I know I've been MIA for a while. I had become burnt out on farming and took the year off from gardening last year since we were overwhelmed with the bathroom remodel. Ugh, you should see the garden plot after being neglected for one season. Let's just say...bermuda grass is the devil.
I also took the year off from milking goats, not really by design, but that's just how it turned out and it was fine with me because, well, burnout. Since our Nubian "Billy" had died, I decided to try my hand at raising some Kinders, which are a cross between Nubian and Pygmy. So, I bought a young Pygmy buck. We gave him the equally original name of "Buckie" (courtesy of daughter). He's naturally polled, meaning born without horns, which I liked because there was a high likelihood of his offspring being polled. I really liked the idea of having naturally polled kids so I don't have to worry about horns.
An interesting little tidbit of information is that if you breed two naturally polled goats, it is quite possible that the offspring cannot reproduce; sort of like mules (which are a cross between a donkey and a horse) are sterile and cannot reproduce mules. Since none of my female goats have polled ancestry, I wasn't worried about that. But, I forgot one of the most important things when I bought Buckie. And, that was to ask if both of
his parents were polled. DUH. So, I wasn't sure he was going to be able to impregnate any of my females.
Well, it turned out he
was capable and he impregnated three out of the five that I intended to breed. I'm not sure why two of them didn't get pregnant. They were the taller of the five and with Buckie being a younger Pygmy, maybe he just couldn't reach. Billy had a 100% success rate, so I know it didn't have anything to do with my girls. Anyway, two of the pregnant does were "first fresheners", meaning that was the first time they had given birth. It's not a good idea to milk first fresheners because they are building up their milk supply and you just don't get enough from them to make the effort worthwhile. They both had twins, which were Kinders and three out of the four were naturally polled. The third pregnant female was a Boer, which is a meat goat. She lost her kid because she went into labor Memorial Day weekend and by the time I was certain she was in labor and that she was having trouble and I was able to get her to the vet, the baby had already died and they had to pull it out of her. Gruesome and sad.
Anyway, that's the series of events that led to no milking this year.
And, there are some pretty heavy things going on in my life right now that have drastically affected our lives and put me in a funk. I hope to some day be able to write about what's happening to us, but because it involves serious legal issues, I can't write publicly about it at present. So, because I have to be in the right frame of mind to write and I have to have something to write about, then being in a funk, and having nothing interesting to say means no blogging.
I did have this though...
I decided rather late in the year to go ahead and breed my goats, so on December 1st, I set myself to the task of separating the goats into categories: those to be bred from those that are too young to be bred or retired. Those to be bred had to be moved into the pasture with Buckie, the wethers, and Kip the guardian donkey. It's a juggling act in which I have to move some here, some there, pen some up, close gates, open gates, etc. It's easier to move goats as a herd rather than to try to take a single goat away from the herd and it's usually easier for me to do it by myself because when Husband comes out with me, the goats get suspicious an won't cooperate. Husband was gone at the time, but I didn't mind since I planned to do it myself anyway. Oh, and they'll do anything for food, so I carried a bucket of sweet feed with me to bribe them.
If you look at the picture at the top of this page of our driveway, it will help you understand the logistics of this. You can see the wood fence that lines both sides of the drive. And, you can kind of see that the area on the other side of the wood fence is cross-fenced into paddocks. Buckie's paddock is on the left side of the driveway and the girls are on the right. The chainlink pen was not up when I took that picture, but it is right up against the wooden fence on the right.
We have this six foot tall portable chainlink pen set up in one of the paddocks for the purpose of corralling the goats when we need to, like, when we need to catch a sick one or treat for parasites, etc. My idea was to get all of the girls into the pen and then let out the ones I wanted to breed. Then, I would walk them as a herd over to Buckie's paddock.
Well, it all went downhill fast. They were all frantic for the sweet feed, but they did not all go in the pen at once. But, since two of them that didn't go in were ones that I wanted to breed, I went ahead and walked them over to Buckie's paddock. As soon as I put them in there, it was mayhem. Buckie went crazy chasing them all over the place. That got the two very large wethers in a tizzy and they were running all over the place. Then Kip got caught up in all of the excitement and went crazy. He totally forgot his "guardian" role and started trying to stomp the females. So, the females were running, with Buckie chasing them, and Kip chasing and trying to stomp.
The best idea I could come up with to save the lives of the nanny goats was to just get Kip out of the paddock, which I finally did. He ran free for the rest of this process. Then I went back to rounding up the rest of the goats into the pen and pulling out the ones to be bred.
So, while Kip was running free and braying, Buckie was chasing the girls, the wethers were running around the paddock, the girls in the pen were wildly milling around trying to get to the food bucket in my hand and all the goats were bleating. I was standing at the gate of the chainlink pen getting ready to pull another nanny goat out when Pansy, our bossy Boer, head butted another goat, slamming her into the chainlink. That slammed the steel post of the pen into my forehead. It stunned me for a moment, then the blood started flowing down my face. I happened to have a tissue in my pocket so I grabbed it and held it against my forehead.
When you're in the middle of moving goats you can't just...stop. So, I orchestrated the rest of this debacle one-handed. One hand pressing the bloody tissue tightly to my head to, hopefully, stop the bleeding, the other hand, carrying a food bucket, opening and closing gates, dragging goats by the horns out of the pen...
I finally got all of the girls separated the way I wanted, got the breeders into Buckie's paddock, moved the non-breeders out of the pen, closed the gate to that paddock, went and retrieved Kip-the-Free and put him in a paddock by himself for a few days until he could be trusted not to be Kip-the-Goat-Slayer.
And, this is what I got for my troubles.
This is after a couple of days of being treated with neosporin and covered with a bandaid. I had a lump for several days, but it didn't bruise up nearly as bad as I thought it would. I think I'll have a Harry Potter scar, though.
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