Hats off to all the other homesteaders who live without internet like we do but who manage to pull off blogs with pretty pictures and even video, gasp. I am frustrated over how much I have to fight the non-internet to get anything to post and I noticed several pictures in my last blog didn’t even upload which makes the perfectionist side of me very upset and the lazy part of me just think, well, it is what it is and that’s old info so time to move on.
We have a lot of changes here and I’ll talk about them and hope and pray that the pictures will actually upload today as the non-internet is working faster than it usually does (knock on wood).
Let’s see, the last thing I blogged about was our new goats. Two of them came to us very skittish and I decided to sell the yearling doe since she isn’t working out well for farm tours and likely won’t warm up in the environment we have here. I feel she will do better with more one-on-one interaction instead of the chaos of a farm with 25 (whoopsie) goats. For those who read the last blog, it’s the doe named Cupcake. She’s a beautiful blue roan on the small side and very sensitive/shy. We found her a perfect home with just a couple of other goats and a family who can spend more time taming her. She’s still here because we’ve agreed to breed her before sending her off and she went into heat the week before the buck we’d picked out to breed with her arrived. So yes, there are some new ones here…
Now I can’t remember if I mentioned my plans and vision for 2021 so if I did, forgive me, but i’m not testing the non-internet by trying to look through the blog and see what I talked about. Here’s a possible re-cap: I’m going to create my very own lines of Mini LaManchas. I gave up finding any registered ones I liked; they simply do not exist within a full day’s drive, if AT ALL. Where the heck are the registered Mini LM at? I mean, I found some that are bad quality. I found some that might be nice conformation-wise but are untested for the major herd diseases. So yeah, there really just aren’t any. And though I have zero desire to show goats, especially after attending my first goat show this past Saturday, I do want registered lines because kids sell for more money which feels like to me a better quality of home for them and because it’s easier to track the lines and to have better quality milk lines. And since I couldn’t find this breed that has been my favorite since starting out with goats, I’ve decided to start my own. Any “mini” goat is a cross between two goat breeds to make the full size kind get smaller (Nigerian Dwarfs technically aren’t a mini goat, they’re just small, hence the reason they can be shown at ADGA (full size) goat shows.) My original plan was to get two LaMancha doelings and two Nigerian Dwarf bucklings to raise holistically and eventually breed but when I asked in goat groups the general belief is that four doelings is a better number to start with. And when I thought about it I decided four bucks made sense because then no one is related and I have many breeding options for several lines. And of course buying the best of the best makes sense b/c I want great quality goats or what’s the point? So there you go…one of my 2021 goals.
This past weekend we went to a goat show, our first one, just as spectators and to also pick up three goats. We had an adult Nigerian Dwarf buck reserved that is a very pricey goat marked down because he got too tall for breed standards; something that we could care less about since we’ll be breeding him to a much taller doe to create our minis. We also picked up a buckling we reserved from a farm with excellent lines (Rosasharn and Castle Rock for those who know goat lines) and he was heavily discounted because the breeder was sick during disbudding time and ended up not disbudding. They sold them cheaper because “you’ll have to pay to have them dehorned.” Well, they don’t need to know we are horned goat seekers. Better to keep that to ourselves. (When I got home and emailed her that we think he is fantastic since she had someone else transport him to the show so I didn’t meet her, she said “Oh and he will be especially nice after you dehorn him.”)
As a side note, I still need another Nigerian buckling for next year and I struck up a conversation with a top lines breeder and asked if she would keep horns with a full payment in advance. She said no, that horns are dangerous to goats without. That makes little sense since what she’d be selling me is a goat without horns to live WITH my other goats with horns, thus being the one creating the danger in the first place rather than preventing it! When I said, “Oh, but the scurs break off and bleed everywhere!” (scurs are the nubs often created when you disbud and a little piece of horn grows back) she actually said to me, “Oh yes, I just like to twist them off. They bleed, you spray them with the blue stuff, and then I find they grow in smaller each time.” I’m horrified. Horrified by this, ya’ll. It’s like amputating a finger, having a piece of the finger grow back a little, and then someone comes over and yanks it off again. And yet this is supposed to be kinder than God’s plan for animals to have horns? I don’t get it.
I am going to fast forward to yesterday and then I’ll get back to the goat show. Yesterday our new buck and our “old” buck Burt Reynolds went in together head to head to fight and figure out dominance. They both have scurs. Burt Reynolds had his scur break off and bleed all over. Christine kept the scur and left it in a place where I ran into it and nearly vomited. It’s seriously the most disgusting thing. Now he has an open wound that is prone to infection. But again, oh yes, this must be safer than horns. ???!! And then today the new buck, Aries, has been kept in a night enclosure alone and he smashed his head on his chicken wire “window” fighting with another goat and both his scurs broke off…blood EVERYWHERE. I’m serious. It looks like his brain is going to fall out of his head. Where’s the vomit emoji when I need it. And the goat next to him, a new polled (naturally without horns) buck equally smashy with his head has zero blood spots. Sigh.
