Liam the Goat Wrangler

Liam is a great help in the morning with the milk goats, Daisy and Hyacinth, and their kids.  They stay in the barn at night so I don't have to bring them in in the morning to milk.  After milking, they all go out to the pasture.  Daisy is still a bit reluctant to come out of the barn and start the walk out to the pasture for the day, mostly due to her fear of Harry, and of course, Harry has to be present.  Sometimes, I have to run back and forth carrying the babies so she'll follow.  It's hard for me to carry the feed bucket and pick up kids and if I set the bucket down, Hyacinth will raid it and tip it over and generally wreak havoc.

  So, Liam carries the feed bucket and walks on ahead; Hyacinth and her kids follow him while I stay behind and urge Daisy past Harry.

  Once she's past Harry, she's fine and everyone moves quickly to the pasture to join the other four does and ten kids.

Afterwards, we walk back to the barn to clean up the stall (or, "snall" as Liam calls it) so that it will be ready for them to come back to in the evening.  He likes to get a rake to scoop goat poop and get the hose to fill up the water bucket.

Liam's Easter

Liam's reaction to every egg he found.

Nespresso Espresso

Tom was inspired by the New York cousins's Nespresso expresso machine and was talking about it when he got home.  Then, surprise! while shopping at Costco, we discovered that they had the Pixie version of it and we bought it.

It comes in this package with the coffee maker, a wonderful frother, and a sample pack of sixteen coffee pods.

It's little, so it doesn't take up much space at our little coffee station.  Like the Keurig coffee maker (which we don't like at all), you just put the little pod in the machine, put water in the canister in the back, then turn it on.  It will make a single or double shot.  The frother will froth up the milk hot or cold and it only takes a little dab.

Yesterday, I made a mocha that wasn't half bad.

But today's caramel machiatto was delicious!  Here it is as just a latte machiatto.

And with the caramel drizzle, becomes a caramel machiatto.

Yum.

A big thank you to Michael and Elizabeth for turning Tom on to this amazing machine.

The End of Kidding

All the goats kidded within twelve days of each other.  We have fourteen in all, having lost one of Daisy's triplets.  It was discovered with the sac still over it's head just moments after she gave birth to all three and was almost done cleaning them up.

The surviving two girls, brown like all the others she's ever had.

Buttercup, the Boer had two chunky little females.

No wonder she was so enormous.

Evil Kiko surprised me by having triplets.  They were the smallest of all the kids this year.  True to her nature, she threatens me when I try to handle her kids.  They'll probably turn out being the wildest of the bunch.

Two females - a grey one and a multicolored one

and a brown male that looks almost identical to Pansy's brown ones.

After a few days in the barn for some taming time, they've all been transitioned out into the pasture.  I definitely don't want to add any more does.  Fourteen kids is too many for me to handle.  The only change I might be making is replacing Hyacinth because of her udder problems.

Too Much?

Nephew Jordan and son Paden accuse me of "just liking to walk under things".

Could there be any truth to that?

Collaborative Efforts

I've been thinking about bean trellises all winter.  Last year, I hated picking the string beans because I had to crawl around on the ground scrounging through the wad of vines growing on the scrimpy (is that a word?) tomato cage things I used (well, truthfully, I really dislike picking anything any time).  So I was trying to think of some kind of structure that the vines could grow on that would be more accessible.  Something that would be cheap and utilize what we already had on the farm.

I thought about using some old cattle panels like we did a couple of years ago to make tomato cages, only taller so I could walk under them and have access to the beans growing on the inside of the trellis.  They've been very useful and I've already set them up and planted the tomatoes under them this year.

Obviously, I don't want to have to crawl through the middle of this.

Jordan and I put our heads together and came up with these and I'm very excited.

I described what I wanted - that I needed to be able to walk under it and easily pick the beans from all sides; that it needed to be cheap; light enough for me to be able to move around without having to ask for help.

Jordan suggested making a frame out of wood and attaching field fencing (we have unused rolls of fencing that we don't have any plans for) to it.  With a little more discussion, we designed this shape of frame and put the fencing up over the top in a U-shape.

Isn't this cool?  I hope they work as well as I think they will.  Jordan built these in just a couple of hours with treated two-by-two lumber and they were under 20 bucks a piece, not counting the fencing because we already had that.  They are approximately six feet high, so that I can walk under and still reach the beans over my head if they grow that high.  Although, it just occurred to me that if the beans grow on the very top and don't hang down, I won't be able to reach them.  Hm.  There always seems to be some unforeseen glitch.  Oh well, we'll see.  The vines may not grow that high.

