Half-way There!

This week marked the half-way point for Bri, Piper, and Baerli in their pregnancies. Bri is due February 24 and Baerli and Piper are due the 26th, but of course like people those dates are just estimates. but As you can see, goats are also a lot like people in that they all "show" differently.

Baerli with 74 days to go.

Bri with 72 days to go.

Piper with 74 days to go.

 

Usually goats don't start to get really wide till about a month before their estimated due date, Baerli is apparently trying to pack on her baby weight early. She did have triplets last year (one of which was Miss Kay), so maybe she's got more than one or two in there. I dunno, what do you think? Here she is, with about 80 days left in her pregnancy with the triplets, so at about the same time as she is now in her gestation.

The Husband and I were pretty shocked when a third kid started appearing during Baerli's labor. I have no idea where she was hiding that third kid. Bri also had triplets last year, so it'll be interesting to see what the girls are hiding in those bellies. We could wind up having 6-8 kids in a span of 3 days! Or, the girls could keep me on my toes and drive me nuts like Baerli and Annie did last year. Annie was 6 days late and Baerli went 3 days late. I spent the majority of 3 weeks in the barn checking on them to look for signs of an impending labor. . . This will be my 4th year of kidding seasons and I feel like I've got enough knowledge under my belt to gauge when labor will start better.

There is no "tried and true" method of predicting when labor will start (again, just like in humans), but my favorite way to checking to see if labor is going to be coming in the next few days (or sometimes hours) is to check the doe's ligaments. There are two ligaments that run alongside the goat's spine in their rump.  

photo courtesy of fiascofarm.com. LOTS of great goat info there!

To "check her ligs" means to run your hand down her spine with your fingers along one side of her spine and your thumb along the other, feeling for those ligaments. Normally, they feel like pencils, they're pretty hard and round. As a doe gets closer to kidding, those ligaments get softer and they start to feel like rubber bands. Just before she goes into labor - or sometimes not until she's in labor - those ligaments will seem to "disappear" altogether and you can nearly wrap your hand around the doe's spine so that your thumb and fingers are touching. That usually means that kidding is within hours. 

Sometimes, ligaments "come and go", meaning that you may go out and check a doe's ligs and they seem nearly "gone", but then the next time you go out there, they feel harder. This can happen over the course of a day, or even days before kidding actually happens and is very frustrating. Annie did this to me last year and she nearly drove me crazy with anticipation. Baerli is the one you have to watch. She'll act a little "funny" the morning before she kids. And by "funny" I mean that you'll only notice it if you know her well. And her ligs will feel a little squishy. She'll usually kid within about 5 hours of breakfast. The first year she kidded, I missed it because I thought I had longer. When I went to check on her, she had twins up and dried off and running around. So the rule to catching Baerli in action is to watch her like a hawk.

Now for Bri and Piper, I'll be watching them like a hawk as well since this is my first kidding with them. The breeder that I got them off of told me that Piper had twin girls just fine. Bri on the other hand had a difficult delivery with triplet boys. I'll give her credit, she bounced back quickly and the boys were all healthy, they just got tangled up in there. Each labor is different, and things may go much easier for Bri this time, but I'm still going to give it my every effort to be present when she goes into labor in case she has problems again.

So, for the next 10 weeks or so, the girls get to hang out and grow those babies. I, on the other hand, will be impatiently awaiting their impending labors. . .

Green with Envy

I have a confession to make.

I'm green with envy.

Garden green, that is.

I love, Love, LOVE the vegetable garden at Colonial Williamsburg. Well, I just love Colonial Williamsburg, but that's a whole 'nother post. . .
When I picture the perfect garden in my head, this is exactly what I see.

Perfect, weedless rows tucked into nearly coal-black fertile soil.

I know Colonial Williamsburg tries to keep everything as period-authentic as possible. I'm pretty sure they're organic, but not sure if they're certified as such. They have paid horticulturalists who ply their expertise on these perfectly-crafted gardens all year long, but I still can't help but think that they use some kind of super fertilizer or weed killer. I mean seriously, their produce almost looks too good to eat. How does one achieve this perfect-ness?

Next spring will be my 4th year gardening (well, so long as you don't count the several years that I tried to grow pumpkins and gourds over in a hilly, rooty, shady patch at our old house). I always considered myself as having a brown thumb. A wilted brown thumb at that. Probably should consider it more like a black thumb. . . But moving to the farm 7 years ago and becoming a farmer's wife somehow brought out my dormant gardener.

Now, every year I have good intentions of growing a successful, gorgeous garden like the ones I've seen at Williamsburg, like the ones that The Husband's Grandpa grew before we took over.

