After mostly finishing the barn loft platform, and then doing so after putting in some steps, we were finally able to move more ground-floor stuff we’ve had in the barn up to the loft so we could get the second barn stall in place. This was the plan all along, since we have two sets of goats during breeding time, which is during the winter when we would most likely need for them to have extra shelter.
What was nice was I was able to essentially copy exactly the first barn stall, and when I bought the materials for that one, I had just doubled the materials in preparation for the second, and so I already had all of the supplies needed.
You can see more details of the process in that first barn stall blog post, but here a few pictures from this one. The long boards had been standing on the ground so long, some of them getting moist, that termites had eaten out at least one of the ends, but it was still usable after cutting off the bad part:
As I mentioned, the purpose of these stalls is to bring in our goats during cold or extreme weather. I added large eye hooks along the side boards to be able to hook each of them up to hopefully keep the chaos to a minimum, and here is a video during one of our fairly drastic (for us) cold snaps we recently had, with them all hooked up in place. Thankfully, it appears to have worked out very nicely, and we are thankful to the Lord!
We are very grateful to God for granting we be able to finish this part of the homestead and barn, and to have a better place of refuge for our goats. Their exposure up in the fields has been a concern for us over the years, and it’s a relief to be able to bring them into the barn now.
Recently, it was time to put our billy goats and nannies together for breeding time this 2016!
The following is a video of the event. As I mention in the beginning of the video, our buck Shatner had some problems coming out of our first cold front of the season. It appeared he spent the night sitting in his urine, and the temperature had reached freezing. He was quite cold in the morning and was having trouble standing. He did seem to bounce out of it, and was shown here in the video around the time, but sadly, shortly after the first part of the video was made, Shatner went down hill and soon died. We were both there with him at the very end. He was a good buck, our first, made many kids, and we are thankful to the Lord for granting him to us. Also mentioned in the video, our other buck Rocky has a growth on his back leg, which seems to be slowing him down, although it did appear the other day he is able to get the job done:
With one of our two bucks gone, we were hoping to find a new one, leaning more toward the Lamancha breed with the hope of more milk production. Graciously and with one look at an internet selling list page, there was a young Lamancha buck available in the general area — wow! I contacted the owners, and went and got him the next day. Here he is in the back of the truck just after arriving back after picking him up on that cold morning, and sticking with the famous “Billy” names, we decided to call him Shakespeare:
His previous owners said he could jump fences, and he indeed did one time as he was roaming out of the pen. But the silly billy (pun intended 🙂 ) tried again to jump the fence but this time caught his back hoof in the top square of the net-wire fencing, so when he went over, the top vertical wire next to his leg bent up and over the top wire pinching his leg in place. Thankfully, Sue was there, and we were able to cut the wire pretty quickly with only a little, mostly external damage, although it seems to have shaped him up a little with fence jumping. 🙂
Here is his video when we put him in with his nannies. You can sure tell he is younger by his immediate interest level 🙂 :
We are always thankful to God for granting we be able to have the goats and the milk. We thank Him for Shatner and the offspring from him, and for Shakespeare now, and the continued health, safety and provision He has granted for the goats and the homestead, and pray He might grant those continue, and for healing for Rocky, according to His will!
We’ll take you around the horn here introducing them, and we do so again in the video below. See if you can guess from where we got some of the names… 🙂
Here is Nellie on the left with Eva and Zsa Zsa:
Behind the black goat on the right next to the camper wheel is Adeline and left to right her kids Arnelle, Adelle, and Alex:
On the right is Marie, and her kids left to right Maggie, Marianna, Adeline’s Alex from the previous picture, and Marco:
Here is Pammy on the left, and her kid Peggy underneath the camper:
On the right here is Gracie. Next to her is Eddie, then Theodore, and in the back in the middle next to the barn is Wally:
Here is Wally again in the front, then on the left is Annie, with Frankie next to her and Annette to the right of him:
Behind Annie in the background is Hannah with her buck Haney:
On the left in front is Lucy, and behind her is Boris, and behind the camper steps is Natasha:
And finally, here is Winnie, whom I call “your highness.” Still the queen of the group if she wants to be, but getting older, and this year she didn’t get pregnant, which we don’t mind because we’d rather have her around than die in kid birth:
And here is their video:
As always, we are very grateful to God for the kid crops, and for this year’s, and we are extra thankful for the health and safety of all of the mothers and kids!
