. What to do? I turned as I always do, to the Internet. After about 20 minutes of searching I found an expert site that explained a fix even an electricity impaired person could follow and we had a working stove! Better yet neither of us was electrocuted! We didn't even need the fire extinguisher that I had prepared Kristi with!
Saturday morning we went to a rare treat, breakfast out. So we celebrated the installation of our new stove by not using it. Sigh.
A quick trip to Tractor supply and we loaded down the truck with goat feed, chicken feed (3 kinds) some parts for the tractor and couple of sprinklers. We paid nothing for it this trip because we also returned a "universal tractor seat" fits Ford tractors among others! Of course it didn't fit MY Ford tractor. Not even close. We also stopped at Home Depot. Got some clips to attach the 6x6 goat fencing to our T posts, some BT for worm control and I bought a seat cover for a garden tractor. The seat cover worked better than the new seat and it took only minutes to install. Plus it was cheap!
Sunday was the day that made me achy. We dealt with poultry in the morning. Something had attacked a chicken. The chicken may have been blinded. It's hard to tell, it's head is scarred. It sits upright but we're having to encourage it to drink and we've been unsuccessful getting it to eat anything. Apparently in the same attack a turkey's ear was injured. Likewise the turkey is being a bad patient with no other visible injuries. Sometimes animals are so traumatized in an attack that the just don't recover. We're hoping for the best.
Sunday I set fire to our large burn pile which had branches old wood tree limbs from getting the driveway ready for the stove delivery and cactus. I have found a good technique for ridding ourselves of some of the cactus. Using the tractor's loader I can scrape the cactus out of the ground and then using a pitchfork, toss it into the loader bucket to be dumped onto the burn pile. Now if I can find a couple of months full time, we can be rid of it! I also prepared an extension of the gourd field, scarifying and de-weeding the earth. It's ready for the next wave of gourds! While this was going on I was smoking a brisket. So I'd stop every once in a while and go check the fire, which was always either out or too hot, as usual. But the brisket came out great anyway. It's what I shoot for in cooking. Every time anyone walks past it on the counter, you have to take a taste. If I can achieve that I've done well.

Coming up Monday - Extending the watering system for the new gourd field!

This weekend was busy as always.
We took our sick little kid to the vet. This is the first time we've taken a goat to the vet. In order to "make" (not lose too much) money on the goats we have to do our own veterinary care. We have had successes and failures in that area. We took the kid in because we were second guessing what we were doing. Turns out we were doing okay. The problem was that the kids wormload had gotten too high. We had wormed him twice in the previous eight days, but he was not getting better. When we took the kid in, we could see his poops (please excuse my language. It's the milder form of what I *could* have said) had worms in them. We thought the wormer hadn't worked. The vet did a fecal exam and found there were no worm eggs so the worming had worked after all. The kids system was just pushing out the dying worms that remained. The vet injected the kiddo with anti-biotics and cortisone. He also gave us 3 syringes with more of the same for the next 3 days. We were to keep him isolated with lots of food and water. During the days we'd let the kid out in one of our "goat free zones" the front yard. There are plenty of weeds for him (Alas!) to eat and he wouldn't be knocked down by the other goats. He would crawl around on his front knees with his back legs fully extended. Looked kind of like a caprine wheelbarrow, and eat until he'd fall down. We'd go reset him and he would eat until he fell down. Lather, rinse repeat.
We got our replacement pump working for the sprinklers and watered the gourd field with creek water. There was much rejoicing.
Saturday another portion of the gourd field was readied for planting. Meaning that the topmost surface was scarified to loosen it up and the weeds were scraped off.
We lost a lot of time because of our stove in the morning. We have a 6 burner Jenn-Air stove that has been declining in ability for some time. We were down to one working burner and THAT burner would only work properly on high. After much research we decided that we'd replace it instead of getting it repaired. There were many things wrong with it and if we spent hundreds on it to repair it we'd still have an old stove of dubious value. So we spent some time doing research and it is decided that we'll replace the old stove with a modern version of the same thing. Unfortunately the new stove is 45 inches wide and the old one is 47. So I'll have to get creative with a solution. The new stove should be delivered Friday.
Late Saturday afternoon Kristi came banging excitedly on the locked door from the back yard. I yanked it open and she was squealing about a snake. Well it was two snakes! They were mating under the shed roof. They are corn snakes, both at least 5 feet long. They cared not a bit that we were standing there watching them. After about 15 minutes they left and we didn't see them again. Or so I thought. Sunday night I went out to close the chicken coop, this gets done every night to protect the chickens from predators. As I approached the turkey, guinea pen there was one of our snakes stretched out on the ground before me. It must have been heading for the chicken coop to hunt for eggs. I picked it up and took it back to the house, knocked on the window for Kristi to see it, then I released it on the other side of the house. The fun we have. Corn snakes are beneficial, they can eat rats and mice. Of course they also like eggs but we're willing to sacrifice the few eggs we lose for the rodent control. They also keep the cats stirred up and they can use some agitation from time to time.
We also got some work done on the downed fences. We now have roughly 2/3 of the road frontage fence back up. There are probably about 10 more T-posts to set and then we can figure out how much more 6 x 6 fencing we'll have to buy. Then we can work on the creek side!

