Category Archives: goats

goats

The kids have arrived!

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In January, we added Cedars of Lebanon Betty Ford (Betty) to our goat herd. We specifically bought her because she was due to kid before any of our other does, and therefore we would resume getting milk for the family sooner.
Today, Betty had twin doelings! Both are healthy and doing well. I’ll take some better pictures tomorrow in the light. We haven’t decided on names yet. The 2 legged kids have some ideas, but I am looking for a theme for the year.

But that’s not all we did today. This morning it was snowing, and we were expecting to get about 2.5-3″ of accumulation. However, it warmed up and never even stuck to the roads. By the late afternoon, it was almost all melted.

I had another craigslist find for the weekend. I felt like I was in American Pickers when I went to a farm to look at some rabbit cages. I ended up buying a large double cage for growing young ones, a 16′ quad cage for whatever, 1 transport cage for rabbits, 2 transport cages for mid size animals (maybe young goats or pigs), and a 100 gal Rubbermaid water trough. I spent the afternoon working on one of the cages since we are getting more rabbits tomorrow.

chicken, garden, goats

a productive afternoon

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The power was out at work this morning, so I came home at lunch.  Of course, I got the call that the power came back when I was within a mile of the house.  No worry, I still took the afternoon off to work with Anna on stuff around the farm.  We had our lunch and once Amanda was down for a nap, we got to work outside.

Last year, the garden consisted of 3 raised beds inside a fenced in area.  It was pre-existing, so we just added some compost and used it like that.  Our total planting area was about 130 sqft.  Today, we removed the raised beds, put down a layer of cardboard to kill grass and weeds, then added about 8″ of compost on top of the cardboard.  We reused the boards from the raised beds to go around the fence and hold the soil inside the garden.  We now have about 300 sqft of planting space ready to go.

After that, the kids got home, Anna went jogging, and I kept working.  I built a new coop for raising young chickens.  I should be able to finish it up tomorrow afternoon with another hour or so of work.  Of course, I also have to get to work prepping more rabbit hutches, because we are picking up 3 more rabbits on Sunday.  We anticipate 2 will be dinner in the next week or two and 1 will be retained for breeding with our New Zealand does.

Thanks to a tip I got this morning, we have decided on our Oberhasli buck.  Well, sort of.  We decided on a farm that has a lot of Oberhasli’s and we sent in a deposit to reserve a buckling that should be born in March.  I’ll pick him up from Maryland in May when I go to DC for business.