Posts from — May 2009

Early on, I had taken a lot of the push out of Gel and was worried about getting it back.  It’s back! He’s pushy as all get up now and sometimes I have to really get on him to slow him down, but the push is there and you need push.  It’s so much easier to slow a dog down than it is to speed him up.  We put the sheep up to Red’s yesterday afternoon.  In order to get up there, we went through the side field which is full of brush and grass that is well over the heads of the sheep.   Guess how much they didn’t want to go through it?   Gel had to lean on them hard to keep them going. He had lambs (who were bringing up the rear) jumping up over the backs of the adult ewes.   He didn’t grip once.  I took Fern just in case I needed the extra push, but I don’t think I needed her.

I was concerned about getting them up there because of the condition of the fields, but as always, Gel did his job.

Last night when we were getting ready to milk I opened the gate and automatically started to put Kessie on chain, but she wanted in there so bad, I let her go in and put Gel on the chain.  She couldn’t lift the goats so I sent Gel in to help.  Kessie all but lit up with the chance to do something.  Maybe one day she’ll come around, maybe even quicker if I got over my prejudice and gave her a chance.

Ah, the cesspool that is the Internet.  People can say just about anything they want either on-line or via e-mail.  I love the Internet and all that it offers, but there are times I wish some people would be forced to say what they say to the others face rather than hide behind a computer screen.  It would cut down on a lot of the crap out there.

Last night I got an e-mail from an individual with the subject line of “you” as follows: “couldn’t be further from the truth in your little article about dry cat food. I would advise a primary school education first, then perhaps generic college courses. Your credibility declines even further when you write your own “author” summary. Another reason the Internet is not a suitable source for fact.”

The article he’s speaking of is one entitled The Truth About Dry Food.  The e-mail was not signed; I hate it when people send unsigned e-mails.  Interestingly, I did not write my own author summary.  a woman with a PhD education did.  The Bozo must work for a pet food company.  Oh well, I hope sending this e-mail gave him (according to the e-mail address, his name is Ben, but that doesn’t mean the writer is a Ben, it could have been a woman, or maybe it was from a cat hooked on dry food) some pleasure, but I think maybe I should see if I could employ him to do some fencing or perhaps shovel some manure.  That would be a more constructive pastime for him.

Until later …

I told Wally I’d run an errand for him today and while I was out doing that errand I planned to run a few of my own.  I did a good bit of house cleaning, then cleaned myself up enough so I’d be reasonably presentable and headed out to the car.  Got in it and couldn’t find my keys.  Damn!  Looked around and there they were: in the ignition turned in the on position.  Great.  I wasn’t going anywhere.  Called Wally and told him he’d have to run his errand after work and to please borrow a set of jumper cables.  Part of my errands was to pick up something for supper.  That got canned.  Thank goodness for individually wrapped chicken breasts which are now defrosting in a bath of warm water.

I took the dogs for a good run today.  They got an extra hard work-out because they had to leap through the tall grass like gazelles to keep up with me.  Finally Fern got smart and started to run in the tire tracks behind the ATV.  They all came home soaking wet and covered in hay seed.

Mopping linoleum floors is usually enough of a cleaning, but there are times that you need to get down on your hands and knees and scrub.  Once down there, you find all sorts of unmentionables stuck to cabinet doors, the walls, refrigerator, etc.  What should have been a ten minute mop job in the kitchen turned into an hour scrub fest.

Remember the chicken was was sitting?  Well, she’s still trying to sit, but she keeps getting bumped out of her nest by the other chickens.  Why 12 nests are not enough for 10 chickens is beyond me.  I set up a half barrel with a hole cut in it into the pen that we were formally using for the chicks, put some hay and ten eggs in the barrel and put her in the pen.  She’s now happily setting and hopefully she’ll complete her job.  I had some doubt as to whether she’d be able to protect her chicks from the cats, but not any more.  When I took her off the nest to move the eggs, Ted came in to see what was up.  That hen chased him back out of the hen house.

