CSA for Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Michelle, our helper this year, cleaning onions.  Michelle
is an ACC Hort student doing her practicum.  You will
probably meet her sometime soon at Global Market on
Saturday mornings!

The first CSA pick-up of our season: the latest start ever for us!  Just wanted things to get a little bigger, have a little more ready!  It's not a huge box by any means, but it will get better every week.  Next week the raspberries should be ready to pick so if anyone is interested in volunteering a little time on a Tuesday or Thursday morning to come help pick - that would be awesome!  (Always bonuses for volunteers....)

This seems like the perfect time for a little refresher on keeping fresh veggies fresh.  Here's a great link to storing your haul of fruit and vegetables!  Our own 'big' piece of advice is get everything out of plastic bags as soon as possible or open the plastic bags for good air circulation.  You're getting super-fresh food but some wilt is possible even in the time it sits waiting for you to pick it up!

Everyone is getting garlic scapes today - a one-time treat!  We love garlic and we always say the scapes are what gets us through until the garlic itself is ready!  They have a mild, fresh garlic taste when raw - cooked they lose that flavor and taste a bit more like asparagus.  They are awesome chopped into salads, into something like tuna salad or mushed up with a soft cheese for a dip or spread.  If you do want to use them in a stir fry or something, fully cook the stir fry, remove from the heat then add the chopped scapes just before serving.  They make an awesome pesto: here's a recipe here.

We've taken fully half of the present radish crop; Thursday members will get the other half.  It was one of a few areas that suffered some serious flooding and wash-outs in the storms of a month ago.  Over half the plot of radishes was ruined, so once we pull them all on Thursday, Farmer Man will till the area and we're going to replant!  We have a few areas that have suffered damage in the heavy rains of June.  We've had some serious losses in the tomatoes, I'm sorry to say, but what survived is doing well now!  I am also sad to report the the goat mommas got away on me one evening and managed to eat almost all the groundcherries before I could get the ladies back under control!  Summer squash is coming nicely and the beans have flowered like crazy and should be ready for picking in a couple of weeks!

So, in the boxes today:

FULL SHARES:  Large bag 'Grand Rapids' loose leaf lettuce, large bag 'Red Sails' loose leaf lettuce, large bag 'Buttercrunch' bibb lettuce, garlic scapes, red onions, radishes.

PART SHARES:  Mediium bag 'Grand Rapids' loose leaf lettuce, medium bag 'Red Sails' loose leaf lettuce, medium bag 'Buttercrunch' bibb lettuce, garlic scapes, red onions, radishes.

SINGLE SHARES:  Small bag 'Grand Rapids' loose leaf lettuce, small bag 'Red Sails' loose leaf lettuce, small bag 'Buttercrunch' bibb lettuce, garlic scapes, red onions, radishes.

Local Perfume!

We're really excited about this: we'll be offering locally crafted perfume at the Global Market, along with our soaps and natural skin care.  Not local essences, sorry to say, but essential oils from around the world formulated into unique colognes here in Brandon!

The colognes are the work of our friend and CSA member John.  It's something he's been working on for a long time.  So far, he's introduced two: Dauntless is essential oils of Lime, Lavender and Vanilla with a 'spicy base' of Patchouli, Cinnamon and Frankincense.  Memories of Earth is a woody perfume with Patchouli, Cinnamon and Sandalwood with a 'sweet wrapping' of Ylang Ylang.  They are both lovely and quite unisex!  We'll have sample bottles of the market, for you to try the fragrances.  Pictured are John's limited edition, hand-made copper bottles.  There is only one of each copper bottle per cologne.

John is working on other goodies.  He's also been playing with distilling his own, locally sourced essences!  Essential oil of saskatoon?  How about wild plum?  It will be interesting to see what he comes up with over the summer!  He'll be opening an Etsy shop which will be called CyborgianSecrets!  Come check it out at the Global Market; we're there Fridays 4 - 8 PM and Saturday mornings 9 AM to 1 PM!

Too Much Rain!

It's been an incredible Spring and now, early Summer is a little on the wild side!  From snow in May to deluges in June - it's a hard year to get things growing!  This past week has seen three major storms, with high winds and large amounts of water in a short time.  We're more fortunate then some in Brandon who are dealing with flooded basements, and way more fortunate then the town of Reston which is flooded....again.