Thursday
Kristi beat me home so she already had the animals fed. The cornish chickens were out of water and food. Out of food is normal, out of water is bad. It's getting warmer. Several of our "new" barred rock egg layers are coming online. Not that they have computers (they can only hunt and peck) and a mouse would stand no chance. No, by coming online I mean that they are laying eggs. Tiny little eggs, but eggs never the less. These are chickens that we bought 5 months ago.
Two days ago I witnessed our new rooster doing his job! This is good news as we can start producing our own chicks instead of buying them. Due to predation we loose chickens from time to time. The guineas are fine. We are beginning to be able to distinguish between them by their call. The males have a single syllable song. The females have a two syllable note. Usually it's referred to as sounding like the work "buck-wheat". To me it's just a noise the birds make.

We are having ups and downs with our sick kid. Yesterday it was listless and unhappy. I gave it a pile of fresh oak leaves and that seemed to perk it up a little. Kristi gave it some energy booster and anti-biotic and that helped too.

We went to Tractor supply to take back our pump. We had purchased it to pump water from the creek our property boarders to the gourd field. Well it worked great 3 times and on the fourth time it wouldn't run for more than a couple of minutes. It was still under warranty so we exchanged it for the same one. I'll install it tomorrow. TS had come feed for the first time in a couple of weeks so we bought a few bags. Also got some chicken scratch and game bird feed. The game bird feed for the guineas and turkeys. The cornish crosses also get it because it has a higher percentage of protein. They grow so fast. They are already half way there. I am going to grow them up to a "finished" (know what that means?) weight of about 6lbs. We let them grow to that weight two years ago and it was very nice having the large quantity of meat. This year we have fewer chickens since we lost 50 in the flood. So more meat is better.
Also at TS I bought a new seat for the tractor. The current one is ripped in several places and when it gets rained on the padding is like a sponge. It makes doing tractor work unpleasant driving around with a wet butt. Of course, even though it is made for a Ford tractor the seat's mounting holes don't match up with the tractor's mounting holes. So yep. It's become a project. Should be done tonight.

It had better be done tonight because tomorrow I have to prepare a new planting area. More gourd seeds are going to get planted. Also I'm only half way done cleaning out the barn. There are several cubic yards of "muck" to clean out. I rake out the stalls by hand into the center aisle. Then I'll pick it up with the tractor's loader and take it out to the compost area.

My final task (oh right!) this weekend is to set the "T" posts for the front fence that was destroyed in the March flood. I hope to get the posts set and then I can determine how much fence to buy. I'll use 6x6 square mesh. That's the same fencing we have everywhere else on the perimeter of the property. I'm looking SOOO forward to getting that work done.

Rain is expected again Sunday.

Kristi beat me home today. She fed the animals and saw a kid laying completely down on it's side. That usually means it's dead and we have the unpleasant task of burying a goat. When she grabbed it by its hind legs however it objected to that treatment. This was just as I was arriving home and we went into goat rescue overdrive. It got some energy boosting vitamins, grain pellets-which it ate voluntarily, water, Gatorade and a bunch of leaves and twigs. It was also brought into the house. A very rare event indeed! It ate and drank and we put it in its own stall in the barn.

Tonight we are under a tornado watch. There's a tornado warning under a super cell in Blanco and Gillespe counties about 60 miles to our west. Probably won't amount to anything here, but we still collected anything that was loose and could blow around and put them away. The barn is mostly closed up with just enough room for the goats to get in and out. The turkeys and guineas, well they will have to fend for themselves. We leave their coop open but they prefer to sleep on the ramp leading to a platform at the entrance to their coop rather than staying in the coop itself. Maybe it needs to be cleaned out.

Eight and Momma goat got some more worming medicine since they have swollen jaws. Thought we had given them enough already but they are still having problems. Our one wounded Cornish pullet had somehow gotten out of its stall and gotten into the stall with the rest of its companions. Since the others weren't picking on it we let it stay there. Chickens are bad if there's a woulded bird. They will kill it and eat as much as they can.

Kristi spread the dirt out in the barn that I had dropped there Sunday before the tractor had a flat. So the goats can stay inside in glorious comfort if they wish.

Our little 1/4 acre gourd patch is finally getting results. There are new plants coming up everywhere. A testament to all the work Kristi put in to get it ready. Now we just have to plant the rest of the acre.

Monday 4/30/06

Repaired tractor tire blowout.
Bought the tire at Tractor Supply in Bastrop.
Bought the tube at Tractor Supply in San Marcos. It took 2 trips because I didn't know I needed a tube when I bought the tire. Sigh. Found a good tractor seat that will fit the tractor though!
Went to Discount Tire in Bastrop and they mounted the tire for free. Celebrated at Chili's.
Mounted the wheel and moved a couple of loads of dirt to the barn.
Moved a load of gravel to the driveway.

Global worming update:
Got 19 (she wanted more) she got an apple treat for being sweet.
Snapped some pix of goats attacking a tree. The goats won.

Finished moving the muck from the barn to the compost heap.
Cleaning out the barn once gains us about 2 cubic yards of compost.

Kristi transplanted a bunch of stray gourd plants that were trying to grow uncontrolled.

Our new pump quit working. I took it back to the garage to work on it.

Kristi gathered a bunch of weeds and gave them to the guineas and turkeys. They scarfed them all down. It doesn't take much to keep them happy.

One Cornish Cross pullet got stuck between 2 sheets of plywood. One wing was bloody. She got sprayed with Hydrogen peroxide and was put into her own stall. VERY luxurious for a chicken. We'll keep her there until she's healed so the cannibal chickens don't pick on her.

