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.

More New Farm Friends!

Pepper and Skylark - half sisters (they shared the same mom) and our herd matriarchs.

We would like to welcome Skylark and Pepper to the crazy world of our tiny farm! These two half-sisters are Nigerian Dwarf does. Skylark is the one with the blue eyes and she is 3 years old. Pepper is the smaller all black goat and she is only two and has never been bred. Both are super sweet and we are pleased to have them as the founding members of our Nigerian Dwarf herd.

Yes, you read that correctly. We've finally decided that it's time to do what makes the most sense for our land/space and our goals so we are changing our goat herd. We will be keeping Buddy as a companion goat (he's our Pygora wether) but Sass is going to a new home.

We met a couple who operates a CSA a few towns north of us (near where I work, actually) last summer and they have a few goats already. They include the occasional homemade goat cheese in their CSA shares. I forget which breeds they currently keep, but they are not the heavy producer that Sass is, so they are excited to have her join them. She'll have a wonderful home where she will get to breed and where she will have other full sized goats to keep her company. Plus, we can visit her! We are not selling her as this isn't about profit - we just want her to have a good home. We plan to be clear about the fact that if their situation changes and they can no longer keep Sass, then we'll take her back. I think she'll have a great time there, actually!

We are also investigating our Nigerian Dwarf buck options at the moment. We may opt to keep one on site someday, but for now, we just need stud service. Nigerian Dwarfs cycle all year round, so our plan is to try and get Skylard bred at the end of March so that she'll birth in late August. Then we will breed Pepper sometime after that so that she'll kid in the spring. From there, we don't know what our plans are, but we are excited about our new decision.

More updates!

Plum tree confusion - it's spring, right?? It sure feels like spring.

We've had a couple of spring-like days lately (following an unusually warm winter), so it's forcing us to kind of take stock of where we are and where we plan to go this year. Since my last major update post, we've made some small progress.

We cross-fenced our goat area and moved the goats to the non-muddy side for the winter. Then we reseeded the other side. The warm weather and sun over the past week has finally sprouted the grass and with any luck, it'll keep growing even though winter weather has kind of returned. This new cross fencing basically puts the goat shed on the dividing line between each area, so that when it's time to switch, we just move one cattle panel and the shed will now be accessable from the other side. We also added an overhang to the goat shed. We wanted to do something more permanent, but considering that we are still planning on building a barn, we opted for a quick fix. My husband sunk two 4x4 posts in front of the shed and then we extended a tarp between them and the front of the shed above the door/opening. This gives the goats a little more protection from rain besides just hanging out inside the shed. I'll take pictures this weekend.

Speaking of sheds and a new barn - we've formed a plan. We purchased plans for a saltbox type shed from a book we bought and we are going to build it this spring. This new shed will then house our gardening supplies that are currently in the rundown shed that came with the property. Once we can move everything over, we will shore up the old shed to be housing for meat chickens (assuming we can get all this done in time). This works out really well because the old shed is smack in the middle of our 'orchard' which is great place to range meat birds. Additionally, building this shed from plans by ourselves will give us the practice we need because our ultimate goal is to build our own barn. So far, we haven't found the perfect barn design yet (it needs to be small but versitile), but we have time. We are also talking about how to set up a mini solar PV system (complete with batteries and an inverter) to power the shed/greenhouse and again, as practice so that we can do our own work to power the house one day (or, to at least speak with some experience when we hire someone).

On the animal front: we do plan on raising meat birds eventually. Additionally, we are now raising 5 more laying chickens - any cockrels of which will be meat as well - for eggs. We are painting the new chicken coop (we needed more space) and I will have pictures of that to share this weekend. We are also currently without goat milk. We dried off Sass late this past fall and we did not breed her. When she finally went into estreus when we were around to observe it, we were too late. The local family who had the buck we used last time had already sold him! In some ways, I think this was probably not a bad thing for us. We've been debating switching to a smaller breed (Nigerian Dwarf) goat and this might be our opportunity. I don't know what we'll do with Sass. I know of a couple of local farmers that might be interested in her, so that's a possiblity. We also might just keep her around - we've gotten kind of attached to her. We'll see. It is clear that our property really is better suited to the little goats, particularly if we hope to one day be fully self-sustaining.

Lastly, I received a new camera for my birthday! I'm so excited because I was really getting tired of fighting with my old point and shoot to get even passable photos for this blog. The new one is great - totally automatic or totally manual with tons of options. It's weakness is low light conditions but it does have an on-board flash. It also has a decent video capability, so I will try to capture short clips for the blog when appropriate. I finally got a good sized memory card on order because I'm dying to capture Maggie and Cooper 'fighting' together - it's great fun to watch!