Bo and I planting carrots last March. Barefoot, of course, 'cause G-Pa says that's the secret to gardening. ;)

I'm sure he's looking down on us, slapping his knee and getting a rather hearty chuckle at our attempts.

I've come up with pretty good excuses over the years: being pregnant and 1/2 a mile away, and then once we moved over here it was having an infant, the drought, going it alone while The Husband was deployed. . . They all sound like legit reasons why my rows are never straight, the garden doesn't get watered as often as it should, and the weeds and bugs eventually take over and choke the life out of my plants. . .

(July) Here the garden doesn't look as bad as it eventually got, but you get the idea of how quickly it gets away from me.

But no more. No more excuses. This year The Husband will be home, the kids are old enough to help out or at least entertain themselves while I work, and I'll be 4 years wiser.

Sounds good.

Right?

Then again. . . a little winter reading couldn't hurt. . .

(All Colonial Williamsburg garden photos courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg)

Ash

It doesn't look like very much other than Ash right now.

But next spring it'll be the site of my new salad garden.

We had some rose bushes that had grown out of control over the past few years before we moved here. Despite trying to cut them back to a manageable size, the poison ivy and other shrubby weeds had invaded and the tangled mess had broke down the old split-rail fence that lined the edge of the carport patio. So we decided to take it all out and start over. We're going to try to rebuild the two-tier design like what had been put in originally, but first The Husband is going to have to dig out all the old dirt and roots.

It's going to be a lot of work, but having a more convenient raised bed than the current one aaaaaall the way down at the other end of the shop will be worth it.

The Great Honey Harvest

Well, see as how I do call this blog, "The Land of Milk and Honey," it should only be fitting that I include how we harvest said honey to use.

**Disclaimer - we are new to bees. Like, TOTALLY new, this is our first year in the beekeeping business. We've had some extenuating circumstances and because of these, we chose to take a veer off the traditional honey harvesting method road. This is by no means the easiest, cleanest, or most productive way to harvest honey, but it'll do in a pinch.**

In my last post, I mentioned that my bees ditched me. The technical term for it is "absconding", but basically what happened was that the queen bee decided (for whatever reason) that the colony was not going to make it through the winter in their current abode so she took off with the majority of the hive. There's no rhyme or reason to it, but it's heartbreaking all the same. There were still several bees left in the hive, maybe in the numbers of 100's. 100 sounds like a lot, but it's really not. Think of a colony like a city - 100 people doesn't make much of a city, does it? These were bees that were probably out harvesting pollen when the rest of the colony took off and they came home to an abandoned hive, or they were newly hatched bees. Anyway, 100 or so bees isn't much of a colony, they didn't have a queen bee around to tell them what to do and lay eggs. It looked like they had tried to raise a new queen, but with it being so late in the season (October), she would not have gotten bred and therefore wouldn't be of much use anyway. Makes one sick to think about it (I know, because it did me), but the bees weren't going to make it through the winter, they just couldn't possibly generate enough body heat to keep themselves warm and they'll freeze to death.
Before the colony took off, they binged on the honey that they had spent all summer working to make in preparation for winter. And boy did they binge. The entire bottom box (called a deep super - for superhive) was empty of honey. They had also eaten what little they had started to store in the top box (it's smaller in size so it's called a medium super). However, the middle deep still had a fair amount of honey left in it. It still wasn't near enough honey for the remaining bees to survive the winter on, so The Husband and I decided that we might as well harvest what was there and start over again in the spring with a new colony.

So, on to the messy part - harvesting the honey.
Now, typically (read that - ideally), a beekeeper would have a honey extractor.
(Click the link to see a homemade extractor.)
http://www.myhomeamongthehills.com/honeybees/equipment/

This is a pretty basic one, but they can get a whole lot fancier and more expensive. The process goes like this:
You "uncap" the frames by cutting off the thin layer of beeswax that covers the holes in the honeycomb where the bees have stored the honey. You load 2 frames (or 4, 6, 10. . . depending on the size of your extractor) into the basket and spin it via a hand crank or some of them are electric. By use of centrifugal force, the honey is blown out of the frames, where it hits the walls of the extractor, and then slides down to the bottom of the barrel. There is usually a "honey gate" at the bottom which is a little door that you open up, the honey pours out and voila - honey in a jar/bucket/whathaveyou.

Sounds like sticky madness, but this really is the cleanest way to harvest honey.

You would then put the frames back into the hive, the bees would clean it up and start filling it with more honey.

But we don't have an extractor (yet). Plus, we weren't sure what caused the bees to leave. Even if we caught the colony resting on a branch somewhere, we couldn't put them back in the hive because they would just leave again. So we figured our best bet was to start with fresh wax foundation in the spring (you can buy sheets of wax foundation at beekeeping supply stores).

