Yep, heat

Well, I was right - Buttercup's in heat again today. I suppose I really can't consider this AI number three, since we were dumbasses and totally missed the heat on AI number 1. So - we'll call this the second AI. If she doesn't settle this time, we'll have to make some decisions.

I might try putting her in with a bull and see if she can conceive naturally. We should probably have her hooves done first, though.

We're starting to get to the point where we need to wait a while so that she doesn't deliver in winter. I hate to go through all this work only to have a frozen calf. Of course, it's not really the calf I'm after, although a replacement heifer would be nice. I really just want milk.

Maybe I'll try the eyelash batting again and see if I can get Craig to buy me a cow that's already in milk. Then I won't flinch every time Buttercup moos.

Fall garden prepping

Mom and Dad came over today to give us a hand prepping the gardens for next spring.

We got the herb beds cleaned out (they had gotten overrun with weeds - totally my fault). I've planted garlic in one bed and my pitiful potted comfrey planted in the small herb bed.

We also got Pat and Brian's yard tilled, leveled, fertilized and grass seed planted.

Buttercup was acting odd today - dancing around and shying away a lot - I bet she goes into heat tomorrow. Dangit!

I'd also finally had enough of one particular goat getting his head stuck in the fence, so I duct-taped a piece of PVC pipe to his horns. Now he can't stick his head through at all. HA!

We found a decapitated Muscovy duck up by the small pond. I'm not sure what got him, probably a raccoon or owl from what I'm reading. We set some live traps. Craig has never seen a live raccoon, so I'm hoping we catch him.

Oops.

Craig went out today to put two strands of barbed wire across the top of the buck pen so that we could move the girls back down there without them getting out again. We use woven field fence for the main fencing, with two strands of barbed wire across the top to make it higher so that they can't climb over. Goats may not be the smartest animals in the world, but they are sure skilled at escaping.

After he had strung most of the wire, he noticed a hole hole under the fence across the creek that goes through it. Of course, Mo wouldn't fit through there, but the girls sure did.

Coulda saved some cash on barbed wire if we had found that hole first!

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!

Cow shed completed

Today we leveled out the floor of the cow shed, added straw in the bedroom and put a hay feeder under the roof. Craig made the hay feeder for me. He's quite handy, I think I'll keep him. Buttercup adores him. She likes her cow shed too!