Eight months

Things go right, things go wrong. The things that stick with me are the things that go wrong. I've had some "challenges" at work this year. There is a lot to that word "challenges" I have had far too little time at home. Partly because of that we have lost several goats. 2 and 3 (the twins) 29 and one of her twins and one of 4's last years twins and she lost one of her own kids. I mean she LOST it. She was out there in the dogleg one late afternoon bellowing for it. Apparently it had gotten under the fence into the creek. The creek is dry this time of year so there was no danger from drowning, but the creekbed is to wildlife what IH-35 is to Texas. A relentless flow of uninterrupted traffic. The first time I went down there I found hundreds of burrows in the banks of the creek. Six inches to more than ten inches across it looked like little round apartments stacked from ground level to above my head in spots. I realized at that time why we lose so many chickens after several days of rain. When the creek gets full all those burrows are underwater. The creatures have to go somewhere and we are the local fast food spot. The Chicken Barn. All you can eat. We have had a challenging chicken year. There's that word again. We've lost maybe a dozen or more chickens to raccoons. Raccoons have a Modus Operandi with regards to chickens. They like to eat the heads first. So it's not terribly uncommon to stroll through the barn and find a chicken laying there peacefully with its head missing. We have had 2 broody hens taken right off their nests. The predator came back and ate the eggs too. All I found of her was a trail of feathers leading off into the woods.
We've lost 4 out of our 5 guineas. Walking through the garden one afternoon I found the head of one laying there in the grass. We bought 5 more pullets (young immature birds) to replace them. They're all gone now too.
We have had eggs eaten by snakes. I've caught a couple in the act this year. One ambitious rat snake had it's lips around our broody pea hen's egg. I grabbed the snake hoping I was right about the species, and carried it off to the creek to be turned loose on the baby raccoon population. Wishful thinking I think. We lost Pure-Cat. He was over 10 years old and kind of withered away. He died in the shed where he usually slept. He was buried along with so many other creatures in our pet cemetery.
Not to linger too long on the specter of dead farm animals, we have had some positive stuff happen too. We just picked up the last two of three full blood Boer goats from a breeder near Elgin. We have a 6 month old buck, a 3 year old Nanny and a 5 month old doe. We now get to set ourselves the task of building an enclosure that will hold a 300lb (eventually) male full of raging hormones. Those goats bring us to about 36. We'll get rid of our current buck (so he doesn't impregnate his daughters) and we can look forward to between 50 and 70 babies this Fall/Winter.

Current list of tasks needing to get done:
Build the Buck pen
Build a fully armed and shielded poultry house.
The spa's pump has sprung a leak and needs repairing.
There are some sections of electric fence that should be extended.
Replace the greenhouse panels with better, more resilient plastic.
Build more shelves for the greenhouse.
Build a new platform for the greenhouse rainwater collection tank (made more difficult due to the 250 gallons of water in it)
Repair the backyard fence, at least the sections that are falling over.
Extend water lines underground to the barnyard. Get rid of the hose that runs from the house.
Fix the electricity to the shed and to the pond.
Bring in rocks and logs for a goat play area. Great for keeping their hooves trimmed short.
Of course the driveway needs maintenance
Some trim pieces need replacing on the house
I still haven't done the home inspector's recommendations from when we bought the place.
Also I need to clean up the area behind the shed again. Maybe put down gravel or mulch to stop the weeds.

I'm building a set of nesting boxes for the chickens. Right now they lay their eggs in several different places. Mostly in the barn in the corners of stalls where they can scratch some hay into a crude nest. They always pick the closed stalls for egg laying. We leave a few stalls closed to the animals all the time to keep some clean. That way if we have a sick animal we don't have to clean one up on a moments notice with a patient waiting patiently. So the hens sit on their little nests and lay their eggs and sometimes fall asleep while laying. Some chickens lay their eggs in the hay feeder in the goat barn. Yesterday as I was checking the fluffiness the hay (goats like fluffy hay) for them I found a broken egg in the midst of the hay. That's not good. Goats are pretty much Vegans and don't even care for eggs fish or dairy products. So eggs are right out as far as they are concerned. The egg reminded me that among the many things I need to do is to make a lid for the hay feeder to keep the chickens out and to keep the goats out. Three times in the last week I've gone to either fluff or refill the hay and I have to check first that there is no goat actually IN the feeder. If I threw an 80lb bale of hay onto a 15lb goat it won't be the hay that suffers. So a lid has become necessary. It will probably be simple, a wood and hardware cloth affair. Easily opened and closed yet suitable for preventing the ingress of the animals while still allowing them to eat all the dried grass they want.
I see that another project has intruded upon the nesting box project. Well isn't that the way it goes. The purpose of the nesting boxes is to encourage the birds to lay their eggs someplace that's easy to get to, for them and for us. Someplace where they won't be disturbed by the myriad of creatures that inhabit the barn. Yet somewhere that is easy for Kristi or me to easily open while balancing a bucketandascoopofchickenscratchandthechickwatererandtheeggcarton which is frequently what we're doing while gathering eggs. So I'm 2/3 of the way through building the nesting boxes. It will be 8 feet long, an 8 holer, with 12x12 luxury boxes for the birds. When I'm done with the structure Kristi will paint the interior in a dark color for privacy. The exterior will be painted for durability. With luck we can keep the goats off it.
All the momma goats are doing fine. All the babies are swell. 29 was released from the designated birthing stall Sunday along with her two babies. We refer to our goats by their ear tag number. That's where the 29 comes from. So we have 3 more expecting females left. One looks big enough for triplets and the other two may have one or two. We're keeping our eyes crossed hoping for trips.

