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?