Posts from — April 2009

So much has happened over the past week.  All of it equals progress on so many levels.  I only have a few minutes to write though.  I need to get out and milk, get the sheep down back, haul water for them and then get back and clean up to head for a hair appointment.

Wally and I spent most of the weekend outside doing yard work and generally cleaning up around the house.  We also spent more time working on the blue building which is now my milking parlor.  When we lifted the building up onto cinder blocks, that provided space for the chickens and ducks to get in there, which of course they did and made a mess.  We jury-rigged some fence around it to prevent most of the access, but occasionally they’d still get in.  We bought some two-foot-high lattice and Wally installed that along the bottom of the building all around it and then put the excess along the front and the door.  I had a bunch of lattice gates that I made when I was doing obedience that had been just sitting around and they got taken apart and put on the building.  It looks really nice.  Unfortunately, the goats are not too happy with the new look and have been giving me a hard time milking.  Monday was the worst.  I was about ready to kill the whole lot of them.  They have been getting progressively better each day.  Hopefully today they’ll be almost normal.

The goats: Dawn and her kid went to a dairy in Polkville.  She won’t be any problem to milk using a milking machine.  Wally and I were going to go to a dairy Saturday morning to look at the goats she had for sale, but she called and canceled at the last minute.  I think that may have been a good thing.  We spent a good part of Saturday running around and doing errands.  One of the things we did was to go to Hickory for the farmers’ market.  I love farmers’ markets!  There is a dairy in Lenoir that I have been very curious about.  I talked to the owner back when I first lost my job about getting a dairy goat from her.  She didn’t have any available at the time.  Laura, the vet whom we got Penny and Luna from got a doeling from her this year and has been raving about the breed: Saanens.  The Saanen is referred to as the Cadillac of dairy goats.  They are the largest of the dairy breeds and up until recently when the sable was introduced, they only come in white.  The owner of the dairy (Ripshin) was there.  Oh, she is a lovely person!  I could have spent the whole day there talking to her.  I learned a lot.  She highly recommended a different type of grain from a millery in Statesville as well as the minerals that they sell.  I picked some of it up on Monday and I can see why she raves about it.  It is a power-packed food and I feel sure now that I haven’t been feeding my goats as well as I should be.  I’ve also been negligent about giving both the goats and sheep access to mineral.  This has since been rectified.

My goats had been looking poor, but I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was not just the normal process of spring shed and heavy milking.  Laura came out on Friday to pick up the two lambs she bought for her children as 4-H projects and told me that they were not looking well.  I had wormed them about a month ago, but apparently it wasn’t enough.  I went ahead and wormed them again on Saturday with Ivermectin (the only wormer where there isn’t any milk withdrawal) and they do look better.  I am going to make it a point to start using herbal dewormer on a regular basis and see if I can’t get by with that most of the year.  The game plan now is to worm the does right after they have their babies (I won’t milk them then) and hopefully that coupled with herbal deworming will be enough.  I am loath to use chemical wormers in both the sheep and the goats, but they did need it.  When we went through the sheep, I think less than half the ewes needed worming.  All of the goats needed it.  Not having ready access to goat-specific minerals didn’t help their condition.

The owner of the dairy, Liza, is a wealth of knowledge.  All of her milking does may be spoken for at this time, but I’m hoping she’ll find one for me.  I went back to the farmers’ market yesterday and spent several hours talking to her.  There was less traffic yesterday than there was on Saturday so she had more time.  I asked if she’d be willing to be my mentor as far as goats and cheese making was concerned and she agreed.  I think what might work out is that she’ll let me have a young doe and her kids which will be perfect.  Then the doe won’t be coming to a new place by herself and depending on the sex of the kids, either I’ll have a future milker or meat.  Liza sells her weaned, castrated buck kids for $30 which is an incredible bargain given their size at weaning (about 60 pounds).  We will be getting some of those for food for the dogs.  The temperament of the Saanen goat is supposed to be very even and calm.  Down the road I might just switch breeds.

I tasted her cheese and mine is every bit as good as hers.  I just need to get the texture of mine smoother as it is on the rubbery side, which for some purposes is better than the ultra-smooth texture, but I would like it a bit smoother.  We talked about cheese making and she gave me some things to try to improve the texture.

Marcus delivered another load of dirt early this week.  Now all he needs to do is to spread it.  Yea!  I haven’t been able to go to agility for the last two weeks though.  Hopefully we’ll get back to it next Monday.

