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.