What Are Your Days Like?

A Sunday morning

First – a happy mothers’ day to all you moms out there!

Posts in this category will be summaries of days, mornings, etc. around the farm. When we were just reading other peoples’ small farm adventures, we found these sort of posts really helpful.

7am the sun wakes me up. Moist, cool, and a little gray.

Caffeinate self, read wild plant field guide in the early sun. Until it rains and I finish under a canopy.

Milk/feed/hay/mineral/water/etc the goats, wincing at the loud “BLA BLA BLA!” and “MEEHEHHEHHEHHEH!” of a mother doe and her kids asking to be reunited (older kids who are eating a lot of solid food are separated overnight so we can get some milk too). We have very patient…or possibly deaf…neighbors.

Make breakfast – fried bantam eggs; grits cooked with molasses, bacon fat, salt,butter, and raisins.

Supplement caffeination, check email.

It’s sunny out! Mess with fencing around the new pasture for about 20 minutes before it gets dark and starts to pour.

It’s raining out! Stop by the buried metal drum full of damp sand that protects our root veggies through the winter. Grab a few handfuls of carrots, dash home.

Start a pot of beef stew with the carrots and a dozen other things in it, make a batch of feta cheese, start a 5-gallon batch of experimental light ale bittered with the tender green growing tips of Douglas Fir trees instead of hops. It’s only midafternoon, warm and sunny now, and after all that brewing the keg of porter I made previously is beckoning…nah, I’ll crap out by 6pm if I do that.

Compose blog post about my day thus far. Include a redundant sentence mentioning that I composed the blog post, followed by another sentence that adds even less to the narrative – and which carries the implied threat of a semantic endless loop, like what you’d see if you pointed a video camera at its own monitor.

Ponder the possibility that blogging about the day’s work might be a subconscious mechanism to convince myself that the day has already been so productive that I can take a beer and a book down to the river, sit in the sun, and relax.

Stop idly philosophizing and get out there to plant the rest of the taters!

Goats, Pets and Livestock

One giant buckling, one traumatic birth

Three nights of very little sleep, thinking she was going into labor. Today, finally, in labor. All day. Single birth. Giant kid, with really giant head. First-time goat mama, with really tiny birth canal. Head stuck. Amniotic sac burst. Me pulling while she’s pushing. Mama goat hollering. Can’t budge head. Mama goat tiring, stopping. Kid’s tongue turning blue. Thought we’d lost him. Still not sure how we finally got him out of there. Wonderful surprise to find him still alive. Choking and wheezing on aspirated amniotic fluid. Swung him several times, now seems fine. He’s a little firecracker. Mama Lulu is tired and torn, but seems happy with her brand new baby. Did I mention he’s huge?

Goats, Pets and Livestock

Zoe’s twins are here!

Two little doelings, one black and one bay; born at about 5:15 or 5:30 this morning. The black girl came out first, frank breech (butt first). Zoe was a trooper – that couldn’t have felt good! It took us a minute to figure out what we were seeing – most often the kids come out in a “diving” position, front feet and head first, so we were looking for a pair of hooves and perhaps a nose. When we first saw a “blob” with no hooves, we thought we were seeing the head and that the front legs were bent back. In that case, it’s important to gently reposition one or both legs so that the baby doesn’t get stuck at the shoulders. So, I scrubbed up, lubed, and (gently!) went in. I had to feel around for a minute to realize that what I felt was not the head, but the butt. Meanwhile, Zoe was still pushing, but the baby seemed to be stuck at the vulval opening. While Peter held Zoe and encouraged her, I used my lubed hands to gently help her vulva open wide enough for the baby’s big butt and back legs to make their way out.

With a breech birth, there’s more of a danger of the baby aspirating some of the amniotic fluid, so as soon as she was fully out we moved quickly to clear her mouth and nose of any fluids. Then Peter held her up by her back legs and (again, gently!) swung her back and forth. This is a trick we learned from our friend and goat mentor to ensure that any fluids that may have entered her lungs are drained back out. This all happened in the space of only a minute or two, and immediately after we plunked her down on a towel in front of mama Zoe, so she could get down to the business of cleaning off her new daughter.