More Catching Up

Brrr... it's been cold.

Last night, Mike smelled smoke -- as in a grassfire type of smoke and drove around at 2:30 in the morning looking for the fire. Luckily, there was no fire.

In his post, he didn't actually make a full accounting of the animals we now have.

23 goats (we had two last night!) -- nine of which, are newborns. 3 of which are male.
47 chickens (last count)
5 guineas (they're brains actually allow them to survive right now. Amazing.)
3 cats (we're keeping PureCat until he becomes socialized a bit more, I think)
1 peacock (wounded)
1 peahen (hopefully pregnant by aforementioned peacock)
1 dog

Catching up

Last post, 15 goats. This post 21 goats. It has been busy. I could attach some very goopy pictures, but that might be rude. Therefore I will post a cute picture of some of the kids. We had a tragedy. When we bought this place Kristi, thinking quickly (as usual) traded a minor potential tax issue at the closing for 3 goats from the previous owners. One young buck (that is a male goat that is still....intact. Fully equipped. Whole. Unaltered. We also got 2 experienced nanny's. A nanny is a female goat that has given birth before. A doe is a female that hasn't given birth and it therefore an unknown quantity as far as birthing problems. Last January we were lucky enough to get twins (both does) and triplets by the other (all boys). Nanny two rejected one and you can read about that in the archives. We called the little buck Spot. In December Nanny two was pregnant again. We were picking the place up and battening down the hatches for a predicted ice storm coming that night. I noticed Nanny two was in the goat barn in the afternoon. That was slightly unusual. She was also bleating, which was unusual. She is usually quiet. We went to the grocery store to buy supplies enough to last a couple of days. When we returned I went to check on Nanny two. I found her in the goat barn. She was having her babies. She had 3. Two were dead, still encased in their placentas. One was alive and kicking. I ripped open the placentas in case there was a chance they were alive but it was too late. If they were born alive, they may have suffocated. It's mama's job to open the placenta, and clean up the babies. Usually they do, but occasionally they don't. Had I been there watching the birth, I could have done something about it, but I didn't put the hints together. While I was cleaning up afterwards I noticed what I thought was the afterbirth coming from Nanny two. It turned out to be a 4th kid, also born dead. This one had been pushed on for a long time, and probably nothing I could have done would have helped. Mama was okay if tired. I got her a nice smorgasboard of grains, hay, alfalfa blocks and goat feed. She ate and drank some warm water laced with molasses. All was well with her. Her baby didn't look so great. One rear leg was twisted about 90 degrees. The other rear leg was bending the wrong way. I think it was due to too many babies in there and overcrowding. I hoped that it would straighten out. After a few days it did and his legs are perfectly healthy. That was Wednesday afternoon.
Thursday we had a nice ice storm. You could leave the house, but it was a struggle to make it 80 feet to the barn. The back deck was iced over. The driveway was iced over. The goats were fed in the barn that day. The goats were happy. I isolated Nanny 2 in the goat barn with her baby so they could bond and she could take care of it without 14 ravenous goats stomping, butting and smashing their way through feeding time.
Saturday morning I went out and fed everybody. When I got to the goat barn Nanny two was dead. She was laying in the same position as the evening before, wrapped around her baby keeping him protected from the cold. THAT was a bad day. Later in the day the other Nanny goat gave birth to twin does. That was great, but the day was one of black gloom.
Saturday morning I buried Nanny 2 in the pet cemetery. She took a big hole. Her baby, now orphaned became my charge and had to be bottle fed. Kristi is calling it Spot, like the first bottle baby. It took a couple of hours to train the kid to drink from the bottle. Kristi and hunger finally convinced it. Oh, and of course we had to drive over to Wal-Mart for a couple of baby bottles. Now, a few weeks later it is taking a quart of baby goat formula twice a day. The baby is perfectly healthy and is much bigger than any of the other new kids.

We are up to about 47 chickens. Our Barred Rock rooster was taken by a raccoon and that was the end of the fertilized eggs for a while. Still, 47 is probably enough. Roughly half are roosters so this spring we'll cull the roosters (make chicken stock) and get another one. We don't want to use one of the roo's we're raising since they are all brothers and sisters. We'll bring in some new genes.

Around the same time as the goats were starting to kid we had a Barred Rock hen go broody. This is our first motherly chicken and is unusual in modern poultry. Broodiness has been bred out of chickens. An egg takes 21 days to hatch on the average. After about 25 days I candled the egg when the hen was out eating. The egg was not fertile and had no chick growing in it. I ran to the house and grabbed an egg from the incubator. I checked it was a good one with a flashlight and ran back to the barn. I exchanged the eggs. Momma hen was fooled and sat right back down on the egg. A few days later the egg hatched and we now have a very proud momma hen strutting around showing off her little baby. This is a behavior we'd like to encourage amongst the chickens.

There's more more more to say and I'll post when I have some more thyme.

