I had to coax the goats out of the barn with food. They won't go more than 18 inches away from the opening of the barn. Darn goats. These feeders are portable. I just hook them up wherever I please. In this case, outside the barn in the snow.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Goats & kid in snow
Just so we're clear, I'd like you to know I braved the elements unhappily to bring you these photos. You're welcome.
I had to coax the goats out of the barn with food. They won't go more than 18 inches away from the opening of the barn. Darn goats. These feeders are portable. I just hook them up wherever I please. In this case, outside the barn in the snow.
I had to coax the goats out of the barn with food. They won't go more than 18 inches away from the opening of the barn. Darn goats. These feeders are portable. I just hook them up wherever I please. In this case, outside the barn in the snow.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
I LOVE SNOW!
I LOVE SNOW! I love photos of it. I love how clean and beautiful it looks. I love watching it fall from the sky. I LOVE SNOW...when someone else is in the picture, someone is else is standing in the gosh darned friggen cold taking the photo, someone else is hauling hot water to their animals and cleaning up after children and getting dressed and undressed and redressed and undressed and dressed and undressed yet again within an HOUR and all that other crap! Yeah, I love it alright. Love watching it on TV, love watching it from the window from inside a warm and cozy house and love especially when I don't have to deal with it.WHY did we move here again??? The kids have been out playing in it about 500 times now! It hasn't even been here 24 hours. WHY did we move here again?!?! Thankfully both the kids are in school as I write this otherwise that 500 would easily triple. WHY did we move here again?
Imagine me dragging Drew along out to the road to catch the bus all the while I am almost screaming at him to stay in the tire tracks that Daddy had made that morning as he left for work only to get to the bus about 300 feet away from the house to find him COVERED in snow! I had to ask myself if I was that one tacked minded trying to get him TO the bus if I didn't realize I was dragging him IN the snow. Nope, I wasn't. He just thought that walking through 8 inches of it was much more fun than walking in the packed down tire tracks!
It was nice alright. Nice for the first 5 minutes when I woke up and everything is blanketed in white. That was about the extent of the nice but since then, I have had it! Those 20 lbs. I lost are easily going to turn into about 50 with the trips I am making to the goats with hot water and convincing them that it's not anthrax! It's not the trips I mind with the water bucket. I could easily put in a deicer cutting my trips to 2 or even one to just feed. It's all the other crap! (i.e. dressing, putting on boots, falling on my as...rear end in the snow, etc. and then reversing all of that on the trip back up.) It's not even the cold for the most part. I scored a wool zip up jacket yesterday at the farm store for $10. I am WARM. If I knew I wouldn't freeze to death by wearing nothing, surely I would just so I didn't have to deal with taking all the layers off and putting them back on and dragging snow and dirt inside, ug. If I had to deal with this more than 2-3 months out of the year (and LORD HELP ME IF IT'S A BAD YEAR AND IT STICKS AROUND THAT LONG), I'd literally choke myself to death on snow. NO JOKE! People who like living in snow are INSANE! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go kick a snowball!
FRIZZLE FRACKING FLARKIN FLICKIN SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Imagine me dragging Drew along out to the road to catch the bus all the while I am almost screaming at him to stay in the tire tracks that Daddy had made that morning as he left for work only to get to the bus about 300 feet away from the house to find him COVERED in snow! I had to ask myself if I was that one tacked minded trying to get him TO the bus if I didn't realize I was dragging him IN the snow. Nope, I wasn't. He just thought that walking through 8 inches of it was much more fun than walking in the packed down tire tracks!
It was nice alright. Nice for the first 5 minutes when I woke up and everything is blanketed in white. That was about the extent of the nice but since then, I have had it! Those 20 lbs. I lost are easily going to turn into about 50 with the trips I am making to the goats with hot water and convincing them that it's not anthrax! It's not the trips I mind with the water bucket. I could easily put in a deicer cutting my trips to 2 or even one to just feed. It's all the other crap! (i.e. dressing, putting on boots, falling on my as...rear end in the snow, etc. and then reversing all of that on the trip back up.) It's not even the cold for the most part. I scored a wool zip up jacket yesterday at the farm store for $10. I am WARM. If I knew I wouldn't freeze to death by wearing nothing, surely I would just so I didn't have to deal with taking all the layers off and putting them back on and dragging snow and dirt inside, ug. If I had to deal with this more than 2-3 months out of the year (and LORD HELP ME IF IT'S A BAD YEAR AND IT STICKS AROUND THAT LONG), I'd literally choke myself to death on snow. NO JOKE! People who like living in snow are INSANE! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go kick a snowball!
