Serenity Yoga Farm

I’m sorry, blog readers, for the big gap of silence.  Our silence was not from anything other than the fact that things have been total chaos around here with, at one point, 22 goats, 2 horses, 6 ducks, 4 chickens, 2 human kids, a lizard, 3 dogs, a cat, and a fish. 

Lots has changed since then.  Let’s see if I can remember it all.

Our other two pregnant goats had their babies just fine; the first, Big Goat, had a doeling born before we could get to her (I heard her screaming in the shed and ran out to find a baby had already arrived) and then shortly after that she birthed a buckling.  Both were equal sizes and colors but they had selenium deficiency so their legs were all wobbly and bent at odd angles.  This is pretty common for our area as the soil is deficient, so we gave them herbs immediately and in just 4 days or so they were walking just fine and hopping around like baby goats should. 

The babies are thriving and are both brown eyed and polled. 

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The next week our last pregnant goat, Bridget, birthed twin bucklings.  She broke our tie because prior to these babies we had an even number of boys and girls.  When her first baby arrived I was saying to Christine “Hand me the sucker, she’s not breathing” and Christine asked me if I knew it was a girl and I said, “Yes, look at her!” Indeed she was the prettiest thing…just beautiful markings and blue eyes. 

But I was wrong; I forgot that boys can also be so pretty. 

Darn it.  A buckling. 

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Then the second baby was born absolutely ugly, haha, like a weird looking pig breed called a Meishan, and one ear stuck out like his mom and one ear was totally flat sort of like a Boer goat. 

Seriously weird looking little dude. 

We named him Meishan, by the way, but now that he’s 7 weeks old he is actually the cutest roly poly of a goat.  He has a pink nose and everything.  Both of these babies were born with blue eyes and are polled. 

So yes, those births went smoothly and the babies are all doing well. 

I may have mentioned we were going to keep Scooter, our very first baby born on the farm.  He had excellent conformation and such a sweet disposition.  Unfortunately, he got “bucky” very early to where he smelled like a male goat, was on the female goats, and well, things were happening, it was not just practice.  It made me so nervous that we separated him out from the herd with just his sister and his mom for a while and then when I worried about his mom’s safety (didn’t want babies happening!) we moved her out too and just gave her short supervised visits with him so he could nurse.  We decided through all that that we just were not going to be keeping him on the farm. 

Two weeks ago, when Dollop’s babies were 8 weeks old and she was not really allowing them to nurse anymore (much earlier than we had planned to sell babies but Mama Dollop and Nature had some other plans I guess!) we sold two of her babies to a friend in our area and one of her babies went to a home with our oldest, mentioned above—Scooter and his sister, Maggie (we changed her name from Moped to Maggie).  Those three went to my daughter’s physical therapist’s family. 

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Unfortunately, Scooter passed away a few days after he moved there because he made an escape and ended up eating chicken feed which caused him to get bloat and die.  We were heartbroken, though we don’t blame the family because gosh do we know how things happen with outdoor animals like this.  But life has to go on for us and it has. 

We sold two of our breeding bucks (dads of these babies) to two different home and we have one left, our Mini LaMancha buck, who is sweet as pie but has been hard to sell for some reason.  Hopefully we can sell him sooner than later as he is lonely without any buddies now. 

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We milk three goats in the morning and one at night.  Some babies are separated from their moms at night, one baby is separated from Mom during the day.  Selling those 5 babies took about 45 minutes off our of daily chores which made life a lot easier again.  We still have much more than wanted, so our goal is to sell, at minimum, 10 more goats in the next couple of months.  I had hoped to just keep 3, but as usual we can’t easily agree on which to keep and which to sell.  The one I absolutely will not budge on is Dollop’s Mini NuMancha doeling  Amelia, who I thought was absolutely ugly at birth but has grown on me now.  She is an absolute doll and she is the first goat people are drawn to when they visit. 

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Kissy, my old favorite, has been a disappointing third time freshener.  This is supposed to be their biggest quantity of milk yet she has hardly given a quart twice a day.  We feed her well; we offer her minerals.  We are at a loss as to why she has so little milk.  She is not very fun to milk; in spite of her great behavior on the milk stand her teats are very hard (genetic issue not something new) and it does take a lot more muscle to milk her than the two Mini Nubians we are also currently milking.  We didn’t bother to milk the smallest doe and we haven’t milked the full sized LaMancha either.  The full sizer who we still haven’t found a good name for so she is called Big Goat is a priority to sell at this point. 

We sold our chickens all off about a month ago.  We just decided to check in and see what our big priorities are and our goals are.  We had a nice list of goals for the year, but since 2 months ago when we wrote it more things have changed so I won’t bother even posting it now. 

The reason we sold the chickens is because we found out that two of the three of us egg consumers are sensitive to the whites. 

Have you ever made an omelet with just yolks? Might as well eat a piece of rubber. 

And the chickens were laying 4 eggs and day so with 28 eggs a week or so it was an incredible amount of waste between our time to care for the chickens, collect the eggs, buy expensive feed for the chickens, and watch the eggs either go bad or end up taking up even more of our time because we’d have to try to find someone to buy them.  Not easy in a place like this where even city dwellers are allowed to have backyard chickens.  So no more chickens which means one less thing to worry about.