Inventory

15 Goats, 1 Buck, 14 Does and Nannys
1 Dog
2 Cats
1 Peahen
1 Peacock
33 chickens (+ one that is fixin to hatch today)
2 Roosters.
55 Animals

All of them need to be fed and watered daily. Dewormed and D.E.'d, petted and fussed over, shooed away and called over. Unstuck from fences, have their bedding cleaned, inspected for pink eye, checked over for parasites, searched for injuries and rarely buried. It's been an enjoyable year with the animals and we're looking forward to what 2006 brings.

The chickens inspect the lathe's new home 

Heavy Metal

Last November Kristi and I drove to California for Thanksgiving Vacation. Vacation should always be capitalized by the way. We had a wonderful trip on the way out. In New Mexico for miles and miles we saw what looked like citrus vines growing on the ground. That didn't make any sense so when we arrived at a little town to buy gas Kristi asked about them. The are a kind of gourd the shopkeeper explained. A local lady gathers them up for crafts sometimes. Well one of Kristi's interests are gourds so we kept an eye peeled for the next hundred miles. Nothing. Not a single gourd or vine. We had exceeded the range of the plants. I volunteered several times to go back and get some but she would have none of it. Too bad.
We had a nice time visiting friends and relatives in California. As part of the deal we picked up a lathe and a milling machine. This was a favor for a friend, they wanted rid of them, it was a nuisance to them and a windfall for me. I had owned a tiny machine shop decades ago so I know my way around the metal working tools. Anyway the trip back was as bad as the trip out was good. I had surgery for a deviated septum (nose) a couple of weeks before and I was still healing. In a small town called Deming New Mexico I was just beginning to pump gas and blood began flooding out of my nose. Not just a little either. We stopped right there and got a motel room. The bleeding didn't stop and I went to emergency - luckily Deming had a hospital. They gave me an IV and stuck a couple of tampons in my nostrils. That was a quick $1100.00. I was dizzy and nauseous so Kristi got to drive most of the way back, towing an 18 foot trailer heavily loaded. One of the few times I drove I very nearly ran us out of gas. We made it to the worlds busiest gas station somewhere in West Texas. Remember it was Thanksgiving week. What an awful trip.
The memory of the trip is now fleeting but the machines are still on the trailer parked out in the yard. I refused to leave them there for a full year. That's just TOO LONG. So this weekend I resolved to move them into the garage. A friend of Kristi's gave us some bookshelves. These were perfect for holding tools and parts and tooling for the machines in the garage so that's where they went. Kristi generously helped organize everything and suddenly we had enough room to move the machines in. Aha! I said. I have vacation coming up. I can move them then! But my vacation is already spent 5 times over with the chores I need to get done. Repair the greenhouse from last years hail storm, Build benches and shelves in there to hold all the plants. Put in a gravel floor and water system both collected rainwater and city water, Reset the supports for the deck so they are not resting on the septic tank lid, build a storage rack for lumber and long items behind the shed, build a proper compost area. That's a partial list. There's more. A lot more. Get the electric fence working around the whole property, Replace some rotting fenceposts in the back yard, clean out the birdhouses, Sand and refinish the deck. There's still more. You get the idea. So we moved them today. I arranged to rent a forklift from my favorite rental company - San Marcos Rent All. It's my favorite forklift as I rent it for work from time to time. I picked it up on its trailer in San Marcos at 8am Saturday morning and towed it home. We moved the lathe first. I thought this would be the easier machine of the two and besides it had to go in first. There were problems that we got to solve and contraptions we got to make but eventully we got the machine set up in its new home. I will attach a picture as evidence.
The mill that I thought would be so difficult was merely tedious. We followed the fine example of the ancient Egyptions, setting the machine down on pipes and I pushed it along while Kristi would take up the pipes as the machine rolled off of them and replace the pipe at the front. This worked well and the machine is now in its new home.
Since this hasn't been much of a farm related post I will share a couple of minor farm items. Early in the day Kristi went chasing after the goats that had once again gotten into the front yard. There was much shouting and waving of arms. The goats left and the trees were saved. But...some have branches broken. All the leaves that were left have been stripped. That's not so good.
I was in the middle of cleanup, putting some lumber away when I heard rain hitting the tin roof above me. I went to get Kristi's golf cart to put it in the garage and Barbecue sat in the passenger side. Well my trip was only going to be a few feet and she had been good all day (mostly) so I gave her a ride around. We went around the fruit trees in the front yard and then into the garden area to survey the damage the frost had done. I rounded a corner past the tomato plants and there was an armadillo! We see the holes they leave as they look for grubs but only rarely do we see the animal. I got Barbecue to look at it and she took right off and chased it out of the yard. Strange creatures they are.

Don't count your chickens after they hatch either

In the last 24 hours we've had 5 chicks hatch. Or flock continues to grow. One of the little ones died between 1:28 and 5:00 this morning. I don't know why. At the earlier time it seemed to be in good conditon. There's one more egg that has pipped- made it's first crack in the shell-so it may hatch before the day is out. We have stopped collecting eggs for the incubator. At the moment we have 31 birds and there are still about 15 eggs left in the incubator. We want to end up with 40 birds and since many eggs in the incubator won't hatch for various reasons. 21 of the chickens have been born in the last month so it will be at least 4 more months before we start getting eggs from them. It's a lot of fun having the chickens around. They also do a fine job of reducing the insect population.

Format change

I don't know if that's the right term but here goes.
I'm not being very regular at updating this blog.
What a surprise.


So.....


I will be posting much more frequently but with even less substance. Even that may be considered substance abuse by some since the quality of the content is unlikely to improve - unless Kristi chooses to post more often.
Any how anything that happens around here of note will be passed on. Especially if something passes on.