Now, we're on the North Hill and we have very sandy soil.  So, weren't we surprised when doing the rounds this morning to find huge puddles in different places?  That never happens here!  It's just an indication of how saturated the soil has become.  The rain of last week had created some run-off areas, which were exaggerated during the weekend downpour and have now become major river beds.  There are patches of field tomatoes washed away, almost an entire plot of carrots washed out and a number of little wash-outs in other areas.  Fortunately, we plant lots...but the tomatoes will be missed.  Perhaps I'll do the rounds of the garden centres in the next few days and see if there are any deals.

All there is to do now is wait and see.  Maybe some of the tomatoes will come back, maybe the carrots will just keep growing - even though they may have been moved down a foot or two.  And we'll continue to watch the weather:  there's another storm watch on right now!

A Greener Home!

One of the things we've been working on for a number of years is reducing our use of one-time, disposable products.  It's easier than you think to go a little greener around the house!  One of the easiest changes, I think, is getting re-usable grocery bags and avoiding plastic bags.  Your grocery store probably offers some at a good price and all sorts of lovely ones are available from crafters at your local farmers market/craft market and on websites like Etsy.  There's even online DIY projects for making fun market bags out of things like old t-shirts.

We've also been collecting more food storage jars and containers.  Getting away from plastic wrap, baggies and the sealable bags is also very do-able!  I do wash and re-use zipper type bags but never if it has contained a meat product!  I use my multi-purpose canning jars to store herbs, dried beans, pastas and food stuffs like that.  I also freeze my goats milk in canning jars, leaving lots of headroom for the inevitable expansion-contraction.  Learned that the hard way my first year of storing goats milk when I cracked and broke a number of the jars: ruining the jar and the milk!

Green cleaning is easy - but does require a bit of an expense that I think is quickly re-couped!  Getting away from paper towels and one-time use floor cleaning pads will add money to your pocket, as well as keeping junk out of landfills!  One of my favorite products is the Norwex cleaning cloth.  You can clean lots of stuff without anything else: just dampen the cloth and clean spills, sticky spots and more!  I think it has something to do with the fabric as well as the nap on the cloth.  I currently have four of these cloths, in a rotation.  As I'm constantly cleaning up spilled goats milk (I'm a little sloppy, I guess) the cloths can get a funky soured milk smell so I just change one out until I'm ready to do laundry.  The cloths are washable; one of mine is almost seven years old, has been laundered about once a week and is still going strong!  I get mine from my Norwex lady Renee at Global Market Brandon - just added the pretty pink one in the picture last week!  Norwex also has a great washable duster (the green mitt in the picture).  It's awesome and we're a dusty house, living so close to a gravel road!  Picks up everything fast!

For floors, I'm a big fan of washable pads.  I've got a Vileda mop whose pads can be used dry for dusting or wet for washing/cleaning.  For our laminate floors I just spray on cleaner and mop away then throw the pad into the laundry.  Works great even for muddy boot and paw prints.  It's another one where I've got a few pads - just in case I'm not doing laundry in a timely fashion....or it's rained and we're super dirty.  And the cleaning solution?  Oh, yeah, I'm making that from scratch for pennies per bottle using this recipe!  It's a great multi-purpose cleaner and I use essential oils known to have cleaning and disinfecting properties like lavender, clove and citrus!  Drying laundry?  Forget the dryer sheets and get yourself some felted wool dryer balls.  No chemicals and your laundry actually dries faster!

Beauty products - we've got those two.  My soap hangs in a little scrubby bag from friend Sharon crochets for me!  Not only helps the soap dry out better but is a wonderful exfoliator.  Completely washable, of course  I've switched over to re-usable cotton pads and I'm loving them.  Yes, washable cotton balls!  Those are the little guys in the left in the picture.  I got mine on Etsy.  I wouldn't use them for removing nail polish - to hard to get the stuff out and too 'icky' in my washing machine.  Fortunately I'm not much into fancy nails but it doesn't hurt to have a few disposable pads around.  Even for cleaning up the goats before and after milking I'm using crocheted wash cloths - handmade and re-usable!  I got a number of mine from local Brandon crafter Ritzy Creations but she's also on Etsy.  A crocheting friend of my crocheting friend Sharon also gave me some lovely large ones she'd made - score!  I currently have a pattern and a how-to book by my bed so I can learn to make my own!  Of course, it's easy to get away from disposable baby diapers and even menstrual pads - just search Etsy for tons of great ideas!

Are you reducing your contribution to the landfill?  Share your tips and tricks in the comments!

Pressure Is A Good Thing!

Back, mid-winter, we had a problem with our well and, therefore, water in our house.  We called the plumbing company; the fellow came and had a look, opening the well and checking around on a frigid day.  He told us that the pipe into the house must have burst and there was nothing to be done until Spring.  At that time, the yard would have to be dug up and the pipe changed.  We accepted that; in the twelve years we've been on the farm we've never really had much of a problem with the well, and don't have a lot of experience with them.