We had lamb steaks on the grill on Sunday and they were nothing short of phenomenal.  They melt in your mouth!  They have more flavor than beef steaks, but not at all gamey.  If I didn’t know what the meat was, I would have said it was very good beef.  We had ground lamb on the grill last night and it was just as good.  I mixed in ground garlic and rosemary and then put them in a burger basket and grilled them over a hot fire.  I bought some focaccia bread at the farmers’ market and I toasted that, added some goat cheese and then put the hot burgers on the bread.  Oh, it was good!

The lettuce in my cold frame is doing better than the seedlings which I planted in the back garden.  The peas are not doing so hot there either.  I think it’s because it got really hot too fast and they were unable to acclimate.  The lettuce that was in the cold frame has been out there for months and is probably hardier.  I ordered some 37% shade cloth and as soon as it arrives, I’ll put it over the peas and lettuce to see if that helps.  We installed hoops completely across the garden which will stay in place all season.  I’ll use them to support shade cloth in the summer and garden plastic in the winter.  I may have simply planted the peas and lettuce too late.  I talked to a farmer at the market yesterday and he said early March is really the time to plant peas here.  He said for a fall crop to put them in the end of September, beginning of October.  While we may not harvest anything from the peas this time around, I learned from the experience.  The garden will be ready for the fall.

I talked to Liza about the possibility of selling grass-fed lamb at the farmers’ market next year.  You can get a meat processing license in North Carolina relatively easily.  You just need to have a separate freezer set aside for the meat you sell.  She said there was a woman at the Boone farmers’ market who was making a killing on grass-fed lamb and there’s no one at the Hickory farmers’ market selling lamb.  We likely won’t be able to do anything this year, but it’s a goal for next year.  We did sell two ram lambs to a local couple which we’ll take to the processor the middle of May.  Some of the ram lambs are of size now, but most need a bit more time to grow up.  When we take those two, we’ll take another one for ourselves.  Liza brings her goat kids to a processor in Mooresville which is about 25 minutes from us.  He charges half the price the one that is close to us charges so we may switch processors.

The dogs are all doing good.  Fern is out of heat and I know she didn’t get bred this time around.  Gel tried like heck to get to her, but he wasn’t successful.  Now everything is back to normal for another six to eight months.  Rose recovered from her spay and is doing fine.  Coyotes have been active the past few nights and she’s been doing her job.  The chicks are in one of the old hay feeders and are doing okay.  We’ve lost a few of them to the cats, but what’s left in there might just have the chance of growing up.  It will be interesting to see how many will be roosters.

Until later …

Everything is good … just very, very busy.  Will catch up later.  Lots to report, lots of good stuff going on.

The wind, I hate the wind.  The pollen count is through the roof and the wind blows it all over the place and makes me sick as a dog.  I don’t know which is worst, antihistamines or sneezing your brains out.  Agh!

Early in the morning I started the ATV with the intention of going down back with water for the sheep.  I got it out of the garage and hooked it up to the wagon, then it stalled.  I didn’t think too much of it stalling because it was pretty chilly out.  I started it again and it only ran a few minutes before stalling again.  Great.  I went back in the house, ate some breakfast and came back out to try to start it.  No go.  Wonderful.  I walked down back with Gel and pulled the sheep and Rose up to the house so they could drink.  Got a few things done in the house, then headed out to Auto Zone to get what I would need to have it tuned up by my neighbor.  This particular ATV is pretty sensitive about its spark plugs.  It likes to have them changed frequently.  That is likely due to all the slow driving I do with it.  I rarely open it up in order to clean out the spark plug.  The employee at Auto Zone was very helpful in trying to figure out what parts I needed for the tune-up.  They could not get me either the oil or air filter though so I headed to the local ATV dealer.  Got lost, finally found it, only to find out it was closed on Wednesdays.  Great.  Stopped at another auto parts store and got the oil filter then headed home.  When Wally got home, he changed the spark plug for me and that fixed the problem.  It still needs to be tuned up so I’ll need to make another trip to the local ATV store to get the air filter.