So here's what WE did:

Our deep super with 10 frames in it.

 First, we tried to just uncap the frames and let the honey drain out into a pan:

 But that was taking FOR-EV-ER. . . after 3 hours, there wasn't much honey in the pan (you can see most of it if you peek under the frame in the photo above).

So then we decided to cut the wax foundation out, crush it, and let it seep through some butter muslin (beekeepers all debate on whether to use cheesecloth to strain the honey or not since you can get fibers in the honey - but it was what we had so that's what we used)

A slice of honeycomb waiting to be smooshed.

The empty frame.

We mashed the entire comb, wrapped it in the butter muslin, and put it in a strainer to drain. I rigged up a homemade cheese-press using a gallon of water as a weigh to help compress the wax and make the honey squeeze out faster.

 

But then, God Bless Her, G-G (Husband's grandma) dug out this old strainer that they had used to strain honey out waaaay back when Husband's Great-Great-Grandpa had bees. I have no idea how old this thing is, but I want one. I can come up with infinite uses in my head already. . .

Old-cone-strainer-thingy.

The honey practically poured out. And, I didn't have to keep switching out my butter muslin (it kept getting gummed up.

HONEY!

 It was a sticky, messy project. It took nearly 4 days of switching out mashed honeycomb and straining the honey and I had to wipe down the entire kitchen when we were done.

But it was TOTALLY worth it! There's not like the taste of your own honey, especially after all that work!
It looks pretty cloudy in the picture above - that was when I had just filled the jar. The honey clears up a good bit after a week or so. Our honey is still a pretty dark honey, which some people don't like, but it's just an aesthetic thing. Dark honey or light, it all taste great!

Our harvest.

After it was all said and done - we got about 24 lbs of honey. Sounds like a lot, but really it's not (especially for all the work it takes!). You can typically expect anywhere from 40-100 lbs of honey from a single hive depending on whether it was a good year/bad year. You can extract more honey using an extractor too, but that's alright. It'll get us and even some of the family through the year.

While I was pretty bummed that our "free" bees didn't do very well, we're not giving up yet. There is a honeybee shortage and we need those little critters on the farm to help pollinate our pastures (they're a clover/grass mix), our wild berries, and our garden.

We'll try again next spring.

That Time Again. . .

Where I'm stuck inside due to inclement weather and try to look forward to Spring. Ok, so I don't spend the ENTIRE winter cooped up, but it sure does feel like it sometimes. We try to spend as much time outside as we can on nice days, but with Miss E fighting an infection and trying to catch up on laundry, harvest honey, and tend a busted puppy, I haven't left the house much even on the nice days.

One thing that I'm already looking forward to is Kidding Season! The big girls are all bred (well, I'm still waiting to see if Annie goes into heat again to tell if she's actually gotten pregnant, but she's never failed to "settle" so I'm pretty confident that she is). Bri, Baerli, and Annie were bred to Tennessee for late February and Mid-March kids. Piper was bred to her co-owner's buck, Fireball. Fireball is the sire to this year's National Junior Alpine Champion Winner! We have high hopes for this pairing with Piper and crossing our fingers for doe kids. Things could get hairy that last week of February, Bri's due date is 2/24 and Baerli and Piper are both due on 2/26. Granted, due dates for goats are pretty much like the due dates for humans, they could have their babies anytime within about 2 weeks of that date. Last year, Annie went 6 days over her due date and Baerli went 3 days over.They nearly drove me nuts with anticipation! This year I'm promising myself to be patient yet be prepared for anything. Annie isn't due 'till 3/14, the day before she was due last year. I really hope she doesn't pull a repeat of last year though. . .

Goats are pregnant for about 150 days, or about 5 months. Most of the Swiss Breeds (breeds of goats that originate around the Swiss Alps, which include Alpines, Saanens, Toggenburgs, and Oberhaslis) are seasonal breeders, which means that their breeding season is in the fall - like their distant cousin, the deer. Bucks will go into rut (meaning that they're hot and heavy and in the mood for lovin' with the ladies) around August when the days are getting much shorter and cooler weather starts setting in and it lasts 'till around January, but this can be affected by the weather. There were a lot of late-bred does last year because of the drought and heat, it was still in the 80's-90's in October so the bucks weren't in the mood.