While Zoe licked and cleaned and Peter towel-dried the newborn, I turned my attention back to the two little hooves showing at Zoe’s back end. They were back hooves, meaning that this baby was coming out footling breech (back feet first). So, this one would also need to be “swung”. She came out smoothly, a tiny little thing, and we once again worked quickly to get her mouth and nose cleared. But we couldn’t swing her – her umbilical cord was thick and twisted around and around on itself, and only a few inches long. It had not broken or separated on its own, so she was still attached to her mama’s insides. Did I mention it was only a few inches long? We couldn’t move her, couldn’t swing her, couldn’t even get her out of the now chilling puddle of amniotic fluid in which she was laying. I held her and rubbed her vigorously to try to warm her while Peter grabbed dental floss and scissors from our birthing kit. He used the floss to carefully tie off her cord in two places, and then cut the cord in between. He immediately swung her to clear her lungs and placed her on a clean dry towel in front of Zoe. Zoe went to work cleaning her up while we rubbed her vigorously with towels, both to get her dried off and to get her warmed up and get her blood pumping. At about this time we noticed that she was bleeding quite a bit from her umbilical cord, so we tied it off again, as tightly as we could.

It took a little while to get this second little girl warmed to the point where she was no longer shivering, but surprisingly, she was the first to go for the teat. She was determined to get her colostrum! Zoe didn’t know what to make of this at first and kept moving away, but once her little girl latched on and started guzzling away she settled right down.

We began cleaning up while we waited for Zoe to pass her placenta. While scooping up the sopping towels and fluid-soaked straw (birth is messy!), we also kept an eye on the little black doeling, who hadn’t yet nursed. Once we had helped her to find the teat and we saw that she got a good dose of colostrum, we packed out our birthing kit and garbage and brought Zoe some grain and alfalfa and a fresh bucket of hot water (Peter had already brought her a bucket of hot water with molasses immediately after she finished kidding; she sucked most of it down right away).

At this point all that was left to do was to dip each kid’s umbilical cord in iodine, in order to prevent infection. We poured our iodine solution into a pill bottle, picked up the first kid, dipped her cord into the bottle, and then tipped her over onto her back with the bottle pressed firmly to her belly. This ensures that the iodine coats the entire area. We repeated the process with the second kid, and then left mama and babies to rest and bond.

And, oh yeah – about that placenta? Zoe, smart mama that she is, ate most of it. What little bit she left went to the dog. Nothing goes to waste on the farm!

Goats, Pets and Livestock

Goodbye rascally boys; enter new goat babies!

Our beloved and rascally Reepicheep and Pattertwig (now known as Waylon and Willie) went to their fantastic new home a couple of weeks ago. We miss them, but we know that they are being treasured and loved by their new keepers. We feel so grateful to have found such wonderful homes for both sets of twins we’ve sold over the past few months. (The above photos were taken on a sunny day in January; the bottom one is the two of them with their mama, Drama Queen.)

But don’t despair, ye lovers of baby goats: our little Zoe (Aberdeen’s daughter from 2009, now not so little anymore) appears to be in the beginning stages of labor. Soon there will be cute goat baby photos yet again! (We know that’s the only reason y’all come here…)

(For those of you that are actually still reading, apologies for yet another long absence – it was a crazy winter for us, but we’re hoping to be much more regular with posting now and maybe even catch up on some back posts we’ve wanted to write!)

General Homesteading, Goats, Pets and Livestock

Barnabas and Clarisse

Barnabas and Clarisse, Aberdeen’s kids from this spring, are the first of our goats that we’ve ever sold. It was hard, but we don’t have the space, money or time to keep all of the goats that have been and will be born here. In order to produce milk, the mamas need to have babies. (And also for their own health ? unbred does can have a tendency to put on weight.)

So far, all of Aberdeen’s offspring have inherited her sweet and gentle personality. We sure do miss those two, but oh boy did they (and we) luck out ? they went to a fantastic home, where I suspect they’re receiving even more scritches and nose-kisses than they did here.