Last night Barbecue was barking her ferocious bark in an unusual spot. The far southeast corner of the property. The neighbors back there have dogs and now a horse. We can tell the difference from the sound. Anyway the dog was barking long and loud in the middle of the night. This morning she was listless and didn't run barking out ahead of us as she usually does. Kristi thinks this is for our protection and I choose to believe that too as the alternative is to be annoyed with her. (Barbecue, not Kristi) When I got home this afternoon I checked her and she seems completely fine. So no problem. I warmed up some frozen corn to spoil the various fowl with and crumbled up some saltfree saltines (does that make ANY sense?) for a treat. As usual I called the birds and went to the barnyard tossing corn in every direction. Ever bird we had came squawking. I went into the barn to spoil the small chicks and what do I see? One of the five large chicks (5 weeks old) was in the medium (3 weeks) coop! How did it get in there? No matter. I got it out. Then it hopped up on the rim of the bowl of corn and crackers and greedily pecked away. I picked up the bowl and chick and put it where the other large chicks could get to it.
I commited to rent a forklift for Saturday the 12th at 8:00 am. It's time to move the machine tools that have sat on the trailer in the yard for nearly a year. Last weekend we got the garage cleaned out and we now have room. I have made a graphpaper model of the garage layout with scale sized pieces to represent all the various tools and tables. Now I can have endless fun rearranging the bits until Saturday when the actual moving must be done.

Funeral of a goat

We lost our first goat Friday. It was a mostly Spanish with a little boer mixed in. It slowly began falling behind the rest of the herd when they'd move from field to field, not much but it was always last. After a couple of weeks of being the last goat it quite going with her herd at all. Well this is unherd of. (that was humor) It would stay around the barn and bleat at me when it could see me. It was still eating and drinking, but the other goats would butt it when it would join the them. Our inexperience caught up with us when Kristi noticed that the goats eyelids were white. That's bad and it's a sign of worms. At this point the goat had stopped eating. We ran to the store and got some worming concentrate. I gave her a double dose but it was too late to help. I saw her at about 3:30 when I gave the chickens their afternoon scratch. She was down on the ground with her tongue sticking out and bleating. I tried to help her get some water but she wouldn't take any. I went out again at 7 to close the guinea coop and she was gone. Saturday morning we had a little funeral procession involving a little red wagon, a couple a shovels a golf cart, some gloves and a lot of digging. A goat requires a pretty big hole. It was a sad day around the farm.

Pink eye and dead rabbits

Seasonal businesses and active posting don't seem to go together well. Yesterday I finally posted an entry that was begun in July. That is how things go sometimes. Barbecue is about 10 months old now. Yesterday she caught and killed her first rabbit. Our little girl is growing up. I buried the remains halfway through making dinner.
We had a small epidemic of pink eye go through the herd last month. Our oldest nanny goat got it first. Kristi and I were in the garden field picking tomatos as we did every day from May until August. All the goats went back to the barn leaving Mama goat behind. This NEVER happens. Mama-goat leads the way for all the others. She was bleating and looking around like she was lost. Realizing something was amiss, I walked over to that field. When I got up close, I could see that Mama-goats eyes were swollen and nearly shut! There was also a watery discharge that had wet her face. She could barely see, and I suspect she could only see light and dark or a blur. She had trouble distinguishing the fence the gate etc. I let her smell me for a while to help settle her down and led her out from the field into the front yard. She never gets into the front yard, but I thought this would be easier as it is a straight walk from the field to the barnyard. She ran off and I followed trying to guide her gently to the barnyard gate. I hate to add stress to her when she's nearly blind. I finally got her in there. Then the fun began. I went and bought some eyedrops for pinkeye. Then I went to one of my favorite stores, Tractor Supply Company and bought some hypodermic syringes and some antibiotics. She had to have 3 injections over 6 days. It did clear up the pinkeye though. 4 more goats got it over the next few weeks and they all had to be isolated from the herd and injected. Not many of them enjoyed it. In fact, none of them enjoyed it. They are still suspicious of me months later.

