Our journal of what we pray is our sojourn of life along the narrow way, even the old paths, submitting to the Bible as a light unto both.
The Lord has granted that our doe Winnie give birth to triplets, all males. Please meet Athos, Porthos and Aramis. This is Winnie’s second litter, and our pure-bred Nubian buck Shatner is the sire:
Here’s an introduction to them:
And the next evening them getting around (I’m a little out of breath at the beginning after running to get the camera):
We are once again grateful to God for His provisions of these goats, and the health He has graciously granted them and Winnie thus far.
— David
The Lord graciously granted Betsy, one of our nanny goats, to give birth to twins. They are pure Nubians. One is a male, the other a female; and so, please meet Donny and Marie. Here is a picture (Donny’s on the right, Marie’s on the left):
And here is a video:
They were born just before sunrise on a near freezing morning. Due to some confusion in our understanding of when new-born goats need to be up, around and suckling, we let them be for several hours. Well, for some reason Betsy didn’t clean them off, and when we checked on them again, they were still laying down, one struggling to get up stuck in the birth wetness. Needless to say, we got them up and cleaned out their little shed and put fresh hay in it. We went and looked up some new-born information in our goat books, and they indicated they needed to be up and suckling within 30 minutes. Sigh. They looked very weak, weren’t really up and about, and weren’t eating; and so, we decided to milk Betsy for her colostrum and bottle feed them. We did this a few times throughout the afternoon. Before our community meeting that night, we closed them into the shed because it was going to be a cold night again. After the meeting we checked on them, and they appeared to be walking around a bit and even latching on to Betsy’s teats a little, and so we decided to not interfere for the night. And we prayed.
Well, God was merciful, and in the morning they were up and standing when we let them out. We watched them throughout the day and saw that they indeed were suckling. Since then they’ve only gotten stronger and are now getting around quite well.
Here is another video:
We are thankful once again for the Lord’s provisions, and his mercies in allowing the new little ones to live and begin to grow healthy.
— David
Part of our plan for our animals was to rotate them through a set of pens, which would provide various types of fertilization in an effort to revitalize, improve and maintain the efficiency of the soil. Also, with the need to separate out our male goat from the female goats to control the breeding process, I decided it was time to add a couple more pens to our current set of two pens. Our neighbor Kelly was looking for some work, so we hired him to build these for us.
Before starting on the new pens however, some work needed to be done on the previous pens to bolster the support structure of the wood posts. On a few of them I had hoped to get away with just a single post without supports. Even though I didn’t stretch the fence that tightly, it still had been putting enough pressure on the posts to begin to pull out of the ground a little. And so Kelly added some “kickers” (the diagonal posts) and “dead men” support (the small posts to which the lower part of the diagonals are attached) to help with that problem. This also would set a better design precedent for the new pens. Further, in the way I designed the first two pens, I had the entry gates for each pen (which were 12 foot gates in order to allow for the driving through of the tractor and disk plows) next to each other so they would share a common post to which the opening side of the gate would latch. This was in order to try to use fewer posts. Although not perfect, this has seemed to work fairly well in being able to move animals from one pen to the other:
However, in adding the next two pens, we could use this same design between them; but if we were going to be able to move animals from pen 2 to pen 3, it would need to be done through gates that would be nearly 200 feet apart, which would probably require a pathway between those two pens. And so instead of that, Kelly added a gate to the side of pen 2 that would allow for free movement between it and pen 3:
Then he set to work on replicating pens 1 and 2 as pens 3 and 4. We plan on adding a 5th pen at some point, so he implemented the same pass-through on pen 4 that he added to pen 2:
We thank Kelly for his work, and once again for the Lord for His resources and provisions. We pray that God always guide and direct us in our decisions in how to build our homestead; and that, despite ourselves and any lack of understanding or foresight, He lead us to do the right things and to those that will work well in the future, for His glory.
— David
The Lord most graciously allowed yet another calf to be born to one of our cows. Introducing Leandro, which means “lion-man”; of course he’s not a man though :). Rosa gave birth to him this past Monday, and he is our first bull (male) calf:
Here is another picture of him:
And here is a video (which was shot Wednesday):
God is very gracious and merciful, and we are thankful for Him granting perpetuation provisions.