FRIZZLE FRACKING FLARKIN FLICKIN SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Thinkin' Spring
I don't care what the weather report says, I'm thinking spring and will continue to try to keep spring on my mind no matter how much ice I'm breaking.
There plans to build a green house probably next month. It won't be anything spectacular. Truth be told, I'm a real big fan of cattle panel hoop houses. (Click on the blue letters and it will take you to some photos of what I'm talking about). We get some pretty severe wind storms here but I read an article recently of a guy in Iowa who raises calves in them for a few weeks and says his won't blow away. They are staked down well and reinforced and Jeremiah and I have some ideas of our own to get one erected for seedlings.
The cattle panel hoop houses are great for so many things, including animal shelters (click on the blue letters again to see photos of animal shelters) and I have been a long time amirer of them. We've bought 20 or so used panels from here and therefor fairly inexpensively and since my barn would require a bit of modification to keep kids completely safe from predators, I'm thinking about erecting a couple panel houses to keep kids in. I haven't looked too much into sturdy waterproof canvas or duct tarps for an animal shelter but for a green house, Lowes or Home Depot carries heavy duty plastic sheeting that would do real well for a green house.
I got my first seed catalog in the mail yesterday so later today when the kids are home from school we'll go through and circle all the things we'd like.
I've been cleaning the girls barn practically everyday and dumping the contents of the wheelbarrow onto the future garden site. We have very loamy soil here on our property, I hear things do real well on it with some good fertilizer. I certainly have that, and A LOT of it! Around the end of March we may start rototilling the garden site to work in all the amenities we've been putting out and with seedlings started early, come planting time in May (or whenever it is) we should have no problem getting a few things to grow this year. We're all very excited to get started with spring and winter has barely just begun. We do expect a couple of warm days (by warm I mean high 40's) this week followed by a storm next Sunday. I'll take high 40's. Heck, I'll even take 40 if the sun's out and there's no wind.
We have an underground spring that feeds the pond. Just the other day while cleaning brush I also discovered we have a creek bed that feeds the neighbors smallish pond in the front corner of their property! Right now there are deer bedding in it. We're working towards clearing out the massive amounts of down trees and limbs in it. Jeremiah would like it looking like a real creek bed by spring. Eventually we'd like shore up the one side of the pond (where I usually take photos from), cut out a lower bank on the creek side and see if we can't actually get it running. If not running, the main purpose would really be to keep the water out of the back yard as that's the lower side of the pond. In very wet years, the neighbor says there can be standing water out by the goat's pen fencing. Some day Jeremiah would also like to get a windmill water pump working to keep the pond full all year round and to water the garden as they are both close to each other. In fact, we plan to use the underground spring as our garden water since it is very close to the surface. I'm guessing that the meandering stream of bermuda grass is the path the stream takes, the water is supposed to be pretty close to the surface so while we may fight the grass in the garden, until we can get a windmill in for running water, we're hoping the ground water and rainwater are all the garden will require. Otherwise we'd have to run a fairly long hose from the house to the garden.
Water has been piped out to the barn from the house and we could try to locate that, trench across the back yard to run a spigot, but I don't know if all that will happen this year. We'll see. Baby steps!
That's all for now...we've always got a thousand ideas running through our heads. Only so much time and money though :o).
There plans to build a green house probably next month. It won't be anything spectacular. Truth be told, I'm a real big fan of cattle panel hoop houses. (Click on the blue letters and it will take you to some photos of what I'm talking about). We get some pretty severe wind storms here but I read an article recently of a guy in Iowa who raises calves in them for a few weeks and says his won't blow away. They are staked down well and reinforced and Jeremiah and I have some ideas of our own to get one erected for seedlings.
The cattle panel hoop houses are great for so many things, including animal shelters (click on the blue letters again to see photos of animal shelters) and I have been a long time amirer of them. We've bought 20 or so used panels from here and therefor fairly inexpensively and since my barn would require a bit of modification to keep kids completely safe from predators, I'm thinking about erecting a couple panel houses to keep kids in. I haven't looked too much into sturdy waterproof canvas or duct tarps for an animal shelter but for a green house, Lowes or Home Depot carries heavy duty plastic sheeting that would do real well for a green house.
I got my first seed catalog in the mail yesterday so later today when the kids are home from school we'll go through and circle all the things we'd like.
I've been cleaning the girls barn practically everyday and dumping the contents of the wheelbarrow onto the future garden site. We have very loamy soil here on our property, I hear things do real well on it with some good fertilizer. I certainly have that, and A LOT of it! Around the end of March we may start rototilling the garden site to work in all the amenities we've been putting out and with seedlings started early, come planting time in May (or whenever it is) we should have no problem getting a few things to grow this year. We're all very excited to get started with spring and winter has barely just begun. We do expect a couple of warm days (by warm I mean high 40's) this week followed by a storm next Sunday. I'll take high 40's. Heck, I'll even take 40 if the sun's out and there's no wind.