Without the ATV we did a lot of walking, which was actually quite nice.  On the way up with the sheep the first time, I called Gel off them once they were pointed in the right direction.  I assumed they’d go home.  I assumed wrong.  Got back up to the house and no sheep.  I sent Gel back down for them.  He was gone for quite a while so I let Kessie and Fern out of their runs and walked back down.  As we were topping the hill to the back pasture, I saw Gel looping around the sheep who were way, way, way far down.  Gosh, it was pretty.  He brought them back up through the gate and into the pasture where we were.  I put them up in the fenced-in area for safe keeping, forgetting that I had left the back gate which opens into the front field.  A few hours later, I came out to find no sheep.  Got the dogs and headed out into the front pasture, walked the whole length of that, up around Red’s house and back down through the back pastures.  The sheep were in the pasture immediately in back of my house.  The lambs were playing king of the hill on the old hay bales.  I let them be and came back and got the goats and pushed them out into the back pasture to graze.

Remember the tick problem?  I think we have it licked … ha! We licked the ticks!!!  I bought a large container of Dawn dish detergent and squirted that a the base of the walls.  The ticks that came out of the walls ended up in the Dawn detergent which killed them.  It looks like crap right now, but I haven’t seen many live ticks since I put the Dawn down.  Yea! Non-toxic tick killing.  I took everything out of the closet in the bedroom and the bathroom and it is all in the family room off the bedroom.  I purposely left the Dawn standing for several days to be sure all the ticks were killed.  I started cleaning it up yesterday.  I’m slowing getting the things I took out of the bedroom back in there, but it’s been a slow process.  I don’t have a lot of energy and I think that’s due to allergies.

Today is looking to be a much nicer day, but the wind is still up some.  I did transplant the seedling tomatoes I got on Sunday into clay pots.  They are too small to transplant into the garden.  I hope to get to the local greenhouse today.  The peas and lettuce are doing wonderfully.  I used a gallon of milk to make yogurt this morning and set up another batch of cheese.  Rose is getting a ball of cheese for breakfast.  She’ll be happy about that.

Kessie update, she gets points for desire to work.  That dog just doesn’t give up when it comes to working.  She may not be very effective at what she does, but she sure tries hard.  I need to get past my issues with that dog and try to work with her.  It’s hard …

I don’t know if you all have been watching this season’s American Idol.  I got hooked on Idol about three years ago now.  At first, I wasn’t terribly enthralled with the performers, but now, damn, Adam Lambert is freaking amazing!!!!!  Unless his voice box falls out, I feel sure he’s going to win.  Did you see his performance of Mad World?  Freaking amazing.  It sends shivers up my spine.  Week after week he delivers incredible performances.

It is a very, very mad world out there …

Off to milk …

It appears that the experiment with the incubator was a failure.  The chicken eggs should have hatched by now.  I’m going to give it a few more days for the duck eggs, but I’m afraid they won’t hatch either.  Bummer!  Raising chicks in a brooder is a pain in the butt too.  They kick shavings into their waterer, poop in their food and water and stink to high heaven.  The smell isn’t a problem when they are outside, but being outside means I have to make sure they are sheltered from the weather.  Agh!  I wish at least one of my hens would go broody.  That would be a much more natural way to raise chicks.  The chicken tractor was a failure as well as the cats were sticking their paws under the wire and dragging chicks out.  I put them back in the brooder with straw for bedding which hopefully will be a little easier to deal with than shavings were.

The lettuce I planted in the tubs that I had cold frame came up, but it isn’t growing all that well.  I bought some seedlings from Lowes and put them in a few weeks ago and they are doing much better.  The peas are coming up nicely.  In the future, I will use the garden against the house for cold weather crops.  Now that the cattle panels are up, it won’t take much to put hoop some PVC against the cattle panels and the house and then put plastic over that during the cold months and shade cloth during the warmer months.  Just being up against the house will help in the cold months.  I only work two days this week and plan to get the rest of my garden in.

The other night when I was looking at the tubs of lettuce I told Wally it was a failure and he said no, it wasn’t a failure, it was a learning experience and he’s right.  I guess you don’t come out of the womb knowing everything there is to know in this World.  You have to learn, sometimes by your mistakes.

I’ll be spending a good part of the day in  my garden.  Must get it planted on time this year  I traded some cheese for some nice heirloom tomato seedlings.  They are still a bit too small to put in the garden, but I’ll buy a few tomato plants at a local greenhouse and get them planted today and tomorrow.  Tomato plants, yellow squash, peppers, cucumbers and some herbs.  Before I plant, I have a bit of weeding to do, but not much.  The garden is very heavily mulched which helps keep the weeds down and moisture in.

Rose and the sheep spent the night in the far back pasture.  I heard Rose barking some, but not much.  It was her “I’m here and I’m tough” bark.  If it escalated beyond that I would have gone down to check on her.  Good girl Rose!  Hopefully everything is okay down there.  I need to run down there early this morning with water.