If you want to see them in their new surroundings, click the link below (posted with the permission of their wonderful new caretaker).

Tumalo Bed & Biscuit ? Dog Boarding in Bend, Oregon

(And if you’re ever in the Bend, Oregon, area and have a need to board your dog, something tells me that Tumalo Bed & Biscuit would be the place to do so!)

Goats, Pets and Livestock

Perfect mini dairy goat starter pair SOLD!

Update Nov 2: Barnabas and Clarisse have left for their wonderful new home (where, I’m confident to say, they will be spoiled rotten). Drama Queen’s two little boys have also been spoken for, but we’ll have more goat babies coming in the spring!

Update Oct 27: We are pretty sure that Barnabas and Clarisse have found their happy home, but we will leave the ad up until they’re gone just in case. We will also be selling a pair of Oberian wethers in a couple of months, beautiful boys with intact horns. We would prefer that they go together.

Clarisse and Barnabas are a six-month-old sister/brother pair of 3rd generation Oberian (Mini-Oberhasli) dairy goats looking for a loving home.

Gentle Clarisse will make a wonderful family milk goat ? her dam is an easy milker and currently giving us well over a half-gallon a day with only minimal grain supplementation.

Barnabas is a wethered (“fixed”) male, and is her best friend. Wethers are the friendliest goats, and this little cutie is no exception. We want these two to go together, as goats are social animals (a goat alone is a miserable goat) with very strong sibling bonds.

Our goats are dam-raised until weaned, but very friendly due to frequent interaction with humans. Their main diet is a mix of organically maintained pasture and local grass hay. We use gentle herbal wormers and have never had to resort to chemical ones.

Clarisse has a scur (incompletely removed horn) that lays back along the top of her head, and Barnabas has two that are shaped like full horns but smaller. Their dam (on-site) and sire are both from Mystic Acres Farm’s Oberian lines.

They are available as a pair for $175.

Clarisse

Clarisse

Barnabas
Cheese Making, Cooking, Food Preservation, General Homesteading, How To, Sustainability

Snapshots from a typical Fall day on the farm

Cheesemaking is kicking into high gear?we’re freezing a lot of chevre to enjoy later when the milking slows down, and here’s the beginning of a farmhouse cheddar:

I screwed up the last batch of beer and foolishly didn’t brew for a while.  Our homemade beer (when it works, which it usually does) is much tastier than what we buy at the store, and ends up costing about half as much. 

Here’s five gallons of soon-to-be-porter bubbling away:

Last year, we got a freeze in early September that took out all the tomato plants, and Teri made a lot of green tomato ketchup.  This year, none of the main (Brandywine) tomato crop had turned red by that point, and my dreams of pasta sauce seemed to by dying?but the past month has been mostly sunny and warm, and we’re bringing in five-gallon buckets every few days. 

Though we aren’t entirely dependent on our homegrown food, it’s probably saving us a couple of thousand dollars a year now, so I have a little more appreciation for how much people doing this in the past were subject to the whims of the weather?and for what a joy it is when one’s hard work is rewarded with abundance:

In a break from my usual “functionality IS the aesthetic” carpentry ethic, I’ve made a tea table to go alongside my desk (I hate having beverages and food on the same surface as my computer).  The top was from a rough-cut slab of some unknown hardwood that I got a bunch of for free because of “imperfections”, and the base is something that was left behind when the electric co-op trimmed around the power lines. 

It’s beautiful wood?but I didn’t know that when I got it, so most of it is incorporated into the chicken coop.  Now that I’ve seen it sanded and sealed, I think I’ll be pulling the rest of it off the coop to make things from (don’t worry chickens, I have plain old fir boards to replace it).  Anyway, here’s the table, which I’m quite pleased with:

Closeup of the wood:

Worky work work!  In addition to all this, there are of course the daily chores such as caring for livestock, cooking, keeping the fire going, earning a living, etc?but some other farm residents have more sensible priorities; I leave you with “Snail Love”: