Weekend Adventures

Every Saturday morning, Randy asks what's on the to-do list. Its usually rather extensive, but its always fun- working together as a family outside all day. This Saturday was no different... except what we were trying to do:

Castration- yup, we tried. Chuck has his "buckhood" for another week. We tried catching him in the morning only to get him riled up and avoiding us. We waited for the afternoon feeding then managed to catch him while his head was stuck in the bucket. And when we finally got him tied around a tree, Randy holding him steady with all his might and me, literally, bringing up the rear, we discovered he's already much too, shall we say well developed for our handy castrating device to work. This device stretches a small, tight rubber band open to fit over the testicles. Then you release the band from the device. It cuts off circulation and they eventually just drop off with very little discomfort to the animal. I was NOT happy about the prospect of trying to do the job with another method so believe me when I say I tried to make those suckers fit. It wasn't going to happen.

Catching a rooster- we traded "Baldy" with some friends for another rooster. Baldy was a hen that got pecked bald in the re-shuffling of the pecking order. We pulled her out and there was no putting her back in. Our rooster had been killed in the reshuffling and our friends said they had one that nothing was going to be able to kill. We put him in a separate pen to get him used to pen life first as he had been free-ranged previously. We had him a week and were working on ways to get him to not be so noisy in the mornings when he managed to escape from him pen while the lid was opened briefly to change waterers. A wild goose chase ensued. We finally gave up. In the evening we were able to capture him relatively easily and so threw him in with the hens. By Sunday morning his head was bloody and he was cowering in the corners, bloodying the corner posts. I pulled him out before leaving for church, but we forgot about him until after dark. We tried and couldn't find him. I didn't know if he could survive the night. Come 6:30am we hadn't heard him and I thought for sure he was gone, but a few minutes later he let out a mighty crow. He's still strutting his stuff all over the front yard. He managed to ward off the coons, foxes and bobcats, but can't stand up to a few fiesty hens. ???

Eggs- We got our first obviously pullet eggs. Pullets are young hens and the first eggs they lay are going to be quite small. But our other layers aren't too old themselves yet so for them to throw out a smaller than average egg isn't unheard of. But Saturday we got 2 that had to have been from the newer batch of birds. Can you pick them out?

Blackberries- I know it doesn't look like much, but this is a blackberry bush. I had ordered 6 bareroot plants from a friend, 3 different varieties. All are thornless. I would have rather had thorns as they will double as pasture fence reinforcement, but the thornless are more disease resistant, particularly to anthracnose which is all over here. We also had 2 blueberry bushes to plant so the majority of the morning was spent in digging holes. Aaron was a big help in spreading the mulch. He had a great time!

Pruning- I finally pruned all the dead branches off of everything... just in time for close to freezing temps to come again! But all is fine. I learned the hard way that nightblooming jasmine is cold sensitive. That sucker is DEAD. Oh well. It won't feed us so we might as well put in something that will. One orange tree was having some nice new growth. I fertilized it (as with all the others) and now the older foliage that survived the winter has dried up and dropped off and even the tiny new growth is wilting. I've treated this tree the same as all the others and the others are looking great... any thoughts???

Noel and Annabelle are looking close to kidding. I'm hoping they'll hold off a couple weeks, but I don't know how likely that is. At least not for Noel... she's huge. Annabelle looked enormous for ages last year. We've started reluctantly giving them a daily dose of grain though. The research shows that it drastically increases the milk production and the health of the kid for grain to begin in the 3rd trimester and carried throughout the lactation. And the only thing it does to the milk is dilutes the CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), but doesn't add anything negative nor decrease the amount of CLA in each milking. There's so little information out on grass-fed goats that a lot is up to us to figure out. We got rather low milk levels last lactation going strictly grass-fed. It looks like we can double our yield with just a little bit of grain added to their diet each day. Its worth it.