Little Bit and Lucy Go on Spring Break

Once upon a time there were two baby goats. 

Their Momma didn't have enough food to feed them so they were fed with bottles by the people.

That caused a problem when the people and the black dog had to go to Georgia.

So the man said "Let's bring the babies with us!"

The woman said "OK, this will be fun."

The black dog said "They can't ride in my seat!"

Lucy and Little Bit said,

 "We don't know what Spring Break or that thing called Georgia is, but as long as you bring the milk bottles we will go with you."

Then they got into the crate and didn't know they were riding cargo class.

The dog didn't tell them any different.

When they arrived in Georgia, the woman's brother said,

"Yep, those are goats. You really brought them."

The accommodations were spacious, but confining. 

Sometimes though the girls got to play in the yard. 

While the people were tearing apart the old deck they made really cool piles of wood for the girls to climb on and slide down and jump off of high into the air.

The woman said, "Now I know why we should have given them their tetanus shots."

After the wood pile was taken away, there was much running and jumping around the yard.

Spring Break is fun!

All that playing made them very tired and ready to go home.

The girls got loaded in their crate and said, 

"Again with the cargo class? But we have grown a lot this week!"

The blonde dog had told them about first class travel.

She was just trying to get the black dog in trouble.

But the blonde dog was So Very Happy to see the goats leave! 

And please don't bring them back!

The End of Spring Break.

Home Again

Wow, was that a trip! I will post more after I relax on the front porch a bit.

Chick Pics

Here they are - almost two weeks old.

They are growing fast.

The school kids are enjoying the show when the chicks get on top of their feeders and try to fly out of the tank. They will be spending Spring Break at the science teacher's house. When we get home from a trip to Mom's they will be moving out here to the farm. We have to get their house set up next weekend. 

As my brother said one time - we are always building something around here.

They don't pose sideways very well so that we can see their wing feathers.

I found an article about sexing chicks based on their wings at the Scratch Cradle blog.

Pullets or Roosters?

My main audience for this subject probably knows all about those techniques though.

Enjoy the pics and Easter break.

Watch out for Hippogriffs!

Goat Babies Are Here

Last but not least, Little Violet's new Ace is here.

Last year she also had a boy with the same color other than the bit of white showing on this baby's front feet. Violet is my favorite and so is her baby.

He is barely old enough to stand. 

Momma was getting some grain while Ace practiced balancing.

Here our two bottle babies are hanging out with FabHub.

They are doing good on cow's milk and egg for protein.

That might seem odd, but it worked pretty well last year.

We still have two of those girls and they are pretty healthy. 

Here are some of the new kids showing us how to take a nap. 

Find a sunny dry spot, curl up, and tuck your nose in.

Today's Spring forecast is for rain, sleet, and snow.

The sunny dry spot will be hard to find, but they will probably be just like us and stay inside or under the building all day. 

We have three more girls. One should kid in a month and two will probably have Fall babies. That will be new for us. We will have grown chickens by then too, so it will all be quite exciting I am sure.

Chicks First Week

To begin - I am told the papers were changed after the photo shoot.

Second there are more pictures here than I might normally include, but I thought the girl who sold us the eggs might like to see as many as possible. Her dad is probably interested too.

This is the most interesting chick when it comes to color.

Feed store testing indicated he is a Rooster.

He started out mostly black, but is getting to growing out some interesting feathers.

In the last pictures the chicks were in the smaller tank full of newspapers that is behind this much larger tank. 

That gives an interesting perspective to how big they have gotten.

 Feathers are starting to show more.

This one is interesting too with the spot on its head. 

We were at the feed store again yesterday.

These chicks are a lot more interesting than what they have which was all red pullets.

We hope there is a nice variety of hens in the mix.

All one color would be kind of boring.

I just noticed, looks like someone gave them some bread.

I bet that won't survive long in another week.

Chick Puff Balls

Photos from the school chick hatching project.

The chicks were moved from the small fish tank into a huge tank.

So big they spread out instead of clumping.

Chick Butts in the window.

A full belly equals no stress.

Racing stripes!

According to the feed store way of determining hens and roosters, 

there are several roosters among the 17 chicks in the tank.

We pretty much expected (hoped for) that, but the proof will be shown in a few weeks.

I didn't mention it before, but the grown chicks are coming to the farm.

We are doing the whole farm thing backwards.

Most people start out with chickens, then get goats, and then cows and pigs.

We like being different.

Tuesday's Twins

Today was Big Violet's day.

We have two goats named Violet.

One I named and one came to the farm with that name.

This one "is" older and taller than the other one.

But look at her. She just had twin boys and she is still big!

I shouldn't pick on her. She is a good Momma.

We haven't seen enough of them to come up with names yet.

Here is another look at Flower's twins.

We were finally able to verify they are both boys.