Wally and I are now certified to use FAMACHA.  How exciting, huh?  I’ll bet the companies that make conventional wormers don’t care much for FAMACHA.  If you use this method, you use a lot less wormer, which is good because it is expensive.  It was fun hob nobbing with the local sheep and goat farmers.  Soon, I need to get to the point of using herbal dewormers for my goats.  They are going to be harder to keep perasite free than the sheep because they stay up more.  When I’m home I open the back gate to the fenced-in area and they go out to graze.  They are doing well about going out to graze and coming back in when they are full.  The know where they live.

Until later …

A few days ago while I was milking Ted (the cat) came in and started messing around with the goats.  Ted is a shit head through and through.  He has no fear of the hoofed animals.  He gets up on top of the milking stand and messes with the goats to try to get a rise out of them.  For the most part they ignore him, as they did that day.  So, he tried a new tactic.  He got down on the ground and started messing with their feet which was getting to them.  To avoid getting a foot in my milk pail, I distracted him by squirting some milk in his face.  He happily cleaned up his face and the milk that landed on the milk stand and I was able to finish milking.

He came in today and was really aggravating the goats; enough so that they started fussing enough that I worried about my milk pail getting tipped over.  I got up and found a stainless steel dog bowl and filled it with fresh milk.  This convinced Ted to leave the goats alone.  I’m afraid, however, I’m going to have to keep that bowl in there for Ted as I think he’ll decide milk for breakfast is a very good thing.

Off to re-set my ElectroNet as quickly as I can and get back here so that Wally and I can head out to a FAMACHA workshop.  It’s about time they scheduled one in our area.  I only found out about it yesterday and luckily there was still room.

Until later …

Wally and I decided to lay low last night and take it easy.  We were both pretty sore from the work we did on Sunday.  There was a mini-series playing on Sci-Fi that was re-airing from 7 to 9 last night that I thought might be entertaining.  It was not, but oh well.  I had prepared a small lasagna using goat cheese and sausage from locally-raised pork.  It was incredible!  If anything, goat cheese gives lasagna more flavor than ricotta.

I went down on the ATV to get the sheep at around 6:30 and we had planned to put them up in the duck and chicken pasture so they could mow the grass down in there overnight.  When we got back up to the house, however, the chickens and ducks were not ready to go up and the sheep were not ready to go in so I let them drift back down into the back pasture.  Drift wasn’t exactly the right word: run, buck and twist was more like it.  A cool breeze had come up and they were feeling their oats.

Before it got dark, I went back out with Gel and sent him to “find the sheep.”  He circled around and came back through the front gate.  Shoot, I said to Wally, I might have to start the ATV and go and look for them.  Then I realized, less than an hour ago, I sent Gel out into the front pasture to pull in the goats and he may have been confused as to what I wanted.  I walked down to the gate of the back pasture with Gel and sent him again.  Then I walked back up and waited.

Sometimes it seems like a long time, but if I were to time him, I’d likely find that he’s only gone about ten minutes, we saw the sheep coming down over the hill.  Keep in mind, there’s over a hundred acres of fields and woods behind our house.  The sheep essentially have free access to the entire property when I set them down there.  Talk about blind outruns.  The beauty of Gel is that I don’t have to worry about his outruns being too tight, short, crooked or anything else.  I’m blessed with a dog with a natural outrun.  There have been times that I’ve sent him on big outruns and after he’s gone I’ll follow up behind him to check his outruns and they are always spot on.

His driving has improved tremendously as well.  He’s pushing a bit too hard these days, but I know better than to put a damper on that.  He will stop for me and right now, that’s all I care about.

I remember, not to many years ago now, I purchased four “dog broke” sheep from a local man.  These sheep may have been dog broke at one time, but by the time I got them, they were evil, sour beasts.  One of them got away from us one night (I didn’t have a fenced-in schooling area at the time) and went down into the back pasture.  At that time, the back pastures had not been mowed in at least a year, maybe longer and they were a thick mess of thorns, grass and who-knows-what-else.  It was so thick, I could not get through it myself.  I didn’t have the ATV at that time.  I sent Gel to “find the sheep.”  He was maybe two years old at the time.  He was gone for a long time so I went down and got as far as I could into the field.  There was Gel, pushing that ewe back through that thick tangle of brush.  He brought her back.  I’m sure at that time it wasn’t as pretty as it is now, but he had sense and guts enough to bring that sheep back through difficult terrain.  An open handler that I was sort of working with at the time told me that he would never have considered sending a green dog out on a blind outrun (fetch) like I did with Gel.  Well, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t have another dog and if I didn’t send Gel, I wouldn’t have got that sheep back.