We have an underground spring that feeds the pond. Just the other day while cleaning brush I also discovered we have a creek bed that feeds the neighbors smallish pond in the front corner of their property! Right now there are deer bedding in it. We're working towards clearing out the massive amounts of down trees and limbs in it. Jeremiah would like it looking like a real creek bed by spring. Eventually we'd like shore up the one side of the pond (where I usually take photos from), cut out a lower bank on the creek side and see if we can't actually get it running. If not running, the main purpose would really be to keep the water out of the back yard as that's the lower side of the pond. In very wet years, the neighbor says there can be standing water out by the goat's pen fencing. Some day Jeremiah would also like to get a windmill water pump working to keep the pond full all year round and to water the garden as they are both close to each other. In fact, we plan to use the underground spring as our garden water since it is very close to the surface. I'm guessing that the meandering stream of bermuda grass is the path the stream takes, the water is supposed to be pretty close to the surface so while we may fight the grass in the garden, until we can get a windmill in for running water, we're hoping the ground water and rainwater are all the garden will require. Otherwise we'd have to run a fairly long hose from the house to the garden.
Water has been piped out to the barn from the house and we could try to locate that, trench across the back yard to run a spigot, but I don't know if all that will happen this year. We'll see. Baby steps!
That's all for now...we've always got a thousand ideas running through our heads. Only so much time and money though :o).
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Hay
Thursday we drove 30 mile south to pick up some crabgrass hay. Crabgrass? I know right? Crabgrass was always a weed my Dad loathed as he pulled it from the lawn, still does. But, after some extensive research, it's great forage for all types of livestock!
If cut at the right time of growth during the early part of the year (June-July) it can yield pretty high protein (16% or so where a good cut of alfalfa is about 18-23% or so.) and is highly digestible! For goats this means more nutrition since their metabolisms are so fast.
These are about 900-1000 lb. bales.
Lucky for me, crabgrass isn't all that popular with the folks who don't know better and so it's a lot cheaper than some of the other hays like brome which I have been buying small square bales. The round bales are much more economical, if you can swing sheltering them/moving them.
Getting the trailer backed up to the barn took a bit of doing. We picked a perfect day to go get it with the 66 degrees we had and a lousy day to unload it after an ice storm. It was snowing while we unloaded, temp was probably hovering in the low teens and there was ice all over.
Moving them was a lot easier than one would think even without a tractor. We just pushed them off with some brute force. The fist one rolled quite nicely into the main barn, the other two we rolled into the south shelter with the brome bales. We had planned to use the trailer ramps which are stored underneath the trailer but realized, after backing up, they were on the side closest to the wall and we couldn't exactly get them out so improvised with a heavy duty pallet that it later ended up sitting on nicely.
So far, everyone seems to like it quite well. I don't think we'll be buying small square bales (65'ish pounds) any longer. We may need one more load of alfalfa before we quit buying hay for quite a while. Spring and summer pasture should cut way down on consumption.
If cut at the right time of growth during the early part of the year (June-July) it can yield pretty high protein (16% or so where a good cut of alfalfa is about 18-23% or so.) and is highly digestible! For goats this means more nutrition since their metabolisms are so fast.
These are about 900-1000 lb. bales.
Lucky for me, crabgrass isn't all that popular with the folks who don't know better and so it's a lot cheaper than some of the other hays like brome which I have been buying small square bales. The round bales are much more economical, if you can swing sheltering them/moving them.
Getting the trailer backed up to the barn took a bit of doing. We picked a perfect day to go get it with the 66 degrees we had and a lousy day to unload it after an ice storm. It was snowing while we unloaded, temp was probably hovering in the low teens and there was ice all over.
Moving them was a lot easier than one would think even without a tractor. We just pushed them off with some brute force. The fist one rolled quite nicely into the main barn, the other two we rolled into the south shelter with the brome bales. We had planned to use the trailer ramps which are stored underneath the trailer but realized, after backing up, they were on the side closest to the wall and we couldn't exactly get them out so improvised with a heavy duty pallet that it later ended up sitting on nicely.
So far, everyone seems to like it quite well. I don't think we'll be buying small square bales (65'ish pounds) any longer. We may need one more load of alfalfa before we quit buying hay for quite a while. Spring and summer pasture should cut way down on consumption.
It's official...I'm sick!
