Goat babies are here again!

Skylark and her new babies a couple of hours after their birth.

On Tuesday, August 31st...one day after the date I predicted, Skylark gave birth to two baby goats. One girl and one boy. The girl is a sweetheart in almost the exact color markings as her mom (the black kid in the photo) and the boy is mostly white with some black markings. Both are very playful and curious. We anticipate that the boy will eventually be a handful as he's already the more adventurous one. The boy is slightly larger and is older by about 20 minutes.

On Monday, I expected that Skylark was going to be delivering soon. I actually hesitated to go to work on Tuesday morning as my H was still out of town until about noon and I had a feeling she was close. Luckily, she held off until the afternoon until after he'd gotten home. I'd cleaned out the goat shed that morning and left him a note to fill it with fresh straw when he got back. He went out to do just that and goat baby number one was already here and being cleaned off my mom! He threw some straw in the shed and called me at work to let me know. A few minutes later, goat baby number two arrived! What a huge difference from the events of this night, huh? As it turns out, Skylark is a great mom, so we had to do very little at all.

So now we have three things that we need to take care of right away. The first is getting them disbudded. Our disbudding iron is for larger goats, so instead of buying a new one immediately, we've located a woman that will do it for us. She also said that she can do these small breed goats with a full sized iron, so I'd like to watch in order to learn. The difficulty is that we don't yet know if either of these goats will have horns! Skylark has had polled babies before when bred to a polled buck ('polled' means that they naturally have no horns) so there is a good chance that one or both of these babies won't have horns at all. That would be AWESOME because disbudding really, really sucks. It's far worse than weathering the boys (castration) as far as I'm concerned. Rick may feel otherwise! ;-) This is partly why we haven't bred Pepper yet. She is polled and you cannot breed a polled goat to another polled goat or you get other potential deformities. The farm where we bought these two had only two bucks. One was polled (the one we bred to Skylark) and the other was Pepper's sire (can't do that combination!).

So now we need to get Pepper bred. Our plan is to get her bred soon so that she'll deliver in the spring and if we keep rotating like this, we'll have milk year round and babies twice a year! I've found a buck for Pepper who is actually colored exactly like her and who is not polled. Once we arrange a date, we'll take her to the bucks residence for a couple of weeks. She's never had babies before, so hopefully it'll go smoothly and she'll be a good mom.

Thirdly, we need to prep for milking. For the first two weeks, the babies get all the milk, but then we'll separate them at night and milk Sky in the morning (until they get weaned). There are two issues with this. First of all, Sky is much smaller than Sass was and this means that her udders are very close to the ground. There is no room underneath her for our old milking pail. It's too tall! I've found a shorter one that might be a good option for us, so we need to get that ordered. Secondly, since Nigerian Dwarf milk is twice as rich as Alpine milk, we'll need a seperator (or I'll never be able to drink it!). Sass' milk was probably about 3% milkfat (whole cows milk is 4%). Nigerian Dwarf milk can be 6 - 7% milkfat! That'll be like drinking half-half! Ick! The seperator we used when we had Sass was 1) too big - we'd have to collect milk for a week before skimming and 2) not working properly. We've found another one that will probably work, but I need to do a little more investigation first. We will certainly have no trouble making butter and cheese with this milk, that's for sure! Oooh, and ice cream too! Yum!

So all of this plus one more triathlon (Sat, Sept 4th) and the need to do some serious harvesting/canning/drying of both our produce and the local peaches that I want to buy and you have a recipe for a very busy holiday weekend.

Sunday Projects

We had a nice long list of projects to complete today, but to be reasonable, we prioritized them and expected that not everything would get done.

First order of business was to skim some more milk. We now do about 8 quarts at a time as I just don't have the storage containers for more than that. We moved the separator from the workbench in the basement up to the 'desk' in the kitchen. This made a HUGE difference in the 'dread factor' as the process is MUCH easier when it's in the kitchen and I won't be dreading the next batch when the time comes. Bascially, we have to warm the milk up to 100F. I do this while my H assembles the unit. Then while he's turning the crank, I pour 4 quarts of HOT water into the feed bowl. As H turns the crank, this water flows through the unit to heat up all the machinery.

Hot water running through the machine to warm it up for the skimming process.

Then, once all the water is out, I pour the warmed milk into the feed bowl. When the crank is turned at a consistant speed, we get cream out one spout and skimmed milk out the other. While this is going on, I have to keep track of how full each contatiner is getting so that we don't overflow anything. We end up with 2 half gallon ball jars of skimmed milk, one half gallon pitcher and a little more than a quart of milk to freeze. We also get about 2 cups of fresh cream. The last batch went towards making butter (which is delicious) and this batch will go towards making ice cream later this week.

Milk getting separated: skimmed milk on the right, cream on the left

We also had 'working on the chicken coop' on our list for today. While I cut a pattern for a light floor out of cardboard, my H began work on building nesting boxes. We have 12 chickens, so we need 3 boxes (4 per box). We suspended the boxes in the coop so that they were essentially using 'wasted' space. We are also going to put down a heavy duty cardboard floor next weekend. We are waiting because we are still 'collecting' the chicken poop for the garden. Once we move it off the garden, we'll install the floor and fill it with shavings. This will allow the coop to get a little warmer now that winter is moving in quickly. The floors will not be permanent, so come next spring, we can remove them and start the rotation around the yard once again.

Nesting boxes - filled with pine shavings and ready for eggs!

Lastly, I continued work on winterizing our row garden area. We've already covered the entire area with quite a bit of chicken poop by methodically moving the coop across it, one week at a time. Then we covered each poop-laden area with either soiled hay from the goat shed, or with leaves from the apple trees. Lastly, we are laying cardboard over everything. We figure that this will allow moisture to soak in, but it will retard the growth of grass and weeds. In the spring, we'll remove the cardboard and get to planting.

Row garden area: back left is covered with black plastic from last summer (to kill weeds), back right (near white posts) is garlic planted under pine straw mulch. The front left is where the coop was last - still needing straw or leaves before we cover with cardboard. Right front is the area that we covered today.