Ted is still being a nuisance while milking, but he has a different agenda this time.  At Champagne’s former home she was eating pellet grain.  I brought a bag home with me when I got her with the intention of switching her over to the sweet grain that I feed the other goats.  When I milk, I make up a smorgasbord for the goats: I put down a strip of sweet goat food, a strip of sunflower seeds and a third strip of pellets.  Often goats will not eat pelleted food and in looking at the ingredients of this food, it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t eat it.  Was I ever surprised to see that the three LaManchas went for the pelleted food.  There must be something addictive in that food because Ted loves it too.  Definitely not species-appropriate and whenever I catch him in it, I toss him back out the door, but he’s persistent.  Beast.

It’s been fun having the sheep in the yard so I can see them.  The lambs are growing up beautifully.  We’ll need to get the rest of the ram lambs either sold or butchered in the next couple of months.  While we’ll continue to give most of our processing work to a local business, I found out about a man in Morganton who does processing for half the price we have been paying.  In a few months if we still have ram lambs we’ll probably take them there and have them processed for the dogs.  Next year we will band all of the ram lambs so we won’t have to separate them from the ewes.  A male goat may start breeding at five months old.  I don’t think a sheep will start breeding that young, but we don’t want to take a chance with that.

Speaking of banding, we’ve decided to go ahead and band Basil (the Alpine buck kid I bought at the auction) and we’ll band the two babies we are going to pick up on Friday.  Keeping a male goat is a pain in the butt.  When it’s time to breed we’ll just borrow an experienced buck who will get in and get the job done and we’ll get him out.  We’ll do the same thing with a ram.  He’ll stay with the ewes for 30 days and then he’ll be removed.  The year before last we had an issue with a ram who wasn’t breeding as he should have.  Luckily we had a botched wether (we didn’t get both of his testicles in the band and he was still able to breed) in with the ewes who finished up the job.

Back to my floor scrubbing …

It is disgustingly humid here.  We’ve had rain almost every day now for at least a week.  I am not complaining, really I’m not.  I’d much rather have it rain than not, but it’s soggy and oppressive.  I’m in the middle of trying to get the house cleaned and I took a quick break to catch up on some of the Blogs that I follow on a regular basis.

The cheesecake I made out of goat cheese yesterday came out wonderful.  I mixed in bananas, strawberries, pineapple and coconut.  It took over an hour to bake and then a long time to cool off in the refrigerator, but it was worth the time.  Gosh, it’s good.  It’s hard not to sit at the table and eat all of it at one time.  I made two and will put one in the freezer for next week.  This will be a good use for extra goat cheese.  The last batch I made came out very, very creamy, perhaps too creamy and it has a bit of an odd flavor.  It could be because I let it set too long before dumping out the curds and hanging them.  I made the cheese later in the morning than I usually do and feel asleep before dumping it in the evening.  I now let the cheese sit a full twelve hours before I dump the curds and that has been working well.  I have a new batch sitting this morning.

As I write this, the sheep are in the yard grazing.  They do not have much grass where the ElectroNet is set so I pulled them up yesterday morning.  They’ve been grazing in the yard ever since.  There isn’t a lot they can get into here now that they can no longer escape into the back pasture.  If they’d stay in the back pasture and not wander up to Red’s where they are likely to taste tomato plants, Japanese maples or blueberry bushes, they’d be fine.  Sheep are not content staying in any one place for any length of time.  They are roamers.  If I push the goats out into the side pasture, they tend to stay within sight of the fence line the whole time.  I can’t leave them loose in the yard because they do get into trouble.

I planted six packages of morning glory seeds along the fence line of my agility field.  Six packages only took me about half way.  I placed the seeds along the fence then covered them with top soil.  It rained yesterday evening and this morning so they’ve had a good watering.  After I got the seeds planted, I set up a few jump patterns and messed around with Fern a bit.  She loves the game of agility.

Okay, I am a glutton for punishment, I know I am.  I am going to go and pick up two more bottle babies on Friday.  They are month old Saanen/LaMancha crosses.  I figured I am already feeding one baby, why not feed two more?  If it gets to be too much of a pain in the neck, we’ll just butcher them earlier.  Wally and I discussed constructing a holder for the bottles and we’ll see if we can’t make one this weekend.  Otherwise I’ll need to grow an additional arm to hold a third bottle.