Sick of fall and winter, sick of cold, sick of ice, sick of gloves, and hats and runny noses and cold wind and Thomas (our wood stove), and cloudy days and brown foliage and leafless trees! I'm sick of it all. I want Spring!!!
We had some last minute company the past week. Gary, Jeremiah's brother-in-law (Rebecca's husband), Thomas and Sarah visited us from WV.
It was 66 degrees on Thursday. As you can see...after wearing long sleeves and jackets and hats and gloves for what seems like forever, 66 degrees feels like summer and out came the tank tops, shorts and flip flops! Can you believe it?
But what a tease...what a horrible horrible awful terrible tease. I knew it wouldn't last. I secretly hoped it would of course but my wishing was fruitless. Thursday evening after such a beautiful day with a warm southern wind, the north wind won out and the temperature dropped so quickly. The clouds rolled in and we had sleet on Thursday night. It was a frozenwonder wasteland by Friday morning followed by snow flurries by 9 AM.
I long for spring! It cannot come fast enough.
Today is Saturday, day one of 2011. We're ringing in the new year working on the basement. We've been slacking off the past few weeks, I'll admit. I have a list of "honey do's" for the next 2 months to include painting the inside of the house. We'll see how far I get with that.
Some new somewhat old news...The Healthy Baby Boutique in Newton (about half an hour due east) will be stocking some of my diapers towards the middle of the month. That's pretty exciting!
One of my goats, PJ, will not settle (as in, she has not gotten pregnant yet). I've run the gauntlet as to the reason for her infertility and narrowed it down to a few possible reasons. I talked to a goat mentor of mine and she said possibly a uterine infection so yesterday, when she came back into heat again (I wanted to wait to be sure she wasn't pregnant as filling her full of antibiotics could harm potential fetus') I started her on a heavy duty dose on Penicillin, after 7 days of that she'll get another 7 days of a tetracycline (which is another antibiotic) and hopefully when she comes back into heat again (approx. 7 days after all the full two weeks of antibiotics) she'll finally settle. I am hoping an infection is her problem because I have about run out of other possible causes. Her daughter Emmy from this year that I kept isn't settling either...I've put her onto the back burner for now hoping that a dose of selenium may be her problem. I'm still waiting to see if she cycles again or not. As for everyone else that I wanted bred is bred so, at least the infertility isn't herd wide, though it may be easier to diagnose the problem if it was! Oh well.
We had some last minute company the past week. Gary, Jeremiah's brother-in-law (Rebecca's husband), Thomas and Sarah visited us from WV.
It was 66 degrees on Thursday. As you can see...after wearing long sleeves and jackets and hats and gloves for what seems like forever, 66 degrees feels like summer and out came the tank tops, shorts and flip flops! Can you believe it?
(Left to right: Rachel, Sarah, Drew, and Thomas. Sarah was 14 months old at our wedding and Thomas was our 3 year old ring bearer...how quickly they grow. How quickly time flies!)
But what a tease...what a horrible horrible awful terrible tease. I knew it wouldn't last. I secretly hoped it would of course but my wishing was fruitless. Thursday evening after such a beautiful day with a warm southern wind, the north wind won out and the temperature dropped so quickly. The clouds rolled in and we had sleet on Thursday night. It was a frozen
I long for spring! It cannot come fast enough.
Today is Saturday, day one of 2011. We're ringing in the new year working on the basement. We've been slacking off the past few weeks, I'll admit. I have a list of "honey do's" for the next 2 months to include painting the inside of the house. We'll see how far I get with that.
Some new somewhat old news...The Healthy Baby Boutique in Newton (about half an hour due east) will be stocking some of my diapers towards the middle of the month. That's pretty exciting!
One of my goats, PJ, will not settle (as in, she has not gotten pregnant yet). I've run the gauntlet as to the reason for her infertility and narrowed it down to a few possible reasons. I talked to a goat mentor of mine and she said possibly a uterine infection so yesterday, when she came back into heat again (I wanted to wait to be sure she wasn't pregnant as filling her full of antibiotics could harm potential fetus') I started her on a heavy duty dose on Penicillin, after 7 days of that she'll get another 7 days of a tetracycline (which is another antibiotic) and hopefully when she comes back into heat again (approx. 7 days after all the full two weeks of antibiotics) she'll finally settle. I am hoping an infection is her problem because I have about run out of other possible causes. Her daughter Emmy from this year that I kept isn't settling either...I've put her onto the back burner for now hoping that a dose of selenium may be her problem. I'm still waiting to see if she cycles again or not. As for everyone else that I wanted bred is bred so, at least the infertility isn't herd wide, though it may be easier to diagnose the problem if it was! Oh well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)