The white one we have named Frank. Not Francis, Frank.

The brown one is named Bishop.

Here we have Sunny's kids using her as a trampoline.

She doesn't seem to mind. They were having a great time and she was getting a good back rub. Also, either she doesn't know Tulip's baby, Fred, is behind her or doesn't mind the warm body on her butt. I think it is the latter.

In case you are keeping track.

We have six does kidding this month.

There is one left.

We now have 9 babies running around the goat lot.

The three girls are Apple, Lucy, and Little Bit.

The six boys are Rhubarb, Fred, Frank, Bishop, and two without names yet.

Monday's Babies

Flower had her babies while we were at work today.

Finally, one that didn't wait for supervision!

All of our other goats are mostly of the Boer breed.

Flower is mostly not.

We don't know exactly what the rest of her heritage is, but it is different.

She has her own way of doing things.

This year she had two babies.

One is brown and one is white. How did she do that?

I couldn't get a decent picture of the brown one.

The white one seems to show more of her "not Boer" traits.

Short ears and the all white part being the biggest signs.

We haven't seen the either of one up close yet.

Their half sister from last year, Clover, is growing out very nicely down the road.

So I figure these two will be nice and healthy too.

Flower is a very good momma goat/ 

She has her kids tucked up in the driest warmest place of everyone. 

The other babies will probably crawl up in there too, but she won't like it.

Someday she might let us see if the kids are girls or boys.

Feathers!

The science teacher at Pike View Middle School had an idea that FabHub thought would be great project for the kids. Let's incubate some baby chickens. She got the incubator and just to make it really interesting we got the chicks from a friend who has a bunch of different types of chickens. 

36 eggs went into the incubator.

After candling them 23 were expected to have something in them.

They started hatching on Friday the 15th.

We went over this weekend to check on them and found this.

An incubator full of chicks!

Fourteen of them to be exact.

We got them out of there and into their temporary fish tank home. 

They seemed impressed.

Then we got the feeder, water, and heat lamp all setup.

The incubator had been 100 degrees. The classroom was not that warm.

After a bit they started moving around to get the water and food.

We went back to the incubator and found another one had hatched.

That green egg has also got a chick working its way out.

The other seven will get a couple more days. It is sort of hard to tell.

This chick seems to have something to say about that -

"Not another one! We are already crowded in here!"

Don't worry, there is a bigger house on the way.

4 Days 5 Kids

So far this week (2 pm on 17 March) we have had 3 does give us 5 kids.

I need to be specific, because you never know what is happening out there.

The one we thought would be first still hasn't had her babies.

So we just go with the flow and check every few hours.

Sunny's kids Rhubarb (buck) and Apple (doe) were born on Thursday, the 14th, Pi day.

Rose had her girls on Friday.

Tulip had her boy on Saturday.

Here are the first four getting some sun on Saturday morning.

Below we have Little Bit and Lucy both does born to Rose.

When they were born, Rose knew she didn't have enough milk for both of them. Probably for neither of them and if she could only save one Little Bit is the one that she had decided to let go.

When I saw she had them out in the yard and that there was going to be some trouble, I put them all in the goat house and closed the doors to keep everybody else out. Then I spent some time making sure Rose knew they were her babies, she was cleaning them both so I went in the house to give them a bit of time. My hope was that her milk would drop and everything would be fine when I got back. I had an idea that I better bring a bottle out just in case though. 

When I got back to the goat house I found Little Bit pushed into a corner, cold and wet, while Rose and Lucy were on the other side of the barn. I wrapped Little Bit up in a towel, got her to drink some from the bottle, and rubbed to dry her. When I had that all accomplished and Rose seemed to have accepted her again. I left them alone to see if they would finally get the problem solved.

A little while later FabHub got home from a school function and went out to check on them again. Little Bit was standing up and seemed to be in good enough shape to live until morning anyway.

Two days later Rose is still letting them try to eat, but we are giving them bottles too. Looks like we might have travel companions for Easter. Maybe Aunt Rose would like to feed thebabies while she and Uncle Harold are at Mom's house.

This is Tulip's buck baby. Inspiration just hit me for his name.

My sister said her son Garrett would name him Fred, just like his bull and horse.

So Fred it is! 

He and Sunny's babies are hiding in the "safe place" under the building.

It seems to be instinctive for them to go where they can't get stepped on.

There wasn't any real drama to Fred's birth.

Just that he was born up on the hill where there is no shelter or water.

I carried him down the hill with Tulip complaining the whole way.

Well that is all we have so far today. But 4 pm is coming.

We will see what happens after the girls get their dinner.

We have little Violet, big Violet, and Flower left for this round.

We expect Daisy will be a month from now.

Daffodil and Salvia are with Tyson now and will probably have fall babies.

This place is full of excitement lately.
Have you heard about the feathers?