Until later …

I am getting way more goat milk than we can use so I’m trying to find creative ways to use it up.  Of course Basil is drinking it.  I am feeding him approximately 22 ounces three to four times a day, but that hardly puts a dent in the milk the goats are producing.  I made four quarts of yogurt yesterday, but it didn’t come out all that well so I gave it to the dogs.  I think the dogs are getting sick of goat milk.  Of course I make lots and lots of cheese, but the refrigerator is starting to get full of cheese.  I bought two graham cracker crumb crusts yesterday (which was kind of stupid as I should have made my own from scratch, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time) and plan to make some cheesecake from goat cheese.  That should be good and reasonably healthy since I won’t use quite as much sugar as called for in the recipe and will use unrefined sugar.  I made a batch of pineapple and banana ice cream yesterday which was very good.  Maybe I’ll start taking baths in it.

I admit I probably don’t need four goats, but one of them could go dry or some other tragedy could happen and I’d be down to three which really isn’t quite as much.  Rain is still giving me a hard time drying off.  Her udder was so full, I felt bad for her and milked her on Saturday.  She looks better if I milk her than if I don’t.  She seems to eat better if she’s getting time on the milk stand.  This goat lives to milk.

Unless we have to, we will not be doing any more bottle babies.  I don’t know how people with a lot of dairy goats deal with feeding bottle babies.  It is extremely time consuming.  I’d much rather the baby were able to drink when he was hungry, not when I decide it’s time for him to be fed.  It is a very unnatural practice.  Wally now feels the same way.  No more talk about bottle feeding a calf from him.

We finished fencing in the agility field yesterday and it looks really nice.  We still need to work on the fence behind the field to make sure the goats or sheep cannot come through.  There are four strands of barbed wire up on one corner and I thought that would keep the goats out.  Wrong.  They climbed right through and all I could see was their udders getting torn up.  We fixed that area temporarily with some cattle panels.  We’ll run field fence on the back side over the next couple of weeks.

It rained off and on all weekend long and it feels very tropical right now.  It’s quite uncomfortable.  In a few minutes I’ll start the ATV and take the dogs for a run and check the sheep and Rose.  I’d like to be able to move the sheep in the next day or so, but I don’t think the weather is going to cooperate.

I made a wonderful meal last night.  I had originally planned to marinate lamb steaks and put them on the grill, but we were so caught up in fencing, that I didn’t get in to get the marinade done.  While shopping that morning I found split turkey breasts for $.99/pound.  I bought all of them.  Luckily I had the foresight to leave one in the refrigerator.  I cut the meat off the bones and placed it in an oven proof frying pan.  I added some sliced new potatoes, onion, garlic (lots), fresh chopped thyme, rosemary and sage, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  I cooked at at 400 degrees for about an hour, turning it half way through cooking.  It was wonderful!  It was a bit too warm to have the oven on 400 degrees for an hour, but the meal was worth it.

I bought a bunch of morning glory seeds and plan to plant them along the agility field fence.  If all goes well, I’ll start to plant perennial wildflowers along the fence in an effort to eliminate the need to keep the fence clear of weeds.  I’ll do the same around my garden fence.  I did a stupid thing a few weeks ago: I sprayed herbicide along the fence line of my gardens and I mixed it a bit too strong.  When I planted my cucumber plants along the fence, they promptly died.  I hate to think of the environmental damage I did by spraying the herbicide.  I won’t do it again.

Until later …

You may recall that one of the two black cats that I took in trade for Mr. Red (Bubba) came to me with a nasty wound at the base of his tail.  I believe that this wound was causing him to lick his tail, belly and hind legs raw.  I treated him homeopathically, but for the longest time, both Wally and I thought his tail was going to rot off it looked so bad.

