Gosh, it was quite the month.
First of all, we barely survived the intense heat! I think we made it over 20 consecutive days of 100+ temperatures. That’s all good and well if you live in Arizona and it’s dry heat but it’s SO humid here it has been like living in a swampy steam room. The animals are MISERABLE and we are miserable because we can’t hang out with them but we have to be out there anyway filling water buckets, filling hay racks, collecting eggs (are eggs even safe to eat when they’ve been laid in this weather??? I’ve been throwing them to the pigs), etc. I won’t lie when I say I have been researching other places to live but at this point politics keep me away from many states, ticks keep me away from many more, and well, I do require sunlight and warmth and LOW humidity so that really narrows it down a bit for us. I have one online friend wanting us to move to northwestern Ohio, one friend pushing for South Carolina, and another friend saying Missouri is THE place to be. Personally I’m drawn to Georgia (but the humidity is probably too much for me, I just love the trees and I’ve been binge-watching “Welcome to Plathville” on Hulu), Virginia (because Joel Salatin and Barbara Kingsolver BOTH live there and have success homesteading there), and Pennsylvania because I think it’s beautiful, it’s closer to NYC, and well, the Amish know what they’re doing…but again the ticks and snow really are a turn-off for me. Anyway, moving would not happen for another five years but I like to imagine it when I’m miserably hot like I have been for way too long.
The heat has brought all sorts of terrible parasite problems that the herbal wormers just aren’t fixing. Unfortunately my neighbor lost THREE out of ten of her goats due to this parasite (Barberpole) and a friend in the next town over lost seven out of twenty-four of her goats. Actually I might be the only person I know with goats in this area who hasn’t lost one this year (knock on wood). We did have to resort to chemical wormer when several of our goats had bad FAMACHA scores and showed major overloads when we checked the microscope. Bummer. We are not out of the hot water yet but they are definitely all doing better and the thing about our goats is that they all look good and act good, so they might be handling it better than other goats would. We are still using herbs too, especially to boost their systems up and we’re giving probiotics once a day to help their rumens.
We have added quite a few goats to our herd. I got excited all over again about goats and goat milk and I had a goal of getting registered goats next year and phasing out of the unregistered ones but then I decided why not start now? And well, we have a thousand new goats, or at least it feels that way sometimes. Somehow my goals of Mini LaManchas and Kikos for next year turned into me getting six Mini Nubians. What happened there I cannot exactly say…first I fell in love with my friend’s doeling that was available, then she needed a future boyfriend, then I found three goats to save from a sad situation (luckily two are going to other homes), then my friend with the doeling I mentioned had a friend with a lot of registered goats for sale…yeah, funny how that happens. Goat math is just as bad as chicken math except much, much more expensive! But in the end we are happy with all of our new goats and we will have SO much milk next year! I had to ask Santa for a milk machine because my hands are just about done…I can’t imagine milking 6-7 goats a day. Right now I’m just milking one and well, it does hurt me. Ever since we got…flu? Covid? in February my joints have ached quite a bit.
In other news, our Barred Rocks finally started laying last week at 20 weeks old. They are the first batch of our COVID-scare chickens. We will likely be butchering all the roosters from that batch of chickens this weekend because they are terribly mean to the hens and they also are not safe around small children (and only safe around us because we can kick them to protect ourselves if we have to–roosters are TERRIBLE animals! I posted about their awfulness on Facebook and people so quickly defended them–say what you will be the fact that we’ve had nothing but MEAN roosters kind of says a lot to me! I won’t be sorry to see them go but I will still have the hard time I had last time we butchered chickens. We will try a different technique this time at least.).
Oh, and for all of you Mini LaMancha fans out there, don’t you worry, we’re still planning for 2021 Mini LaManchas! I have not had luck finding good quality ones around here so I’m starting over with registered full sized and working my way down to minis with them. Stay tuned…