–David
The Lord in His graces and mercies granted a new little heifer (female) calf be born this past Sabbath (Saturday) to one of our cows, Amistosa. The calf has a little “dot” of white fur on her otherwise red (brown) head, and that reminded us of a East Indian princess, which apparently is not what the dot means and was just an improper perception we had; but we decided to go with it anyway, so please meet Sarita, which means “princess” in Spanish. She was up and about following her mother in just about 6 hours, we figure.
Her mother’s name means “friendly” (because she has been from the moment we got her), and it appears this little one picked up the gene, because she walked right up to us, which allowed us these pictures:
And this video:
We are very grateful once again to God and His many provisions.
— David
Currently, our only pig pen area is the place set up with the farrowing shed. One day if the Lord wills, we hope to have pigs as part of an animal rotation scheme. But until then, I thought it might be beneficial to try to allow the pigs in the farrowing area to semi-free range (allow them out of the pen but still keep them controlled) where there was grass and other eatables available. This hopefully would also help us cut back on the store-bought feed. Michael had done this with his pigs by surrounding a forage area with electric fence driven by solar power, and so I thought I’d go the same route.
For us, this involved pounding rebar stakes into the ground every 12 or so feet apart, pounding metal T-posts at the corners, attaching the proper plastic electric fence wire insulators for rebar and T-posts, and then running the electric wire. Here is a picture of the fence:
And here is a reverse pictured of the same area:
In running the first wire strand, I found that I needed to attach the plastic insulators for the T-post corners after running the main fence wire through them. If you wire them to the corners before hand, which I did and initially thought was just part of a good preparation process for running the fence wire, there was no way to then actually run the fence wire through them when running the wire off of a spool. So I had to undo and redo the wired corners as the wire was run by. Oops. I did however get it right on the second strand.
But once the wire was run, it was time to hook up the solar powered electric fence power source. Part of wiring it up was driving into the ground a 6′ galvanized rod for grounding:
Oh Give Me a Home
In considering the distance between the ground and each of the fence wires, I set the plastic wire holders attached to the rebar about one middle finger to thumb hand span above the ground and then then same span above that for the second wire. Well, once we turned the system on and let the pigs out, apparently not only did we agitate them too excitedly for the moment, but the upper wire just said “doorway” to the pigs; and they both proceeded to hurtle between the two wires and off into the field.
Well, after chasing them back into the pen area, and with the obvious fence failure, I was unsure as to how to proceed. However, I decided to try lowering the top wire half the span between it and the lower wire; and also thought that when we would let them out we would try to make sure they weren’t stirred up so much.
That seemed to help. Here they are discovering their new roaming land:
And…well, I guess things are all right now:
We once again thank the Lord for His provisions and wisdom, insight and help with the processes of building our homestead.
— David
In trying to separate from dependence upon the world, we are hoping and praying that the Lord will perpetuate our animals here, so that we may have ongoing provisions, according to His will. These will be updates on any the Lord has graciously granted.
Chickens
The same hen that has gone broody every year so far did again this year. A hatching cycle is 21 days, and you can almost set a clock by it. She sat through one cycle of our eggs with no chicks hatching. Last year she sat through another cycle of eggs that didn’t hatch before we borrowed eggs from the Bunkers to put under her for her third cycle (which worked last year). This year we didn’t wait, and the Bunkers graciously allowed us to have some more of their eggs to put under her in the second cycle. And sure enough, the Lord graciously brought forth 2 chicks!
Here they are still pretty new:
How’s that for a blanket!
Here they are recently:
“Momma always says…”
“‘Life is like a bag of hen scratch. You never know what you’re gonna get.'”
Taxi, please!
Goats
Here’s the latest of Winnie and Minnie:
Don’t let Minnie’s mature act here fool you in this up close and personal moment – she still likes to jump all over Sue’s back:
Pigs
The Lord graciously granted our female pig to give birth to 5 piglets mid June. In His wisdom though, one was still born, and 2 more died within a week or two. However, again by God’s graces, we still have two healthy piglets running around, both which we believe are females.
Here they are lined up for a photo op:
And here’s up close and personal with the pigs, although I think a little too up close and personal for the sows liking. In the second part of the video though, I got smart and recorded from the outside of the pen:
Actually, I think she thought it was watering time. 🙂
Once again, we are grateful to the Lord for His provisions!
— David
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