Guineas are wonderful birds. They are watchdogs (watchbirds?) that squalk so loudly you have to hold your hands over your ears. They squalk at strangers, hawks, sounds, feathers, dirt, the sky and minor air movements. Get the picture? We started with 7 guineas. We lost one early on when I failed to realize the quickness of their development. They could fly before I was ready for them to fly. My little, portable chicken coop was pressed into service when we got the guineas. They took to it well as they had no choice. The coop was designed for chickens which don't generally fly very well. I had left the top 4 inches below the roof open for ventalation. One day I went out to feed them and they were all sitting on the top roost! So they were able to fly over 2 feet to the 2x2 roosts. Gah! I had to do something quick. I went and cut some impromptu screens out of hardware cloth. This was screwed over the openings. They still had plenty of ventilation but could no longer escape. A quick count however showed one missing. We looked around but it was gone, probably eaten by a possum, raccoon or cat.
Last weekend I put the guineas away just at dark. They are the last stragglers amoung the poultry to go to bed. A count showed 5 birds, six if you count the rooster but that's another story which I will come to presently. Since it was dark it was hard to see. I ran and got Miss Lyn and together we tried to find our missing bird. No luck. We trusted we would find her/him in the light of the next day, and sure enough we did. Miss Lyn was searching all those places that the chickens lay their eggs every day. One of the newer places is behind a small door in the goat barn. This door is about 4 feet wide but only 2 feet high. The door is always kept open, folded back against the inside wall of the building. The door is held in place by a cinderblock. Frequently the goats move the block around and the door comes away from the wall enough for a chicken to get behind it for the privacy she wants for egg laying. When Miss Lyn opened the door she found our missing guinea. It had gone in and could not get out and had died. As it was raining heavily I opted to bury the poor bird in the afternoon.
Several weeks ago our main rooster "Florshiem" was found dead on the floor of the barn. There were no marks on him and no reason could be found for his death. He was buried on the perimeter of the barnyard where he lived his whole life. This loss left us without a main rooster. We still have an emergency backup rooster, but as it is a ridiculous bird we won't acknowledge it. We needed a rooster. A mate for our flock of 9 Barred Rock hens. The hens lay eggs just fine without a Roo, but if we want to create new Barred Rock chickens we need a rooster for fertilization. We found a place that sells more or less full grown roos and bought one for $7.00 An exorbinant price for such a bird. However the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks if we get more chicks.
We let the roo go in the barnyard. Silly us, we should have locked it in the chicken (guinea) coop for 2 weeks so it would know where home was. I only read about that after the rooster disappeared. Yep, after the first night it was gone. After 3 days we were going to go get another one. I was in the barn with the box that we had picked the last one up in, when in the corner of the barn scratching around was our rooster!! It hadn't been eaten! The barred rock hens would pick on it mercilessly. Whenever the roo was anywhere nearby the hens would chase it off. Later that afternoon I saw the rooster go into the guinea coop, look around an come out again. That evening as I was shepherding the guineas into the coop I saw the rooster in there. So the roo was going to live with the guineas. Swell. Forget about fertilized Barred Rock chickens then. Turns out that the roo wasn't developed quite as much as we thought. He still had a few weeks to go before he started crowing. Now he hangs out with the chickens during the day and the guineas at night. We are happy with a full incubator, he is happy and the barred rock hens are happy that they have a guardian.

You say Tomato, I say Potato.

It's the 26th of June and hotter than three kinds of hell, but that doesn't stop us from working our collective asses off. I'm not talking donkeys here, either.

The 200+ tomato plants are ripening, but not all at once. We get about 10 pounds a day and yesterday we made tomato sauce with the first ten lbs. Today, we have another ten pounds and will be making salsa, but not for canning. I also canned several pints of crunchy jalapenos, the same jalapenos that make you get on your knees and scream to the heavens. You know, good ones.

The rat in the tack room is maybe five inches long plus the tail. Mike's seen it three times now, always in the morning, but he can also hear it most of the time. We left the door ajar for Eatz, our rat-eating cat, but today the little goats got their heads inside and thus their bodies and tore open a chicken feed bag and messed up some of the goat chow bags.

Our attempt at raising corn this first go around was a bust. Without big machines that go between the rows and pick the corn, we figured out that we need at least two feet between the rows to get into it with a mower. Mike thinks I'm crazy because I bought a hand mower, one that doesn't run on gas. It will come in handy. He just can't see it right now.

Alas, the corn looks like miniature corn, and really that's not bad, it just isn't the type of corn we wanted. It's silver queen, but matured too fast because of two factors -- weeds and lack of nitrogen in the soil. This is version One Point Oh!

The watermelons are coming along nicely, too, but slowly, as always. The squash -- two kinds -- zucchini (sp?) as well as round squash, are growing like crazy. The plants are the biggest I've ever seen. Huge.

The gourds are doing well, but I could not remember what type of gourd I planted in one pot and when I transferred them, I thought they were dipper gourds, but that's not the case. They're LOOFAHS! So we have round ball gourds, dippers and loofahs this year. Somewhere. Next year, the markers will be bigger so I can find them.

Today, I harvested the dill seeds on the drying heads that will die off in the sun if they're not captured. I put them in a garbage bag with holes in it, then tied it up in the kitchen.

The volunteer gourds in the barnyard that are doing well are birdhouse gourds. We also have snake gourds growing.

Mike finished the covering behind the shed where he will store his wood, so that's good. Today, he is sorting the wood and creating a way to store it properly. He's found a bunch of cockroaches which are easily taken care of organically with boric acid and diatomaceous earth. It's too bad the chickens don't follow him around out there, because they love to eat the cockroaches. More protein, better eggs.

We are getting between six and seven eggs a day right now, but some of the shells are not hard enough and I suspect that those eggs are from the new layers. We've always had that problem with the ends of the eggs being super soft and usually broken. Mike says that's not the case, that the chickens scratch around and cause the egg to break. Nonetheless, those eggs get thrown into the barnyard and our little cannibals love them.

The guineas are a handful, but they hang out in a pack, are quite noisy and delightful at the same time. They explore a little more area every day, and these last few days, that area has been the barn itself.

Weed control for the tomatoes, the potatoes, the beans, the corn, etc... is a real issue we have to deal with next time. The black plastic could have worked, but the dirt I put on top seems to have allowed the grass and weeds to grow. Version One Point Oh!

The fruit trees we ignored for a week and the leaves fell of off some of them because of the heat and the fact that we've been too busy to keep watering them consistently.

Bewicks Wrens, which are diminishing in numbers in the US, seem to be nesting in the small, wire shelf just outside the back door. The eggs, we think, have hatched because the wrens come with grasshoppers and other bugs, so that can only mean they're feeding chicks. The wrens are wary of us, but more wary of our long-hair cat (Thud), and chirp like the dickens when she's around. There are four little eggs and both the male and the female share nesting duties.