We have lived for more than three months now with extremely poor water pressure.  The five minute shower became a ten minute shower as we tried to fit our soapy body parts under the dribble ensuing from the shower head.  Filling the chicken waterer became a five minutes job.  Filling a bucket of water for the goats became a five minute process.  The water dispenser and ice machine in the fridge hardly worked. The dishwasher wouldn't work.  What was usually a thirty minute laundry cycle became an hour.  It hasn't been fun!

So, as the snow finally melted and the ground dried, Farmer Man prepared to dig up the back yard.  He opened the well to take a look at where the pipe was going and started to think about the process.  It looked to him like a flexible pipe could be and had been pulled through the larger pipe.  He talked to the plumbing company fellow who didn't seem to agree.  Farmer Man then discussed it with our neighbor Mike, who has a bit more experience with wells.  The two decided to give a go at fixing it.

What they discovered, on the appointed day, was that a hose leading from the pump itself to the piping had been chafing, perhaps for years, and had split open.  If the plumber had only pulled the pump up that day, we wouldn't have had to go through all the low pressure trauma of the last months.  While the boys were at it they did pull all new hose from the well to the house and replaced a few old fittings.  Good to go with an afternoon's work.  Morale of the story?  Always get a second opinion?  And always trust your instincts.....And now we sooooo appreciate a shower with good pressure!

Finally...Spring, Maybe?

Saturday was a gorgeous Spring day - we've been waiting for this for so long!  Temperatures near normal, with a high of about 14C (about 60F) and just a light breeze.  Sunday is suppose to be even nicer.  Ahhhhhhh.......

The nice weather of the last few days has chased the snow away quickly.  The lawn is starting to look a tint of green.  It's still very wet in the fields; there were places I had to skirt because it was just too muddy.  Buds do not seem to be swelling in any big way yet - which is what the goats are waiting for.  Goats are browsers - they love best leaves and fresh young twigs.  So far they are still on a diet of (dusty) hay and their wee grain ration.
The chickens are faring a bit better; they are fighting over the first fe, dopey bugs that are starting to appear and are happy with every little green grass blade!

A couple of good things found on my walk: the garlic is up!  Yeah!  Sporadic in the rows - but it's coming.  We sooooo love our garlic so much that it is always encouraging when it peeks out.  No sign of the rhubarb yet.  And the other piece of good news is that the dug out is full to the brim, and even looks like it spilled over a bit!  It still has ice floating in it, but it's full!  Always nice to start the growing season with a good supply of water!

It seems like it has been a long hibernation this year.  Finally feeling a bit like coming out of my cocoon and stretching my 'wings'!  Gardening is in my near future - that's invigorating!

A Jersey Cow To The Rescue!

Jersey cow milk is a beautiful golden-ivory shade!

Some friends have a Jersey cow that just gave birth.  The cow, apparently, is producing an amazing amount of milk.  So, we were able to acquire some to help supplement our not-nearly-enough goats milk supply for our baby goats. We prefer raw, fresh milk; we believe pasteurization destroys some of the nutrition of milk.  Of course, when I brought it home I had to try it and it is gorgeous!  It's a yellow cream colour, much more golden than goats milk.  It's rich and buttery and thick.

So as not to upset any little tummies, I started by just adding a splash, then over the course of a week upped the ratio until the cows milk was about a third of the bottle for each kid.  As the kids are already on to a small portion of grain and have hay to nibble, the over-all quantity of milk they are getting is being reduced a bit each week.  The transition was not a problem (animal owners have to get used to examining poop: it just comes with the territory).  So, our baby goats are growing big and strong with every passing day and 'the milk crisis' is lessening.  Mind you me, there is only a couple of bags of frozen goats milk in our freezer, so we may have to buy some commercial goat milk to get us through to weaning, which will be in about three weeks.  Maybe the mommies will produce enough: time will tell!

Now, having a nice haul of fresh milk in the house, and wanting to have a nice 'thank you' to our cow-owning friends, I did set a little aside to make some soap.  I felt a little guilty sneaking milk but.....It seems to have made a lovely soap!  Used it just like I would goats milk, freezing the milk in cubes.  Used our 'Simple Soap' recipe of nothing but Jersey milk, olive oil and coconut oil.  The soap, fresh out of the mold, is ivory but a little darker than goats milk soap.  It will probably darken a bit more during the curing process.  Can hardly wait to try a bar in our shower!

If you'd like to catch pictures of baby goats cavorting check out our Facebook page!  We share probably too many baby goat pictures!