The tail has since healed and the hair has almost completely grown back around his tail and in the other places where it was missing.  I realized, however, that if his tail had rotted off, he might have been more adoptable.  No one wants a plain old black cat, especially one with so much hair missing, but if his tail had rotted off, he could have been marketed as a new breed: a Bald Belly Manx cat.  I’m sure someone would have adopted him then and while his hair may have eventually grown back, they’d have a really nice cat.

He is a really nice cat, as is Boo Boo.  Their downfall was their color.  It’s a shame people are so drawn to flash and oddities.

While I worked until 11:30 (and couldn’t get to sleep for several hours after I got home) I still woke up at my usual time.  Got the milking done, animals cared for and ate breakfast.  It’s been raining off and on all day which is really quite nice.  Wally and I watched some television for a few hours, then headed out to set the posts to fence in my agility field.  I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to spend the money to fence it in or not.  I really don’t want the animals (any animals other than the cats) to have access to the equipment.  The goats climb on it, the sheep rub on it and Fern loves to run laps back and forth across the dog walk and over the A-frame.  While her enjoyment of the equipment is a good thing, I don’t want her running on the equipment without my interaction.  So, we measured out where we wanted the fence and set the posts.  If all goes well, we’ll run the fence tomorrow.  I hope to be able to plant Morning Glories along the fence line.  That will be really pretty, but it’s only pretty if I can keep the goats away from it.  The fence for the agility field is going to have a dual purpose: it will keep the animals away from the equipment and will keep the goats and sheep from being able to come up from the back field on their own.  The sheep are behind ElectroNet and will stay there for the foreseeable future now that we’ve mastered moving and setting it.  The goats have done really well with going out into the side and front pasture and eating, but they know how to come up through the back.  The fence will put a stop to that.

Until later …

So much for sticking with one breed of goat.  To date I have three purebred LaMancha goats: Rain, Penny and Luna; I also have Luna’s daughter, Dusty whom I will register and Penny’s buck kid, Casper who will ultimately be butchered.  I just bought Champagne who is a purebred Nubian.  I like different things about each of the goats so I can’t say I prefer one breed over another.  The plan originally was to breed Champagne, Penny and Luna to a Nubian buck who belongs to the woman we bought Champagne from.  I really liked both of her Nubian bucks and even though I’d end up with crossbred kids from the LaManchas, I have no plans to keep anything from either goat next year, but I might want to keep one from Champagne.

Well, last night at the auction, I was captivated by a pretty little Alpine buck.  He looked just barely old enough to be weaned.  I bought him for $30, which is a good price given his size.  As it turned out, however, he’s just three weeks old!  He’s huge for that age.  His name is Basil and he’s bloodlines are from some of the nicest Alpine dairy goats in the country.  The woman who sold him said we could have his papers if we wanted.  At three weeks old, he’ll be just old enough to breed to Champagne, Luna and Penny in October and once he’s through with that, we could butcher him.  That would probably work out best for all concerned as I wouldn’t have to bring in an outside buck or bring my does out to get them bred.

I’ll still have to find a buck to breed Rain to when it comes time, but we can work that out later.  Perhaps I’ll breed her to a Boer goat in order to get chunkier kids to keep to slaughter.

This dairy goat business is a constant work in progress, always evolving and changing.  I guess that’s the way a lot of things go.

I put the sheep up at Red’s on Wednesday and left them there overnight.  When I got home from work on Thursday, I took Gel, Fern and Rose up to get the sheep and bring them to the ElectroNet.  It was tough going to get down there because the grass is over the backs of the sheep and it was hard to see where they were going.  Gel and Fern were not having any trouble knowing where they were, but they were intent on pushing the sheep way faster than I wanted them to go given the heat.  We got everyone up and I headed back to the house to get everyone settled so I could go to the auction that night.

When we got home, we gave Basil a bottle of milk.  I’ve never fed a baby goat before.  It’s kind of neat.  This morning, however, panic struck!  I had washed out the nipple the night before and left it on the shelf to dry.  When I got up to make up a bottle for Basil, I couldn’t find the nipple.  I took everything off the shelf looking for it, but couldn’t find it.  Great: one of the cats thought it was a toy and who the heck knew where it might have been.  It might not have even been in the house.  I told Wally and he came to help me look, but he was unsuccessful.  Oh well, I told him, we’ll have to get one of the does to let him nurse.  We decided on Penny and she was reasonably good about it.  It took Basil a few minutes to figure out this new form of nourishment, but once he did, there was no stopping him until his belly was full.