Normally, I've tried to breed my girls in October or November, making them due to kid in March or April. I just felt better about the weather during those months. We're less-likely to get a blizzard and there's less pressure to keep the newborn kids warm. Plus, spring is right around the corner and it's not much longer until the moms and babies can have access to fresh green pasture.
However, this year I had a wild hair in my keester and decided I'd try to breed the girls for late February kids and see what happened. Oh, it happened alright. Bri and Baerli were ready and willing to make googly-eyes with Tennesse (and then some). Piper was over at her co-owner's place and apparently the mood struck her as well.
Of course, I would pick the year that we're supposed to get a really hard winter to breed early. . . but oh well. I have the advantage of being a stay-at-farm-mom so I should be able to catch the girls in labor and get the kids dried off as soon as their born to prevent and sickness or frostbite. Yep, goats get frostbite too. Just ask Baerli - she and her twin brother lost the tips of their ears to frostbite when they were born at the tail-end of the ice storm back in '11.

Schwanli had floppy ears from the weight of the dead frostbitten tissue.

Nubby ears!

Boy I sound like an old-timer there, haha.

Here's the fun part tho. . . I like to try to predict what colors of kids that my goats have. Color genetics has always fascinated me (I'm still kicking myself for not taking that Equine Genetics class in college. . .). Last year, Annie and Baerli totally stumped me.

The Alpine breed hails from France and their various colors get these pretty French names. I'll cover two in this post because these are the two colors that appear in my herd.
Baerli is what is called a Chamoisee color. Bri, Piper, and Tennessee are also considered "chamies".

Baerli is also what's known as a "snowbird" she's very light tan in color with white markings on her face, ears, and legs.

Bri - she's got a lot of grey shading in her color and dark grey/black around her neck and forelegs.

Piper is a darker chamoisee with more black on her face than the other girls.

When Baerli was bred to a buck with the same type of color, she had a buckling and a doeling that were also chamies.

The buck that Baerli was bred to her first year. This is called a "broken" chamoise because the white band around his middle and white legs breaks up his coloring pattern.

(Sorry for the goo-shot) The buckling in front - looks just like his dad! Notice the "frosted" ears, white on his face, white legs, and white band around his belly.

Bubbly - the doeling that Baerli had. She is a "true" chamoisee - black legs, black belly, insides of her ears are black, and no white anywhere.

So, last fall when she was bred to a buck of similar color to the last one she was bred to, I expected similar results. Only, that's not what we got. . . Baerli had triplets (surprise!). The two bucklings were "snowbirds" like Baerli, very light-colored and white ears and legs. But then where did the black doeling (who is now Miss Kay) come from? Chamoisee is usually a dominant trait, BUT Baerli's dad was black, and so was buck's mom. . .so, luck would have it that we wound up with a black baby in there.

Two snowbirds and a black cat, haha.

Phil (left), Miss Kay (center), and Si (being cleaned off by mom).

A better look at the color of Si, lots of white on his forehead and legs.

 Then, there's Annie. Annie's coloring is called Sundgau (some pronounce it sund-gow, some call it sund-goo). It's a black body with white markings on the face, legs, rear, and tail, and frosted ears. They can also have random white spots too. Miss Kay is also a sundgau.

Annie was bred to a dark chamoisee buck. I figured it was a toss-up as to what colors we'd get. Chamoisee is the dominant trait, but Annie had tended to kid with sundgau-colored kids in the past. But, surprise again. She delivered sooty-grey colored chamoisee kids.

Penelope (left) and Pistol (right)

Then there's Tennesse, or "T" as we call him.

Not a great shot, but it showed his coloring the best.

Like Piper, he's a darker chamoise (they drop the extra 'e' since he's a boy - it's a French thing). He's got lots of white splashes all over his legs and belly though and a funny spot on the top of his head and a cute snip right there on his nose. Last year, T got ahold of Bubbly (Baerli's first daughter pictured above) despite my best attempts at keeping them separate. This is what came out of that pairing:

Silly Maybel!

This is Maybel, she and Bubbly live with some neighbors and they just love her to death! I do too, she's a real sweetheart and look how pretty she is! She's lighter-colored with the true black legs and ears like Bubbly, but with flashy splashes of white on her legs and belly like T. I could expect similar results from Baerli's kids, BUT again - T's mom was sundgau-colored and so was Baerli's dad. Maybe we'll have another surprise like Miss Kay?


I didn't get to see Piper or Bri's kids from this year, so what their kids look like will be a total surprise! That's ok, I like surprises.

There hasn't been a lot of study done on color-genetics in goats like there has been in other livestock such as horses and cows. For the most part, it's not a bred-for trait. Serious breeders are looking for more important traits like proper conformation, milking ability, or resistance to diseases/parasites, or ease of kidding. I try to "breed up" each year - meaning that I try to find a buck that has stronger traits where my does are weak. T's biggest trait is that he comes from a long line of does that have nice, well-attached udders with lots of capacity (more room for more milk!). He will also add "dairy character" to my herd - basically meaning that his genetics should make the offspring from my girls more "pretty" and feminine looking with better traits for making more milk.

