I am dedicated to blogging more often, especially as we have opened up our farm to some tiny home dwellers and we’re adding structures in the next few years. I hope people can get a feel for who we are and what our vision is to see if we’re a good fit. If you contacted me previously and I told you we were going in another direction, please contact me again. We are finally feeling peaceful with our first vision of having community here.
We’ve made a few changes this week. First of all, our remaining 3 ducks have been rehomed to a friend’s property. She has about 50 ducks and a huge pond, and best of all, reliable livestock guardian dogs that keep the ducks in the pond so they don’t get snatched up by any predators. She took a video as soon as she got them home and they are happily swimming around in the pond with the others. I felt like crying happy tears knowing they are so safe and happy.
Last Friday we did something crazy. I had this plan of getting two bottle baby bucklings (full size, not the minis we breed) to raise as packing and carting goats. I know I mentioned this in my last post just briefly. The truth is, goats can pull 200% of their weight and they look adorable pulling a cart with a human in the back, plus, they seem to love it! Now how you train a goat is beyond me; my goats are pretty much untrained to do anything except stand on the milkstand while being milked and that’s only because they came trained! So this is definitely a learning curve. But anyway, Friday we drove out to a dairy we used to get milk from to pick up two cuties. Next thing I know Christine is loading FIVE into the car. The dairy owner at first had said, oh, if you decide to get more than two you can have four for the price of three! And Christine is quickly tossing goats into a pen thinking they are all so adorable they must come home with us.
Then the dairy lady says she’ll throw in a little white LaMancha for free because the poor thing isn’t walking right. This is pretty common with goats; a selenium deficiency they are born with due to our soil being so depleted. We feed our goats brazil nuts for selenium but we did have one mama have twins last year with this wobbly bendy leg issue in spite of our efforts. The good news is, it’s easily fixable. We use Vitalherbs tincture and within a day and a half their legs straighten out. The dairy lady didn’t really believe us; she gave us popsicle sticks and told us to wrap the legs with vet wrap around the popsicle stick.
So that’s the story of how we brought five full size bucklings home (three LaMancha and two Nubian). Bottle babies. That have been eating us out of house and home.
They’ve eaten all our frozen goat milk from last year and now we’re spending an insane amount of money on cow’s milk as goat formula is known to cause serious health problems/death and plus it’s completely not organic or natural and well, our plan is to train these guys to carts but they won’t all be good at this and so the rest will end up as meat. We have decided this year to raise meat animals, I think I might have mentioned that in the last post too, and part of me says we won’t be able to do it because we’ll bond with them and the other part of me says we absolutely must do it because we are eating Keto and we eat an exorbitant amount of meat. All organic, grass-fed, etc, and it’s VERY pricey. Unwilling to buy anything else–can’t support factory farming. But aside from being pricey, I see it as a copout. How much longer can we buy meat from the Farmer’s Market or food co-op and pretend it didn’t used to be an animal just like our own? It’s ignorance. And I can’t live that way anymore. So while we aren’t ready to butcher our animals ourselves, I think we can push ourselves to take them into the processor alive and that is a step in the right direction. Here is a fabulous post on this very topic from a blogger/vlogger we have followed since we lived in the city and dreamed of our own farm someday.
So for now we have been bottle-feeding five babies four times a day. Last weekend we had six farm visitors! I was beyond psyched to have friends (and friends of friends) over to see the animals. They loved helping to feed the goats and they loved meeting everyone.
The most surprising thing for me was how excited Tucker the Tortoise was to have company!
He immediately “ran” over to them/us and sat in the middle and was clearly super excited to have people to hang out with.
I had no idea he was such a social butterfly! My acupuncturist friend says he has a blue/green aura and that he’s a psychic tortoise which we all thought was amusing. Tortoises feel so wise; maybe they are all psychic/”in tune.”
So, our pregnant does are still pregnant; they have each tricked us several times thinking it was time and it hasn’t been. It’s been a lot of ups and downs with them and sleepless nights (well, waking up every 2 hours to check the barn cameras feels pretty much like not sleeping). One was due last Sunday and one was due Monday/Tuesday (depending on when she actually conceived). So it really is any day now. And one lost her ligaments around her tail, a sign that labor should soon follow. But yet nothing is happening. My dreams of leap day babies is gone LOL but we are just tired of the waiting game and I know the ladies are too.
