Photos, photos and more photos!!

I have photos!! Today, instead of being my usual wordy self, I'm going to share a few photos with comments.

The chicks are now just over a week old. They are growing like mad! They've now figured out how to perch (we gave them a little perch to play on) and how to 'fly' to the top edge of the box and out onto the garage floor. We will be finding a new box as a brooder this weekend.

This is our goat lean-to that H is building. It still needs a left wall, a front wall (partly) and the shingles on the roof. I'm also going to build a hay trough inside of it so that the hay will stay dry. The post to the right is an old fence post we found that we put up to hold the buckets of water and hay for Sassafras.

This is the milking stand that I built. It works very well! We need to permanently attach the feeding bucket still, but so far so good. What I didn't think about when building this was the size of our goat. I made sure her head would fit...but I didn't consider her length. She barely fits on it! Alpines are one of the largest dairy goats, and at over 100 lbs, I think Sass is a pretty good sized one!

This is the compost bin that H built. He used the left over wood/boards from a couple of shipping crates built by our movers. The blue and white stickers say 'fragile'. It's important to have your compost appropriately labeled, right? ;-)

And this was this morning's surprise...buffalo! We knew that they used the field behind our house for grazing, but we hadn't seen them yet. Today, Sass alerted us to their presence. This is a bad photo because they weren't actually behind our yard, but behind our neighbors. Cool, huh?

As I mentioned yesterday, this weekend's goals are two-fold. 1) get a fence up and 2) get the garage cleaned out and the yard sale pile started. I'd also like to get Sass a friend if we have time. Oh, and I discovered a good place to get my yogurt started! H has a few computers set up in his office that generate decent heat. One is a server that is running all the time, so I think that a jar wrapped in a towel sitting on top of it should be just right to incubate some yogurt cultures. I'll be giving that a shot this evening. The 'ice cream' I made the other day tasted great, but the consistency left something to be desired. I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for a hand-crank ice cream maker. I think that would make all the difference. I'm imagining the same vanilla goats milk ice cream topped with fresh blackberries from our yard. What an awesome August treat!