But I still like to try to predict the outcomes, kind of like guessing if a woman will have a girl or a boy, or if the baby will have one parent's curly dark hair, or the other parent's round blue eyes.

So, who wants to take a crack at it?
For each girl: How many kids do you think she'll have? (Remember, twins is the norm, but triplets aren't unusual!) How many boys/girls? Colors?

Here's my first guesses (they'll probably change several times):

Bri/Tennessee - Triplets - two does/one buck (she had triplet bucks last year), all broken chamoisee (like Maybel above).
Baerli/Tennessee - Triplets - two does/one buck, Chamie girls/Sundgau buck.
Piper/Fireball - Twins - one doe/one buck, both dark chamoisee
Annie/Tennessee - Twins - two bucks, . . . I'm still mulling over colors. . .

What do you think?

Woo-Hoo Fall!

Wow, so much has happened / is happening. . . Of course, it's the busy harvesting season in our neck of the woods which means a lot of scrambling for the farmers around here, including us. I've got a few ideas for blog posts lined up so hopefully I'll be able to write on a more regular schedule. As winter sets in, I'll have more time to write (mostly out of boredom, so be prepared for some ramblings. . . )

First off: HUSBAND IS HOME! He and another soldier from their unit were sent home early because the other soldier needed knee surgery and my husband was sent with him to make sure that he was taken care of and to try to ensure that his medical attention would take place as close to home as possible. The rest of the unit will come home in small groups over the next few months. This is a BIG help around here since FIL is trying to chop silage and he can get twice as much done with Hubs' help. Also, the cows are right in the middle of the fall calving season which means that milking takes longer as more cows freshen (have calves and start to produce milk). We'll have around 40 calves born from the end of August 'till about November or December. That also adds a lot of mouths to feed so that adds time to the milking time chores as well. With Husband home, I'm getting a little more help around the house, which means that in turn I can help out around the farm more. I try to help with the evening milking as many nights as I can since the guys are out all day chopping silage and they can make more use of their daylight hours.

The day after Husband got home (we're talking less than 13 hours), we were loading up animals into the trailer to take to Farm Day. I love Farm Day. It's an annual event that neighbor farmer's host for the nearby Kindergarten classes. This year was especially fun because Kindergartener was coming as a student! We take a milk cow and a calf or two and a few of my goats. Other farmer neighbors bring turkeys, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and piglets for the kids to see. It's a great day and I really like that some of the neighbor kids bring their animals to talk to the little kids about. The incentive is probably more in the fact that it's an excused absence from school as it's Ag and Education related. ;)

Baerli and Miss Kay demonstrating their super goat abilities - mostly eating. . .

That weekend I was on a solo road-trip (something I don't do very often and it's probably a good thing) and got a little. . .um. . . lost. Well, I knew where I was, but wasn't sure how to get to where I wanted to go. By the time I figured out a route - I was going to be too late to the event I was headed to. So I brought home a puppy to salvage the trip. Husband was (not) impressed.

Puppy Love.

Meet Buck. He's 3/4 Great Pyrenees/ 1/4 Anatolian Shepherd. He's a livestock guardian dog and will have the job of guarding the goats/chickens from predators like 'coons and coyotes and to ward off other intruders. We've been having more an more breakins in the neighborhood and our own home was even broken into a few weeks ago. While Cali our "guard dog" was asleep in the front yard. Yea. Poor Cali is blind in one eye and 1/2 deaf, we needed something a little more aggressive.
Buck has already bonded to Bo like super glue. And Bo loves him dearly. He also took to the little goat girls like he'd known them his whole life. He's fitting in well here.

A week later we took a much-needed family vacation to North Carolina. Of course, we would pick the one week that the government shuts down and the Smoky Mountain National Park was closed. . . oh well, we drove through it and still got to see some really awesome sights.

Mountain Selfie

Unfortunately, Buck had an accident while BIL and SIL were farm watching. It wasn't their fault and they acted quickly and took him to an ER Vet in a nearby city. Nothing could be found to be wrong with him other than being sore from the fall, but a week later when I took him to our vet for his first shots and a leg checkup, we found that his hip was broken. So, surgery was scheduled for the next morning and Buck came home this afternoon and is much happier for it. I dunno if Bo or myself was more excited to have him home. It might be a tie. Buck is recouping comfortably on the back porch until his sutures come out and then he'll be back to work out in the barn with his goat buddies.

As if all of this excitement wasn't enough,I found out that my bees had absconded (a.k.a. skipped town) sometime since I last checked on them. There's really no rhyme or reason to why they do this, but for whatever reason the queen decided that their current abode wasn't going to get them through the winter and took off. It looked like those who were left behind (who were probably out foraging when the queen took off and came home to an empty hive) were trying to raise a new queen, but it would have been for naught. It's too late in the season for the queen to be bred and the rest of the hive had eaten as much of the honey that they spent all summer storing up in preparation for their big move. The ones left behind won't make it through the winter. So, Husband and I made the tough decision to collect what honey we could and start over in the spring. Ok, so the honey kinda weighted that decision a little. . .Husband loves his honey. It was still tough taking all that food when I knew there were bees left in the hive. And they weren't going to give it up without a fight either. In a rookie mistake, I got cocky and didn't have my beeveil on when I opened up the hive. Took a sting to the eye. I look like Quazimoto from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. . .

But the honey was worth it.
I'll try to get a better honey-harvesting post put together later since this post is getting lengthy as it is. . .

There's definitely a truth to the saying, "Busy as bees." This is our semi-annual busy time of the year, where we're harvesting, storing, wood-chopping. . . the list is nearly endless and there's never enough that you can get done before Old Man Winter confines us to the house. Time to snuggle in and wait out the cold. . . I'll be spending most of my time making plans for the spring - deciding on how many goats to keep/sell once kidding is over, planning out the garden, coming up with new projects or working towards finishing others that didn't get done before the cold set it. How do you spend your winter?

My Pretties...

My little girls (the pullets) have started laying! I found two pullet eggs in the hay this morning while doing chores. I've always admired colored eggs. They're so naturally pretty and hardly ever are two eggs the same shade. I've had green eggs for several years now from my Ameraucana/Ameraucana cross girls. They've always been a muted pastel green or olive green color, nothing like the vibrant pastel blue/green egg that I fiind today. I'll call it aquamarine. And I have yet to have a green egg with white doors before. I've had brown spots on them before tho.
The little brown pullet egg isn't as dark aş a typical Cuckoo Maran egg, but it has the typical copper tinge to it. Their eggs tend to get darker as they age.
I can't wait to see what the rest of the little girls start laying!

The Weather

Did the summer fly by as quickly for you as it did for us? It was a good thing for me. As much as I hate to wish away life, anytime that The Husband is gone and time passes quickly is a good thing. Granted, it was more like that saying, "The days drag on, but the years pass quickly." Or something along those lines.

There's been a lot of talk about this year's winter forecast. According to the almanac (yes, I read it and I've found it's usually pretty accurate), we're to have a "biting cold" winter with lots of snow. Another forecast I saw said lots of early snow. I'm not really sure what they count as being early. In my neck of Indiana, a white Christmas isn't rare, but it doesn't happen often either. There's been other times when it's snowed on Halloween (Not fun when you're dressed as Princess Jasmin from Aladdin, just sayin'.). Indiana weather is crazy like that.

And true to Indiana fashion, strange things have been happening with nature's way of telling us it's going to be a doozy. Of course the usual hints, like the whooly worms being brown and extra fuzzy, are showing up. One Old Wive's Tale that I had yet to try was the persimmon trick. The first persimmon you find on the ground (our type of persimmons are the kind that have to fall off the tree before you know they're ripe enough), you cut it in half. If the core is in the shape of a shovel (or a spoon depending on which old-timer you talk to), you can expect lots of snow. We actually have several persimmon trees along the edge of what we call "The Walnut Grove" where we like to camp. I didn't realize this 'till last year after the persimmons were done. Husband pointed the trees out to me, but I'm not a tree master yet so I still couldn't tell one tree from another. A few weeks ago, I decided that I was going to figure out which ones they were. It wasn't too difficult once I found little fruits on them and took note of the shape of the leaves on the trees and the look of the bark. 'Course I didn't know what a persimmon really looked like either, but I knew they weren't walnuts. We had plenty of walnuts in the backyard at our previous house, a huge one right over my chicken coop and let me tell you - they ain't kiddin' about the amount of noise a walnut makes when it hits a hen house roof! Makes a sound like a gun going off right outside your bedroom window and loud enough to wake you up from a dead sleep if your windows are open. . .
So the other night I was out walking with the kids a noticed a ripe, dark orange persimmon laying on the ground. I was excited and all giddy and took it back to the house to dissect it. . .

I've also heard it that you split a seed down the middle and the same holds true. Let me tell you - persimmon seeds are not easy to split so if you try it, watch that you don't slice open a digit.

Seeing that we've also gone from 96* to 70* in two days, I'd say fall weather is finally starting to get a good grip. I'm excited. We barely had a fall last year during the drought, and even the winter was pretty mild.
I'm in the mood for bonfires, sweaters, apple cider, and all the other fun goodies of autumn. I love all the wonderful, mouth-watering smells of the gift shops and the stands at the Covered Bridge festival.