After I finished milking, I went down into the garden and got the rest of the herbs planted and a few marigolds.  I have several more packs of marigolds to get in and I’ll need to go back to the local greenhouse to get some more cucumber plants.  The ones I planted several weeks ago didn’t survive the cold we had a few days ago.  A few of my seedling tomatoes and basil didn’t survive either.

When Wally gets out of work today we’ll be heading up to Polkville to pick up my ATV which hopefully will be running better.  That ATV has not run well since I’ve had it.  I don’t know why.  The model got excellent reviews.  Hopefully the man who worked on it got to the bottom of the problem and it will be okay now.  It has been gone a week now and I miss having it.

Until later …

Whoo Hoo!!!  Marcus came out last night and leveled out the agility field.  He also pulled up a stump that was on one side of it and took dirt from other locations on the property and filled additional dips and holes!!  Now all we have to do is to get some straw to put down over the dirt and then my equipment can be moved down there.  We’ll run some fence around it to keep the sheep, goats and stray Border Collies away from the equipment and we’ll be golden.  Yea!

The field is quite a ways from the house so the plan is to crate Kessie in the furthest room of the house when I go down to train Gel and Fern.  She barks like a fiend whenever I try to train Gel or Fern in agility and that is extremely irritating.  Maybe now I’ll be more interested in training agility.

Training on stock is just about out of the question right now.  The grass has grown up over the backs of the sheep.  I let them out yesterday afternoon to move the fence and they all but disappeared.  My ATV is out for service so I had to take Wally’s truck to go in search of.

I might have to call in sick to WalMart today.  I am in shock.  Adam didn’t win.  Apparently some shocking photos were revealed on the Internet.  Not sure exactly what the photos were and quite frankly, I don’t care.  People will say and do just about anything to get attention on the Internet.  Such is life behind a computer screen.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter too much.  I feel sure Adam is well on his way to greatness.

Until later …

I learned through trial and error how to use Gel and now Fern as tools to get done what I needed to get done with the stock.  Except for what he’s done with me, Wally has not used a dog much to move stock, but now he always wonders how people manage stock without a dog.  It was sort of funny watching him Monday night as he went out to put up the chickens and ducks.  He brought Gel in with him and as they got into the pasture, Gel stopped to finish up the bowl of milk that I had given to the chickens and ducks that evening.  Wally kept on walking towards the house and started to put up the poultry on his own.  Gel kept drinking the milk.  I got up and yelled out the door asking him if maybe it would be easier if he used the dog to put up the poultry and it was at that point that he realized that Gel wasn’t where he should be and put him in action.  Everyone was put up in a few minutes.

If it were me going in there, I likely wouldn’t have gone much past the gate: I would have sent Gel in telling him to put up the ducks.  The adult chickens go up on their own as soon as it gets dark; the ducks and now the chicks have to be put up.  The ducks flock and move off the dog quite well; usually as soon as a dog enters the pasture when it’s dark, they go up on their own.  The chicks are another story; they go every which way but where you want them to.  While we might have been able to put the ducks up without the dog, it would be close to impossible to get the chicks up.

Last night Wally went out and Fern put herself first in line to put up the poultry and he let her do the work.  Unfortunately, Fern doesn’t have power steering (meaning she doesn’t know her flanks; must teach Fern her flanks one day), but she gets the job done, just not as quickly as Gel can.

Oh, and life is good, very, very good.  Last night Adam Lambert sang Mad World again.  I was so glad he sang that song over one of the others he sang during the season.  He has to be one of the best performers ever seen on American Idol.  This week the So You Think You can Dance competition starts and today I start to get DVDs from Season One of the HBO True Blood series.  Wonder how I’m going to be able to get anything done over the next few weeks.  Another HBO series that Wally and I have enjoyed is Carnivàle.  We still have some DVDs from Season Two left to watch.  Talk about a twisted story line, if you get a chance, watch a few episodes and see if you don’t get hooked.