Mid November means it’s time for our goat bucks to go to work and earn their keep! 🙂 Breeding time!
Here are all of the goats tied up for milking. We kept them here while we moved the sheds. Last year, we showed the moving of the sheds, although now I start the shack caddy inside the first goat pen and drag it into the destination pen, all the way to just about where they’re going to be set—it’s much easier that way. 🙂
Shatner’s ready!
And Rocky!
And Sue’s bringing our first customer!
And the full action of the move is in this video:
We are grateful to the Lord for granting the continued health and safety of the herd, and the opportunity once again to try to breed them. We ask He might grant what He might come Spring time, in accordance with His will!
We had some late arrivals with our goat kids this year, but we are thankful for the two more kiddings the Lord graciously granted! Below is the departure of the main herd of kids, and also some of the goat goings-on around the farm, for your entertainment. 🙂
The Kids
Winnie gave birth to a little buckling! She had been having quite a bit of rumen problems last year, and we think that’s why she was delayed in giving birth, but thanks to the Lord she did so in health and with a healthy kid. In honor of her name, we called him Wilfred:
And here’s their video:
Then, it was time to ship them off with their new owner!
Here we are setting up:
And here’s a video of the process and saying goodbye:
We are grateful to God for providing a buyer who likes to come every year and collect our kids.
And then, thankfully after what we think was originally an aborted pregnancy, Lucy gave birth to twins about a month ago! They have their sire’s oolors, with the blotches, and they reminded us of ice cream — the light colored buckling like chocolate chip cookie dough, so we called him “Chip”; and for the doeling, we couldn’t think of a good ice cream name, so we went with Jane Dough, or what we call her, “Janie.”
Sleepy…
And here’s their video, with an intro about their mommy before she gave birth:
Around the Yard
Goats are interesting, fun, smart and troublesome quite often. So, we thought we’d share a few of those moments…
Um, yeah…
Here they are lounging around in the sun one day:
And then all around the camper, which they do often. There’s a nice little breezeway under the camper they can usually count on to provide some refreshment and relief from the heat:
And Hannah sometimes gets some extra lettuce or kale, and then comes around looking for more. She’s an expert at convincing you she is an innocent victim and has fooled us many times…. but she’s probably the most wily of them all 🙂
We are grateful to the Lord once again for the kids He granted us this year! We had to give several of our goats de-wormer this year as some of them got pretty anemic, but God granted they get better; and we thank Him for the continued safety and health for and milk from our goats; and we’re thankful for the adventure they bring to our lives here! 🙂
This time of year has come to mean many things to us: Dave finally taking off his coveralls from wearing and sleeping in them allll winter long (we call it his “onesey”); new life in terms of crops, gardens and…….. BABY GOATS!! We have been raising goats for almost ten years now, and the Lord has been most gracious to us through our learning curve so far. We are always in awe of His mercies towards us. With that, I will take you on a mini pictorial tour of this years young-ens:
May I introduce to you Abe. He looks the most like his daddy, Rocky, out of this year’s kid crop. His sister, Abby, is sitting next to him:
And here is their mama, Adeline, with Abby at her feet:
Next is our orphan Annie from a few years ago, the mama of new l’il Abner here. He takes the prize for looking the most like *his* daddy, Shatner:
This is Nellie, the sister of Adeline in the pic above:
Nellie was blessed to have triplets this year: Artie, Gueney, and Lance: (Gueney with the long ears is the runt but, BOY, does she make up for it in moxie!):
Here is Marie, the daughter of Betsy that died a couple of years ago. She is pure Nubian, and she, also, was blessed with triplets this year. Soon after they were born, I started to notice a swelling under her jaw and into the neck area. After doing some research, it appeared she maybe had some form of bottlejaw, which apparently can be caused by worms or protein deficiency. And perhaps the strain of giving birth to triplets made her weaker and zapped her resources. One site said to slow down before running out and getting a chemical de-wormer, and one site recommended apple cider vinegar as a potential remedy. Well, I started giving her about 20 CCs of raw apple cider vinegar diluted with water for the first couple of days, gave her protein cubes with food-grade diatomaceous earth on it for any worms, and made sure she had extra grazing time, and thankfully to God, it went away! I really believe it helped too, because I started to back off the regimen, and the swelling came back, and when I started it up again daily in a smaller amount (5 CCs apple cider vinegar/5CCs lacto-fermented juice/water combination daily), it went away again! The lacto-fermented vegetable liquid is for good bacteria to help her rumen function well. We will probably continue with it while trying to slowly ween her off of it, and we are thankful to God for allowing us to find something to help:
