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. ;)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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