Back to the show, so we had those two bucks reserved to pick up and someone I met last week had offered me a Sundgau LaMancha doe, sending me pictures of her from a year ago. She got her tested for all the herd diseases, which I paid for, and brought her to the show for us to see and then take home if we were ready. Sadly she had been bred to her full size LaMancha buck which meant kids I didn’t want or need and a year wasted on not being able to start up my mini LaMancha lines. I wasn’t thrilled about that but she sounded good. When we got there and saw her we didn’t like the way she looked nor did we like her teats which were not quite right for hand milking. Now people at goat shows, for the most part, are SUPER friendly. I’m used to cat shows and I’ll say at cat shows there is a range of people, some nice and some that give you looks that could kill, basically saying “Stay away from my cats” with their eyes. And for the most part people are decent human beings. But goat people go out of their way to be extremely friendly and chatty which was nice and unexpected. The first one to chat us up was a woman and her teen daughter who raise LaManchas in north Texas and they casually mentioned in their conversation that their yearling doe was for sale. Two hours later we loaded her into our suburban.
Can you imagine, two rutty bucks, a doe, and one kiddo plus two adults in one suburban? Yeah, that was our almost 2 hour car ride home. We fell so in love with this new doe I couldn’t stop staring at her the whole way home. She is amazing! And yes, they herd test too or I wouldn’t have considered her. The teenager wants to be a vet and they take great care of their six goats (how do they keep down their numbers? I wish I could!) plus they’re like us where they dress up their goats for holidays and take funny photos.
So those three settled in this weekend and that’s been fun/challenging as we just got another new buck the week before. All but one of our does are now bred (other than the ones I’m not breeding this year) so we are preparing for February and March kids. Lots of baby goats means lots of goat yoga, ya’ll! It will be a fun spring.
So a week ago we picked up an LGD…we drove 7 hours roundtrip to get her, a 3 year old spayed Anatolian. My teenager promptly fell in love with her, she was the sweetest dog ever, and she named her Bella (her old name she didn’t seem to recognize). Well, on the bright side she was friendly with chickens, goats, pigs, tortoises, and sheep. But sadly she had zero interest in actually guarding our animals; she just wanted to either be with humans or be off of our property. And she could climb 6 foot fences! There was no containing her! She would be in with the pigs and then ten minutes later she’d be down the road barking at other dogs, chasing the neighbor’s sheep, or eating another neighbor’s cat food. Sigh. And if she was standing in the middle of the road and I called her she would wag her tail and then run off somewhere else. Not useful when you need a dog to protect your animals. So we ended up returning her. I would have kept her as an indoor dog but we have enough going on in our lives without complicating things more. I hope she finds a good place where she’s safe; my anxiety was so high with her here because I was constantly worried about her getting hit by a car.
A few days ago we finally moved fences so the does could be on clean pasture. We have 13 in that pen right now (Cupcake will be leaving as soon as she’s bred though). We’ve made the hard decision to sell Simon, the horned and moonspotted mini Nubian we bought last month (did I even talk about him? I hope so…he’s a sweetheart!) because we need to cut down on numbers and focus on my new goals, plus he is not interested in breeding this year and I’ll have plenty of bucklings next year I can keep. I was so disappointed he is uninterested in the ladies and neither is my one other mini nubian buckling, Shindig; I ended up having to breed my new Mini Nubian doe, Promise, to a darned Nigerian. Not what I wanted, but the other other Mini Nubian buck we have is polled and a polled to polled breeding results in freemartins/sterile kids (1 out of 8, but that’s a risk I don’t want to take).
Oh well. I’m sure things will work out! They always do. <3
In other news, we bought six of the goats beautiful name tags for their collars. Here some of them are, eager to show off.
We sold Tango, our remaining horse. The llamas are doing well but we don’t interact with them as much these days b/c Tango took over their area (unintentionally) and so they don’t come up to the barn much. They just got their toenails professionally trimmed and they’re in need of some alfalfa and more fatty feeds to bulk up for winter, but other than that they’re doing well.
Oh, and I traded little Siesta Pig for a goat. She is doing well at her new home and I can keep in touch. I have considered selling all the pigs in order to focus on the goats but I know that will not be as fun on the farm tours and plus, I’m very bonded to my gilt and boar.
Two of our goats that we raised on bottles last year go in to the processor in a couple of weeks. I’ve not tried goat meat yet. Stay tuned.
And we butchered all of our mean roosters and the 15 meat chickens that were supposed to be Easter Eggers. So that is all behind us. We have a manageable number of 42 chickens now (plus the two turkeys). I’m selling quite a few eggs now too on the farm tours, so that’s been good.
Looking back at this post I think I’ll write a whole separate one about the horrors of goat shows. Probably not today.
Here are some random things on the farm as a closing to this post. Enjoy!
