Busy Day at Boughshire Dale

Today was a very busy day on the farm.

We "mucked" out the chicken coop, which was much easier than I thought it would be. The coop has a concrete floor, so shoveling up the old bedding was a breeze. That was all hauled up to the compost pile (chicken shit is good!).

We put new bedding in and rehung the waterer and feeder so that less straw would get kicked into it. (Chickens are very messy housekeepers!)

Then we mucked out and restrawed all of the goat areas. That, by the way, is a stinky job.

After a break, we penned up all the goat ladies, then caught and led Mo up to the goat bordello. He's a huge buck and kind of scary. At first, he didn't want to go. Then he got a whiff of the herd and realized where we were going. After that, we were the ones being led.

All the ladies were still penned when he got into the goat yard because we needed to separate out the little girls and take them down to Mo's pen for the winter. They're too young to breed.

It took a little while to round them up and throw them in a cage in the back of the truck. We hauled them down to Mo's pen and strawed their shed for the winter. We also decided to take Flag down there to babysit. I don't have the heart to butcher her or sell her, so she'll just become Nanny Flag and sit with the non-breeding stock over winters.

We made a mistake in that we didn't take Nanny Flag's baby boys down to the girls' new digs along with her.

Around 7:00pm, I heard a goat screaming its head off. It was Sally. She was standing up by the fence near the chicken coop yelling to beat the band. At first I thought she couldn't find her way down to the shed with the rest of the goat girls (goats aren't the smartest things). I walked down to gate and went in so that I could walk out into the field and lead her down. Oops... there were no goats in the shed. !!!

We found the rest of the goats nibbling grass along the creek by the main goat pen. Now we're faced with the problem of how to catch 6 goats with no fence to use to corner them. Luckily, Flag is very tame (unlike the rest), so I grabbed her horn to lead her up to the pen and the little girls followed. We penned them in one side of the catch pen and went back down to catch Sally.

Sally, of course, didn't want to be caught. We finally gave up around 10. She figured out how the rest got out in the middle of the night and we found her up by the goat pen the next morning.

Fun times!