One smell I could do without is the smell of a buck in rut. If you've never had the pleasure of getting a whiff, you're not missing much. It doesn't even really "stink", but it is a strong, part must/part urine smell. Let's just say that Mr. Tennesse definitely has a "yang" to him now that the rut has started. Goats (well, the swiss breeds like my Alpines anyway) are seasonal breeders, meaning that they have a breeding season (like their cousin, the deer) instead of going into estrus year-round like humans. The goat breeding season starts as the weather starts to turn cooler, around mid-late August and goes 'till about mid-late February. Last year, with the drought, it was still HOT in October so there were a lot of does that got bred late last year because their cycles were fooled by Mother Nature.
Being that it is September, we're into the swing of things, and my goats know it. The girls have been flagging their tails, their hoo-has look all swollen and bright pink. . . they're playing "leap frog" with each other. At least that's what I tell the sensitive neighbors/kids. My kids know what's going on (REALLY glad that when the time comes to have the "birds and the bees" talk with them, it should be a fairly short conversation. . .), but they don't know why the girls are riding each other when the buck isn't around.  .  .
T (that's what we call Tennessee for short) is hanging out over at the big farm until I'm ready for him to do his "duty" (sometime next month, whenever the girls are in heat). Despite having a pen over here to keep him separated from the girls, the temptation would just be too much and there's a good chance he'd either find a way out of the pen to get to the girls before I've planned, or there's the chance of what I've witnessed where a buck will breed a doe through the fence. Yea. They're THAT good at what they do. . .
A goat's gestation lasts about 5 months, or 150 days. Does can kid anywhere within a week (or even two) before or after her due date, just like people. The closer a doe is to her due date, the better. There's a better chance that the kids are fully developed, but without getting too big and causing problems during kidding. I plan the girls' breedings so that they kid in March. January and February are just too cold for me, you can lose kids that are born in extremely cold weather, or they can end up like Miss Baerli and missing the tips of their ears/other extremities due to frostbite. March can still get pretty cold here, like it was last year, but winter is on it's way out and it's not much longer until spring arrives and nice green grasses and the babies can be let out with their mothers to play. Plus, I just don't like having to milk by hand in freezing temperatures.

Luckily the weather is in my favor this year, the girls are starting to go into heat pretty regularly and it shouldn't be hard to get them all to cycle (and hopefully settle - meaning become pregnant) in October so we'll have a bunch of bouncing babies next March. I'm interested to see what the girls throw for me. Last year, Annie had good-sized twins, a buck and a doe (Penelope). Baerli threw triplets that were almost as big as Annie's kids! Two bucks and a doe (Miss Kay). This will be my first year kidding with Piper and Bri. Last year, Piper had twin does and Bri had big triplet bucks during a marathon labor. Bri needed a lot of help from her owner at the time (a friend of mine who is a more experienced goat-breeder than I am). She is on my "watch like a hawk" list for kidding season in case she needs help again.

But, that's all 6 months down the road. Right now I'm just looking forward to fall fun!

Going it alone

When Husband and I discussed him leaving on a second deployment last year, I'll admit that I was nervous. Nervous doesn't quite cover it - more like anxious. I'm the type that gets knots in my stomach and feels queasy when I know something unpleasant is coming up. I never quite get sick, but if things don't go smoothly, I tend to panic. Well, that was the old me anyway. Seriously, the moment we moved out to the farm, my backbone started to thicken. It was slowly at first, but then took off quickly after I became a mom and Hubs was gone a lot for Army training stuff.
But I was anxious about this deployment. The last time Husband deployed, The Toddler (who will now be known as Bo) was just a newborn, Preschooler (who starts Kindergarten in the fall, eek!) was just a toddler, and I was bored as all get-out. We went to Walmart nearly every day - sometimes not even buying anything, just to get out of the house. We went to the neighbor kids' basketball and volleyball games like we had kids playing (I'm sure the other fans weren't as appreciative of my squirming, crying kids). I know, most women aren't bored with small children in the house, but housewife stuff bores me to tears. It wasn't like we had people over all the time so the condition of the house wasn't a real priority. My priority was surviving. I did what I had to do to get through the day. I wallowed in self-pity through the winter. I got up, fed the kids, fed the chickens and the dog, and then went back inside to obsess over my Farmville game.
When spring came and things started to warm up, Bo was big enough that we could go outside more and I wasn't hammered down to 2 hr feedings around the clock. I had researched getting into dairy goats all winter. I pestered Husband enough about it through email and Skype. Finally one day he said, "Babe, if you want to get a couple of goats, go for it, if that's what's going to make you happy."

So March 19th I went and bought three does, an Oberhasli named Moonpie, a Nubian/Toggenburg cross named Coco, and her 2 week old doe kid, Belle. I came home and fired off an email to Husband complete with pictures of my new prizes. I was SO excited I was giddy. Moonpie was supposedly bred and should have kidded in about a month (turns out she wasn't) and I had my first milking goat!