First Baby 2013

Sunny won the "who is going to deliver first" race.

If I remember correctly Tyson was giving her a good chase back in October.

This is her first baby for the year.

His name is Rhubarb.

Because he was born on Pi day of course!

I told him his name today, he said we couldn't make him do Math.

Nope, not going to happen.

He would be willing to eat the Rhubarb though.

I told him no, that would not be good for him.

This is his sister Apple.

Still Pi day.

She had FabHub worried last night.

We have discovered that the second one is usually smaller and takes a little more time to get their feet organized under them. Which means it takes a little longer to get their first meal.

He decided she needed some help, which caused a few trips to the goat house last night.

Everybody was fine this morning.

And now they are up running around causing Sunny to spend extra time eyeballing the dogs.

In the goat house last night while little sister was figuring out the meal plan, 

Rhubarb met his daddy, Tyson. 

And then Daddy and the rest of the goats abandoned the goat house for the night.

Apple is noisy. She hollered every time Sunny moved.

I think the rest of the herd opted to stay outside and save their hearing.

I was expecting more babies when I got home today. That didn't happen.

With our luck the next ones will be born after 4 pm again.

And FabHub has a school function so I will be babysitting.

I cleaned the goat house just in case.

Wish us luck. Come on over and hug a goat.

'Tis the Season

Revisiting last year's day care.

What will the spring of 2013 bring?

There will be more of these cuties.

And feathers!

What are we getting into?

We are still here

Still here. Still farming cows, goats, and about to have chickens. Squawk!

The Generator Trailer

Last month on our way back from Georgia just as hurricane Sandy was about to cause our neighborhood to get dumped on with snow, we stopped and picked up a generator. We figured we would either need it or it was good insurance to chase the power outage away. Turns out that is what happened. We didn't have to use the new generator at all. We did work on our plan for when we will need it though.

Since the generator is classified as portable and the farm always needs work done far from an outlet or the spare battery pack, part of that plan involved getting a trailer for the generator to live on.

We considered buying a complete trailer. Have you ever priced complete trailers?

It is like those things are made of gold or something! Honestly. We have several trailers of various sizes and for a variety of purposes around the family farms. Every one of them (except the cattle trailer - and it has been rebuilt, so almost included) is homemade and most of them are licensed for the road. None of them cost anywhere near the price of those "ready-builts". It is nice to have people with skills who know how to bargain for the parts and build things from scratch.

So with that plan, we considered building one. That requires an axle to be found/purchased.

The second nephew of BIL just got done looking high and low for axles and had found nothing that would work on the scale we wanted. Not too big so it can be handled and stored pretty easily. Not too small so other things can also be carried when necessary. Just right would also be road worthy for those trips down to the family farms, cause you never know what might come up around here.

The cheapest axle we found locally was $129. That and the rest of the building supplies would have been more than we wanted to pay. So we looked for another plan.

We looked at Harbor Freight. Because sometimes they have the unexpected stuff.

I guess they have always had trailers for sale at HF, but finding this Utility Trailer was perfect for our plans.

If you consider it or any of what they have available here are some tips. 

• Don't miss the 20% off any single item coupon that is in their mailer ads or in some magazines. They took the coupon even though the price is listed as on sale.
• Call your local store before traveling an hour. Glad we did. We would have gone to the Roanoke store, but they didn't have any so we ended up at the store in Cross Lanes. Plus $12 toll. grump
• Watch out for surly clerks
• Bring some proof of insurance for the registration
• Don't plan on getting it licensed quickly. The paperwork can take 6 months.

So we headed to the big city to buy the trailer not knowing how big the packaging would be and sort of expecting the frame and axle to be pre-assembled, we took the Big Boy truck. We should have taken mine since the ride isn't quite so harsh. We could have taken a Smart car. If we had one and dared ride it on the interstate. 

There was quite a bit of assembly required.

But FabHub is the best assembly guy on the farm.

He did skip the light installation though.

The trailer is small enough to fit in the back of the truck if he needs to leave the farm.

Towing would be more of a bother than rolling it up into the truck bed. 

The size keeps it easy to roll and move around.

Putting the frame together was the first step.

Next step was building the deck and adding the side boards.

Finally was attaching the generator to the deck.

For FabHub that meant installing not just 4 U-clamps, but also 6 carriage bolts.

This thing is not moving from that deck very quickly.

There is also plenty of space for "stuff"

Yes, that is a goat named Daisy checking out the job.

That is another blog post.

She approved.

And so do I.

One more tip.

Some of the comments on the HF website talk about the "poor" grease that is in the wheel hub.

Lesson for those people, that isn't grease.

It is shipping/packing and rust prevention lubricant.

See that little gold valve looking thing - that is a grease plug.

You will need a grease gun and a tube of grease.

Stoopid people are funny.