What it comes down to is that you use the tools that are available to you at the time.  Some people told me that you always ruin your first dog.  I don’t think that’s true, at least it hasn’t been with me.  Gel is far from ruined.

Until later …

As you may know, Dawn delivered a buck kid almost two weeks ago.  She’s never been a good milker and I think I knew that when I went to look at her, but the price was right and I went ahead and bought her.  She was a kicky doe and that has pretty much resolved, but I had to spend $35 on hobbles that I likely may never use again.  I also spent almost $50 on a hand-held “Maggie Dan” milker to use to milk her which originally did work well, but now it’s clogged and can’t be used at all.  Now that Dawn has freshened, her udder is much larger, but of course her teats are still tiny and getting hold of them to milk her is close to impossible. Last night I had Wally put her up on the stand to see if it was something I was doing wrong, but he didn’t have any more success.

I can send it back milker to the manufacturer to have it unclogged, but that will be postage there and back and there’s no guaranty the milker will not continue to clog. The “pump” to the milker is a drenching/vaccinating gun manufactured by PrimaTech.  I am sure it was not designed to pass heavier liquids like milk and the mechanism is sensitive enough that small particles of hair, dirt or even hay will eventually clog it.  Apparently the milker manufacturer has designed a filter for it, but that’s just more apparatus to have to clean and lug around when it comes time to milk.  I could just buy another pump and keep it on hand as a spare, but that’s another $50.  If you factor in what I paid for Dawn ($100) plus the additional almost $100 I spent on equipment just to milk her, that brings her price up to $200.  I guess there are no real bargains to be had in livestock.

Then again, Penny and Luna are awesome milkers and I only paid $75 each for them.  When I put Penny up on the stand today, her udder was so full she started leaking milk!  With the milk I’m getting from the three does I can make cheese every day which is pretty much what I have been doing.  Rain is a good milker, but she’s miserable to be around.  Hopefully that will change once she has babies of her own on her.

So I’ve decided to go ahead and sell Dawn and her kid and put that money towards another, more solid milking doe.  I know a lot more about what I want in a milking doe than I did six months ago and feel I can make a more educated decision.

Wally and I spent most of the day catching sheep and lambs, tagging the lambs, trimming hooves, worming those who needed it, banding the ram lambs we were going to hold on to until next year and recording all that we did.  By the time we got done, we were both covered with mud and sheep shit.  I only ended up on my back with a sheep on top of me once which is a miracle given how slippery it was where we had the sheep penned up.  They have been gorging on fresh, green grass and many of them have soft stools from the rich diet.  That coupled with more rain today made the footing quite treacherous.  The arrangement is that I catch a sheep or lamb and if I can bring it to the stand on my own, I do, if not, Wally helps me get it there.  Once they are on the stand, Wally trims their hooves while I tag them (if necessary) and check the color of the membranes around their eyes to see if they need to be wormed or not.  Once that is done, I record all that I did along with any other abnormalities we note.  It takes Wally longer to trim the hooves than it does for me to do my part so while he’s still trimming, I catch the next victim.

I had forgotten a woman (who had been here a few weeks ago to buy cheese and eggs) was scheduled to come out with her friends to pick up more cheese and eggs and to see the sheep.  Around 1:00 a red car pulled into the driveway and then I remembered.  Shoot!  We were surely not dressed for company, but they didn’t seem to mind and were incredibly fascinated with what we were doing.  We took a break and went out into the back pasture and I gave a quick demo with Gel using the sheep that we had finished.

Poor Gel has about lost his mind.  We can’t keep him in his run.  He dug out yesterday while I was at work, bent the screen door on the back porch open and got into the house.  Luckily Fern was in her crate.  When I finished with the demo today, I put him up and he wasn’t in there 15 minutes before he got out again.  Later on Wally put him up in his run again.  He heard a noise and turned around and there was Gel walking across the tarp covered roof of the kennel.  He was climbing up on his dog house and getting out, but we moved the dog house to the center of his run so he now must be climbing the side of the chain link.  He’ll just have to stay in a crate when we are not home.  Given how distracted he is, I was happy that he was honest about his work today.

Until later …