Well, here it is almost 1 PM and I haven’t got much of anything done today.  Most of the morning was shot because I took Wally’s mother and her husband to the eye doctor for an appointment which ended up lasting almost two hours.  Guess I had better go and get something done so the day isn’t entirely shot.

Until later …

Used her to put the sheep up last night and she was back to her usual self.  I dosed her with Lycopodium about a week ago now.  Lyc is a slow, long-acting remedy so it doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t see improvement right away.  While we were heading out, Rose was doing her best to distract Fern, but she wasn’t successful.  When Rose tried to jump on her, Fern simply ducked and kept on working.  Good girl!  The grass is so high out there that I frequently couldn’t see where Fern was.

As I write this, it is only 42 degrees.  Is it March or May?

I have an interview this afternoon with a new title company opening offices in Charlotte.  I’m not terribly keen on working for a title company or driving to Charlotte again.  We’ll see how it goes.  Perhaps I could negotiate a three-quarters time work week.

I made a batch of ice cream from goat milk yesterday.  It is really, really good.  I made it with straight goat milk (no cream).  I’m sure it isn’t as thick as it would have been if I had used cream, but the lower fat content makes up for that.  I’m using a Cuisinart ice cream maker.  You freeze the canister and you don’t have to use salt or ice to make the ice cream.  I used fresh strawberries, bananas and raw sugar for flavoring.  Too bad it’s too cold to eat ice cream!  It was so cold last night we had chicken noodle soup for supper.

I feel sure I am in a dream and I’m really not sitting here at 6:11 AM with the whole day ahead of me, a whole day without real, paying work that is.

A few jobs for which I am qualified have come up recently.  Lowes has a real estate paralegal position open.  Another title examiner position came up.  Both of which I applied for.  Last week I took and passed the management tests at WalMart.  On Saturday I spoke to the Manager of the store and let him know my background and that I was interested in entering the management program.  We’ll see what comes of that.

It’s hard to think about throwing away 25+ years of paralegal training to do something so completely different like becoming an Assistant Manager at WalMart.  I’ve never considered myself to be a people person, but I’ve surprised myself while I’ve been at WalMart.  It’s pretty much set in stone: you do what you have to do to keep the customer happy.  That’s the only way a company is going to stay in business these days.

Yesterday afternoon, Wally and I went Goodwill Crawling.  I frequently shop at Goodwill.  In fact, I buy almost all of my clothes either at Goodwill or on e-Bay.  Wally has never shopped at Goodwill.  He’s lost a lot of weight and I suggested that he try to find some jeans in a smaller size.  He found two pairs.  I found several pairs of shorts, some shirts and two dresses.  I thought long and hard about buying the dresses.  I don’t have a lot of call to wear dresses these days, but they were from excellent designers and quite beautiful.  For $7.50 a piece I figured I could put them in my closet and see what happens in the future.  They won’t go out of style and they won’t go bad.  For $30 I got three or four pairs of shorts, one of which still had the tags on them, four or five shirts ranging from summer dress shirts (again, they’ll go in my closet), one blue shirt to wear at WalMart, two casual cotton short sleeve shirts and one spaghetti strap shirt with a built in bra, the two dresses and a stainless steel pan with a handle to use with my one-handed milking.  Not too bad, huh?

Use and re-use, that’s my motto these days.  Why buy new when you can get new or almost new for less than half the price?  Wash the clothes and no one will ever know where they came from and because they are from good makers, they’ll last a long time.

Because it was so cool yesterday I had decided to make chicken Parmesan and to bake some bread for supper.  There is a recipe from my bread machine cookbook for Parmesan, ricotta and garlic bread.  I modify it a bit and instead of ricotta, I use goat cheese.  I used the dough cycle in the bread machine to knead the dough and when it was done, formed it into baguettes and baked them in the oven.  It was one of those meals where you say, “damn this is good.”