Hello Spring!

You would not believe what it took for me to get this picture in this post.  It has sucked the joy right out of me.

New computer...Mac Mini.
Husband set it up, then left town.
Pictures inaccessible to me for a week.
It's not any better now that he's back and trying to help me figure it out.  Blogger (Google) and Apple do not want to work together, so you pretty much have to be an engineer to figure out how to get them to.

Maybe that's the problem...the engineer makes everything far more difficult that it has to be.  I don't have the time to go through the gazillion steps it takes to post pictures on Blogger, even if I could remember the gazillion steps.  Who has a five year old that I can borrow to show me how to use this thing?

Practicing.

Sisters

I usually hate having my picture taken, but while my sister was visiting the farm this week, we had these taken.  I thought they turned out great.

It's That Time of Year Again

It's kidding season and we've had seven babies so far. 

 

Hyacinth had her two black kids like she always does, a boy and a girl - the spitting image of Billy.  And, as usual, her udder is congested and as big as a basketball.  I'm milking her for the colostrom (only getting about a cup) and adding it to the milk I froze from last year and bottle feeding the kids.  I'm also trying to get them to nurse as often as possible so they won't be totally dependent on the bottle.

The following picture is gross, so if you can't take gross, close your eyes and scroll down.

 

I'm posting it because it is also pretty cool.  Nephew Jordan happened to be in the barn when Hyacinth went into labor and he alerted me.  We were able to watch the kids being born.  Jordan took video with his phone.  If you want to see better, click on the picture to make it bigger.  What you're looking at is the head of the second kid coming out of the birth canal.  You can see that it's head is still completely enclosed in the sac and it's eyes are open and little tongue kind of sticking out.  It stayed like this for several minutes.  I actually was getting a little nervous about it because I sure didn't want to have to go in there and assist.  She finally did pop it out all at once, thank goodness.

And here are Pansy's triplets.  She was still cleaning them up this morning when I went into the barn, so they had just arrived.

 This is the boy.  He's a big 'un.

This one's a girl.  Isn't she a doll?  She must have been first because she was all cleaned up.

 

Another girl.  I thought she was black at first, but when she got mostly cleaned up, it turns out she looks very much like her sister.

We have three does to go.  Hopefully, they'll all be done kidding within the next couple of days.

Firstlings

 

Our first kids of the season were born today.  This is the non-evil, but very skittish Kiko.  I'm very surprised that she had twins.  She stayed so thin that I thought she had miscarried earlier in the season.  I wasn't sure she was pregnant at all until her udder started developing about a month ago.  Even then, I thought she would surely only have one.

Tom and I had brought all of the does from the pasture and  put them in the barn just last night and when we got home today from a day of shopping and relaxation (like the calm before the storm) and I went into the barn to get the feed, I heard the little tiny voices.  When I went to check, she was cleaning up one and trying to go back and forth between the two, but the second was laying there with the sac still covering it's head, so I went and pulled it off so she could breathe.

We should be having lots of births for the next few days since we have six pregnant does this year - two kikos, two boers, and two nubians.

 

I think this is Harry's favorite time of the year.  He wanted to go in there so bad, but I just let him take a peek

 

I'm just sad that our little guy isn't going to be here for the kiddings.  I thought for sure all the goats would kid this week while Liam was with us, but unfortunately, he had to leave us today for his judge-ordered week away.  He's into Woody and Buzz right now, "to infimy an beYON!"

Work For the Night Is Coming

 

It's still cold enough to run our wood burning furnace, so we're burning through lots of wood. It's a good thing we have this hard worker to load up the rack.

I apologize that this video is so tiny.   The Blogger site is sometimes not very blogger friendly.   For the past couple of years, it hasn't let me load videos at all.  Then a few weeks ago, it stopped letting me post pictures and I had to switch browsers.  I decided to try videos again.  It's not easy and I had to enlist the help of computer genius Tom.  He got it to work, but Blogger made the video postage stamp size.  You can click the full screen button in the bottom right corner of the video, but then it's all blurry.

 Blogger fail.

Rumor has it that Google bought Blogger and they're trying to force everyone to switch to Google Chrome.