We foiled the squirrels that had torn a hole in the trashcan that we were using to store bird feed on the back porch. We replaced it with a metal one, but recently, we've discovered that the little buggers have pissed all over the lid. Maybe they're just pissed off because they can't get to the seed. With all the pecans, the acorns and other food around, you'd think they wouldn't be so spoiled.

Barbecue, who has been given the OKAY to chase the squirrels has a little dance that she does when chasing them. She runs after them with a bounce on her front paws, barking excitedly and turning around and around. We encourage her to do this and she loves it. It still doesn't keep the squirrels out of the back yard, though.

Barbecue is enervated by the heat. Poor dog, she sits under bushes where it's exposed and cool dirt. I don't think she's got enough energy to actually dig a nice cool spot out for herself under our trees at this time. That's not a bad thing.

We tried to set up a scarecrow waterer that is motion-activated, but she'll have none of that. She is afraid of the water because someone, AHEM, used to squirt her if she started barking at the hose. Now she stays away from the water when it's in, AHEM, someone's hands.

Welp, it's time to go switch the waters over and eat lunch.

Humidity Blues

Now that the heat's here, so is, yes, the humidity. It blankets every act you commit outside and every single step you take. Mike can just THINK about going outside and his shirt is soaked.

The guineas flew the coop yesterday. Mike cooked dinner and I went outside to check to see if the guineas had come out -- we've left the cage open for the third day and they finally decided it was cooler outside than inside the cage. But they weren't just walking around, they were bathing in the dirt. It reminded me of Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein and Teri Garr's "Roll, roll, roll in the hay.." scene. Only four guineas made the jump, with two squawkers inside the coop who didn't quite understand the concept of an open door.

We saw Star Wars III for the second time yesterday and came home around 6:30 when Mike decided to check the trap for predators. He thought something was amiss because Barbecue was barking like crazy and acting a little weird. She knew there was something trapped, but didn't quite find the English words to tell us, "Hey, Dudes, something's in the trap." Stupid dog.

So off Mike went and Barbecue apparently got to the trap before he did... and then Mike saw that another raccoon had visited us over the last two days, taking the chicken-parts bait that we left in the trap.

We did the humane thing again, using the truck's exhaust and a garbage bag to do the deed...

It was kind of a crazy night, but very delightful and funny in other ways.

The tomatoes are getting out of hand, but they're not quite ripe just yet. I pickled a batch of jalapenos (two pint-sized mason jars) and put some in a bowl for us to try them out. They are spicy hot, but only after the first bite. But then you get down-on-your-knees-say-jalapeno-luya-scream-like-you-mean-it hot. It's the sandy soil what does it, methinks.

Off to never-never land...

Kristi

It's still Summer... or it's Summer-still

It is amazing to me how comforting this farm is, how wonderful to go home and to not have to worry about walking around the house in skivvies or staying inside because you don't want to talk to the neighbors. It all works for us. We like the peace and quiet because truly, neither of us have quiet jobs. Mike's job might be on the top of a hill that overlooks a cow pasture, but it's still noisy with the people around the warehouse, his employees and the constant ringing of the phones. My job is just crazy.

It is SO nice to come home to the farm. It's just RIGHT here.

Our harvests so far have been some test garlic and onions, a few plums, peaches, herbs, eggs, 40 'harvested' chickens, dill up to my... neck (almost). The gourds have gone crazy and will be taking over the 50 foot by 150 foot plot of land where they're planted.

The tomatoes are going crazy, too, and the teardrop tomatoes look more like filled in cartoon balloons with large... points on the ends.

The corn has just begun to put out its pollen packages and I hope we see some silk action in the next few weeks.

One of the boar billy goats have, for the last two days, been in the forested area where there is no gate. It has cried when we got home and gotten stuck behind the fence where it goes to find better foliage, I guess. We've had to let it out twice at the evening feeding time. The poor thing bleats like there's no tomorrow and is so panicky with us, that it just doesn't know how to handle getting back into the barnyard.

Our barred rock chickens are almost ready to lay, and we think one of them might be doing so. We can't ever tell because we pick up the eggs at odd times. Since chickens lay about every 23 hours (with regular feedings), we don't know and can't FIND the eggs when they do lay them. They've laid in the nesting boxes I made for them only twice. They are foragers, too, supplemented with chicken scratch from time to time and laying mash when they want it in a huge feeder.

The littlest goat is finally off formula, but still a pain, as it is the loudest of the goats and the one that has to be right next to us around feeding time. Bleating. Did I mention the annoying bleating?

It's hot, now, and there is still much work to do. The greenhouse is useless right now, but still has a few plants in it. Tomatoes (cherry) as well as castor bean trees, one caper plant and a few odds and ends. I need to clean it out and reorg it for the fall. It's not quite right, yet.

We have sparrows nesting right outside our back door, right at eye level and where we put stuff like gloves. There are three eggs in the nest along with Mike's matchstick lighter for his barbecue.

Speaking of Barbecue, she's got a million sticker burs in her coat and we try to keep her free of them by brushing once or twice a week, but it just doesn't seem to matter. Rolling around in the dirt and the grass is her specialty, after all.

It's been a long few weeks.

Happy farming!

Miss Lyn (Kristi)