It is cool this morning and forecast to be cool for the whole week.  That’s good.  Laura’s comment on pests in the garden reminded me that I needed to get some of those companion plants into my garden.  I have a bunch of basil, rosemary, parsley and cilantro to get planted as well as a flat of marigolds.  Mostly what I have planted in my big garden is tomatoes, most of which are heirloom varieties.  This really is a no-no in organic gardening and I need to get more variety in there.  I can see a couple of the heirloom seedlings that I traded for goat cheese may not make it so I’ll replace them with another variety.  As I opened up two cans of crushed tomatoes to make the chicken Parmesan I reminded myself that I need to learn to can this year.  From what I’ve read, canning tomatoes is relatively easy because of their acidity.  I don’t know that I care to can much of anything else.  I am going to make it a point to use the basil this year.  I’ll run it through the food processor either plain or make pesto with it and freeze it in ice cube trays.  Once it is frozen, I can snap it out of the ice cube trays and store it in zip lock bags to use throughout the year.  Last year I let most of the basil go to waste. I’ll do the same with the cilantro.

Nothing will go to waste this year, especially now that I have goats.  They love basil, parsley and cilantro.  Sunday morning I washed and cut the tops off two gallons of strawberries.  I intended to give the heads to the chickens, but I all but got attacked by Luna as I headed out to the chicken pasture.  It seems the goats love strawberries!  They are doing really well with going out into the side pasture and eating brush for hours.  That’s how goats should eat.  Most people do not know that goats are not by nature grazing animals: like deer they are browsers.  I need to bring Rose up one day this week and leave her with the goats for a good stretch so Champagne can become accustomed to her.  Champagne has been around a guard dog, but Rose is new to her.  I don’t want Rose running her through the ElectroNet; she doesn’t chase her, she is only trying to meet her, but the few times she’s been with Champagne, she was nervous about her.  Right now the sheep are fenced around the larger thicket in the back pasture and I’d like to get the goats out there a few days this week.  I only work two-four hour shifts during the week.  Saturday I work 2:30 to 11:30.  Lovely …

Wally talked to Marcus on Saturday and he said he has not forgotten getting the dirt moved.  This is a busy time of year for him and the weather has not been too cooperative.  I really can’t wait for him to get over here and get that area leveled so I can get all my agility equipment in one place.  It’s too late to plant grass seed so I plan to move several loads of used straw and goat and sheep manure and spread that over the dirt.  Because the matter has not been composted, it should still sprout some grass and will keep the dirt from becoming too much of a muddy mess.  Once the area is leveled, there shouldn’t be much run-off if it does rain.  If need be, I can spread several bales of straw over the entire area until the fall when I’ll spread some grass seed.

Maybe I can spend some time training Fern this week.  Little rat that she is, she’s happy as a clam to work the chicks and if I get after her for working them on her own, she doesn’t turn into a wilting daisy.  Quite the contrary, she stops for a minute, then goes right back in there.  That is a good indication that she’s following in Gel’s earlier footsteps.  No, it’s not a good trait, but Gel worked through it and I feel sure Fern will as well.  I’ve all but lost training area in the back because of the grass, but I can surely drag out some jumps and do some agility training.

The chicks are doing quite well.  We probably lost about a third of them, which isn’t too bad.  Last week I start to let them out of their enclosure to run with the big chickens.  They follow me around begging for food.  On Saturday when I went out to put them up, they were in a pile behind their enclosure.  They are pretty funny when they lay in a pile like that because they sing to each other.  Of course I couldn’t leave them there so I called Wally and asked him to bring a plastic tub and he helped me scoop them up and put them in the chicken house.

So how do you put up your chicks at night?  We scoop them into a plastic tub and carry them to the chicken house.  Fern was quite happy to help round up the escapees.

On Sunday, we put their light in the chicken house and constructed a low perch for them to use.  Last night Wally and Gel were able to get them all up in the chicken house.  In a day or two, they should go up on their own.

There is a hen setting in the chicken coop.  It will be interesting to see what hatches out and if she is able to protect the chicks (and ducklings?) from the cats.

Time to go and milk.  Until later …