And here they are! Farrah, Kate and Jack. Their daddy is pure Nubian, as well:
Next stop: Pammy! She has been about the sweetest goat one could hope for. Little Sammy (long ears) and Tammy are hanging on her apron strings here:
And here is Gracie, one of Pammy’s oldest kids. She was also blessed with triplets this year, but God saw fit to take them away within a couple days of birth. (This is explained on the video). She and I have bonded pretty closely since then because I started milking her right away. She takes after her mama with her very sweet temperament:
Here is our little video so you can see them live doing goat kid “stuff”:
Marie’s triplets were born in April when it was still kind of chilly on some mornings. I had seen my neighbor do this when her kids were born in the winter time. I took the sleeve of an old sweatshirt, cut two armholes in it and stuck her head through the end of the sleeve. Voila! It was that easy to make a quick kid coat. Here is our model, Kate:
I improvised a coat for Kate’s brother, Jack. His “plumbing” requires different covering techniques. I used a hood from a sweatshirt and secured it with a make-shift belt. It worked well!
Even though we have learned that this time of year can bring the heartache of loss as well as the elation of lots of new life, we are so very thankful for God’s provision and mercy and pray for Him to continue to make us good and wise stewards of His gifts.
For a few years now, we’ve let our goats out into our inner field, which is between the goat pens and the barn, as this area is always growing something naturally…mostly weeds, but the goats eat just about any of it. Well, in order to be able to do that, I had to put up a fence around our orchard and pecan trees, but I didn’t want to take the time to put up a permanent fence, so I was hoping to be able to get away with just hand pulling some fencing around some lightly-pounded t-posts.
This worked well, until last year, and the goats started getting into the orchard, and ate back one of the pecan trees. So, it was time.
We’ve had a whole bunch of rain this Spring, thanks to the Lord for His graces and mercies. But that has slowed things down, so I’m only partially done after several weeks, but here is progress…
I originally thought I could just bury the landscape timber posts in mud, but the rains showed me that that wasn’t going to work — it just wasn’t going to be solid enough for stretched fence. So, after unburying them, I concreted them in. I’m trying to get away with only using a single angled brace on the corners. I also added distance between the current trees, and brought out one side to allow for another row of trees. I figure I can just continue to move that west line over the years if needed to add room for more rows. There is also a gate space planned along one of the lines, big enough for the tractor to drive through:
Here’s a diagonal brace installed. I notched out the the bottom of the dead-man post using a reciprocating saw and hammer and chisel, worked the angles on the brace until I got it right, and then notched out the upper side of the main post. Then, I drilled pilot and counter sync holes for the 3/8 by 6 inch lag bolts and washers:
And so I didn’t have to dig a post hole on line that already had fencing, I thought I would try using a t-post bracing system for one of the ends (sadly, once I started pulling the fence, this ended up not working — too much pressure on the aluminum pieces and the t-posts too loose in the ground), and I had to put in the wood posts and brace):
With the posts in place, using a string line around the perimeter, I pounded in the t-posts. Sometimes you hit rock, but sometimes those rocks are smaller, and it is possible to pound through/around them, although that almost certainly brings on the blisters, at least for me it does. 🙂 :
And that’s it for now. Yesterday was dry enough for me to work on the fencing some, so I just started to tie off a couple of the ends of the net-wire fencing; but Lord willing, this will be ready soon. Actually, because we are sort of out of hay for one of the groups of goats, and it’s too muddy to get any right now, I have to go move the temporary fence and hand pull it around the new fence line because we need to let them out today.
We thank God for His provisions to be able to put up the fencing, for the rains, the mercy in the weather, and for the free goat food He’s granted to grow!
Heb. 11:8-10 - "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
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