Moonpie

Bo, MIL, and Kindergartener (when they were 5 mos and 2 1/2) with Belle

Coco

The first thing that Husband wrote back was, "So I see you called my bluff."
But he TOLD me that I could get goats. He said - go get you some goats if it'll make you happy. Well, that's what I heard in my head anyway, but he's learned not to bluff so much if it's something that he really doesn't want to do because I WILL call him out on it.
(I've never been good at poker, I can never remember all the rules - but I do have a pretty good poker face when I want to.)
The rest of that deployment was a mess. There was way more hardship than one person should have to deal with, but my critters and my family kept me distracted enough to make it bearable. I became much closer to God that year and I know that He is the one who carried me through it all.

So this go-'round I was anxious. I liken it to when you go into labor with your 2nd child. That first contraction hits and all of the sudden all of the pain and agony comes rushing back to you and you think to yourself; "This, is gonna suck." Only this time, I have three small children ages 5 and under; the house is at least twice the size of our old one; we have 7 acres with (currently) 7 goats, 18 chickens, a beehive, and a 40'X90' garden; plus anywhere from 10-20 dry (cows that aren't making milk right now) on the place. I knew boredom wasn't going to be a problem and so far it definitely hasn't.
But now I was worried that I wouldn't be able to handle all of it. So far, I think I'm doing an OK job by myself. What I wasn't expecting was how much Help I would need.
Help is a four-letter word (duuuhhh...) in my book. I'm one of those who is more than willing to lend a hand to anyone who needs it. I'll jump up, load up the kids, and go load hay bales at a moment's notice before I'll ask someone to do the same for me. It's a pride issue and I have to work at getting over it. Thankfully, my church family, relatives, and neighbors know what's better for me than I do.
Like this spring, a neighbor came over with his small tractor and tilling attachment and tilled up my garden SO nicely! I didn't even have to ask him, he was doing his and another friend's and just did ours while he was at it. That was a life-saver because after cleaning out the goat barn and throwing it all on the garden, my little gas-powered tiller wasn't going to cut it (it took me an hour just to try to make one pass!).

The boys were SO excited that they got to drive!

Bo helping me plant a row of carrots (barefoot, of course!), the garden looked so nice then . . .

Then, Miss E decided that she didn't like the wallpaper in the dining room and started peeling it off the wall. . . I figured I might as well do the whole room then. I realized that the hole in the wall (that we knew about) where an old stovepipe went was bigger than I first thought. It was even bigger than my second guess was too. Luckily, another neighbor and good buddy, Tim is a carpenter and was looking for work at the time so he was home playing Mr. Mom. He brought his kids over (the same ages as Kindergartener and Bo) and got it patched up (and all the other holes we found in the 100 year old plaster) like it was new over the next couple of weeks. Which was very good, because I think Husband would have killed me if he came home to the mess I had started!

Before (you can see 2 of the three layers of wallpaper that was on the walls. . .)

After - I tried to pic a paint color close to the original paint color that was put on around the beginning of the 20th century.

And then there's times like yesterday when Tim's wife, Leah sent me a text saying she was coming over to help pull weeds in my garden.(On TOP of spending several days this year so far picking nearly 70 lbs of berries and making jams. . .) Which was lucky since that was what I was already doing at the time. Not too many people volunteer to come weed, but Leah's a good ol' girl like me and she's never been afraid of work or dirt. My garden had gotten away from me since I had been so busy and for a time was under a doctor's orders not to do any heavy lifting and no aerobic exercise (yea, THAT went over well. . .). But I'm in the clear now and the garden has been my concentration.

It's great neighbors and friends like that that make farms work. It's the same way on the Big Farm too - FIL borrows equipment from other farm neighbors, and he also helps others (mostly us!) when they need it. No one can do it "alone", whether you live in the middle of a big city or you live someplace similar to out here.
Sometimes I think I'm alone working in the garden, but it doesn't take long for Mother Nature to make me realize that even if there are no other humans around, God has sent little beings to help make my work Work.
I'm sure it's part of being American that we like to think that we can do it all ourselves. That we can achieve our dreams with our own blood, sweat, and tears. Don't get me wrong - it takes all of that, but we don't realized that we can spend all the blood, sweat, and tears 'till we're bone dry and it won't do any good if we don't have God. He is the one who makes our efforts fruitful, He is the one who can take it all away too.

When you've got God in your life, you're never going it alone.

Love

Look what Hubs sent me for our 7th anniversary! I LOVE it! Pretty much sums up our life (with some kids and critters in the background, ha).