Unfortunately a few months ago our Rankin dragon, who woke up from brumation a little bit out of sorts, passed away.  He’d been with us since we first moved back to Austin in 2015 and it was a sad loss for us.  Who knew a lizard could have such big personality and touch our hearts the way he did.  RIP Skippito. 

The ducks have been fine, we were convinced they were keeping the snake population down but now we’re not so convinced since we’ve seen a few rattlesnakes (one was 3 feet long!). 

No copperheads yet, knock on wood, but odd since that’s what we had the most of last year. 

Now another new thing is that I put in a deposit for a kitten born in March who could make an excellent show cat.  I committed myself to this kitten and to the show cat lifestyle.  I even met him and named him Cohen after Leonard Cohen who is one of my favorite folk singers.  Cohen the Kitten will not be arriving until July, date undecided as it seems he may need hernia surgery now. 

Interestingly enough about 5 weeks after committing to Cohen my other breeder I have a deposit down with but who had an extremely long wait list (I was #25 and then she closed her list so that no one else could put down a deposit) told me that she had a kitten available to me that she had planned to keep for herself but ended up choosing one from another litter instead. 

She is such an amazing color (seal point!) and Christine said she would buy her for me herself.  She is supposed to arrive at the end of this month, so before Cohen even though Cohen is a week older than she is.  She is currently unnamed though our joke is that since she was my sobriety gift (it will be three years without alcohol the same weekend the kitten arrives) that we should call her Soba as in “Yakisoba” the Japanese food which also sounds like “sober.” 

But that’s just a joke, not likely to stick. 

The names I’ve been serious about my family absolutely HATES.  Lorca, a poet that Leonard Cohen likes so much he named his daughter after him; Clara, after my great grandmother; Rumi after the poet.  Who knows what will fit her since we haven’t met her and she’s too far to visit for just a few hours. 

When C and I were working on our 2019 goals on the farm, since we’ve been here a year now and it’s time to reevaluate, we decided that one reason we haven’t been able to enjoy our land enough is because of the seemingly endless animal chores we have.  So selling the chickens was part of that.  Selling all but a few of the goats is another part (ironically the test that showed two of us having egg white sensitivities also said I am highly sensitive to goat milk…perhaps a sign that we should really change the things we are doing on our farm). 

And then we looked at our horses; the horses we have not ridden since moving them here (well, I rode the Haflinger, Tango, once or twice but only for five minutes a ride so it hardly counts). 

We realized that Cash, our first horse and our reason for even buying  a farm, is not a good match for us in the end.  He seemed fine for a while in the city until the trainer we were working with told us that he was green.  We had thought it was just us not knowing what we were doing with him, not that it was the blind leading the blind.  As soon as I heard that I became a fearful rider and got very nervous around Cash, which of course he picked up on and it only made behaviors worsen.  He was not a cheap horse and he’s been essentially rotting away in the pasture since we haven’t had time to work him either on the ground or through riding. 

We stopped bothering having the trainer come out probably a year ago or so because it seemed wasteful since we didn’t have time to ride him anyway.  So we looked at what we want here and we realized really some old trail horses that have done it all and seen it all and are chill as can be would be the best fit.  I don’t have the time to be the English rider I used to / wanted to be and trail riding horses make so much sense here.  To be able to jump on a horse and ride through our property and then jump off sounds like a nice way to start our day.  With Cash that simply was not going to be a possibility. 

So we thought long and hard and decided to sell him. 

He’s currently still ours, but our trainer took him ten days ago to work on him at her place and then sell him for us.  Tango, our older horse, was extremely upset to be alone (they both became very buddy sour, meaning that when one couldn’t see the other they would become anxious and run back and forth until they could see him again).  So we ended up contacting the woman we got Tango from; she rescues horses from the kill pen and uses them as lesson horses or sells them to good homes.  She had a perfect horse for us, another older horse who is so calm and very responsive (you can say “trot” and he does).  He arrived at our house yesterday. 

We had planned to go for a nice ride this morning but Christine found our neighbor’s goat caught in the fence this morning which ended up putting us an hour behind on our chores.  Hopefully soon we will get a chance to ride and that he will do as well here as he did when we rode him at his old home.

I have been making a ton of chevre, yogurt, clabbered cream, cajeta (like a caramel sauce) and even paneer.  Still, our whole fridge is milk these days.  It’s a lot of work!  The paneer is amazing. 

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My next thing to try will be healthier Velveeta!  Yes, homemade Velveeta. 

If I’d blogged two weeks ago I’d have said that we’re done with farm life, it’s been just too much and it’s put a stress on our family and relationships and none of it feels like it’s working. 

Maybe I’m unrealistically positive writing this today but I have some small glimmer of hope that we can rough out the kinks and find joy and have some life again outside of the farm while still enjoying what we’re doing here. 

There may be somewhere more optimal for us to live *with* our animals, a possibility we are definitely exploring.  I absolutely adore our property, I just wish it wasn’t this humid or snakey.  It’s been very difficult somehow to deal with those issues.  But somewhere less snakey will be more snowy, something that adds difficulty in another way. 

The other major issue is that I’m really missing my career and I can’t get it going again without being closer to a big city, so we are definitely considering somewhere closer in.  Nowhere is perfect, it’s just a matter of finding a place that works well for us.