There's Not Enough Milk for the Babies!

Ghost gets lunch!

We're milking goats twice a day, but are having a hard time feeding the baby goats!  Our poor Goldie became ill shortly after giving birth and during treatment her milk dried up....completely.  She's much better, thank you, but will not produce milk again until she has more babies.  That won't be until same time next year so we've got to make some adjustments.  Goldie not producing milk is a big set back for both our fledgling soap business and our current crop of baby goats.  Goldie was our biggest milk producer: her daily contribution almost doubled the individual output of our other two mommas, Chocolate and Mabel!

So, Goldie's two kids, Ghost and Giggles, are essentially without a supply of nourishment.  Mabel is not producing quite enough to feed her triplets Monkey, Muffin and Mink.  Chocolate is taking good care of her kid, Coco, who was growing fat and happy on her 'free-choice' milk bar.  So, Coco now is taken away from Mommy during the day and we milk most of Choco's supply each night, leaving some for dinner for the kid.  The kids are all approaching six weeks of age so they are starting to nibble hay and a wee portion of grain.  But still, it's not enough milk!

Fortunately, we had a lot of raw milk frozen.  It's purpose was to make soap - I had planned a good stash for getting ready for Spring shows/sales and the opening of Global Market.  We've slowly but surely been dipping into the 'stash' to feed the babies!  We could have gone to formula but....to us that's yucky, chemical stuff.  We could purchase bottled goat milk- but the cost is silly and we view pasteurized milk as almost dead, much of the nutrition destroyed.  So, the stash it is.

We're finding that, when it thaws, fresh, raw goats milk separates and has some 'curds' suspended in what looks like a mix of whey and thin milk.  We've quickly come to the process of thawing the milk in an ice cream pail and then taking the stick blender to it to reconstitute it.  We add in and blend anything newly milked, once it has cooled.  It's working well and all the kids are thriving!  However, I'm not making any soap right now or eating any of our lovely, fresh goats milk, saving all the good stuff for the kids.  Looking forward to the day when the kids are weaned and the excess becomes mine to do with as I wish!

The Search for Fabulous Citrus Goat Milk Soap

In most of my Cold Process (CP) books, the authors mention the difficulty of citrus fragrance using natural essential oils (EO).  There is something about citrus essential oils that doesn't stand up to the heat produced during the CP process.  And I really, really want a nice, perky citrus soap!

When I'm making soap, I use a very cool method because I don't want to 'damage' or scald all the good things in goats milk during the process.  I want all the skin-friendly proteins and fats to be totally available.  I freeze our fresh, raw milk in ice cube trays and add the lye to the cubes.  I melt all our solid butters then allow them to cool with the fluid oils before adding the milk/lye mixture.  I freeze the soap mixture as soon as I put it in the molds.  Doing these things, I've manage to produce lovely ivory-coloured soaps, without the beige/brown tinge brought on by high heat.

Thinking my cool method may negate the citrus scent problem, I made a small batch a while ago, using just sweet orange EO, which is what I had on hand.  I used almost double the EO that I use for my lavender and peppermint soaps.  I ended up with absolute no citrus fragrance at all!  Huge disappointment!  Because I'm stubborn and really don't want to use the fake fragrance oils, I started some research.

During the Christmas season (which is also kind of the beginning of citrus season), I was seeing a lot of stuff, on the crafty blogs I read and on the Facebook pages I follow, about using up citrus peels.  Posts included drying for potpourri, dehydrating zest and....infusing oils.  Well, I thought, why couldn't I infused the olive oil in my soap recipe, to get a little head start on fragrance.  So I took some of the many mandarin orange peels we were producing, air dried them and then soaked them in olive oil.   That blog post is here.  When finished, the oil had a nice, although light, citrus scent.  I kept the peels and air dried them again, letting them dry really well to use as an exfoliant in the soap.



Then....somebody commented anonymously with one word.....bergamot!  Whoever you are - thank you, thank you, thank you!  I went in search of bergamot EO and love it!  And found five-fold lemon EO while I was at it, which means extra concentrated.  So, a new batch of citrus soap has been made, with sweet orange, five fold lemon and bergamot added just before I pour the mixture into the molds!  After 24 hours, during the cutting, it smelled strongly of fresh soap (somewhat chemical) and very little like anything citrus.  Now two weeks later that 'new soap' scent is gone and a nice but light citrus fragrance remains!  So excited!  The soap has a lovely pale peachy/yellow colour with some darker orange pieces from the ground peel.  The soap needs at least another two weeks to cure, but I have high hopes!

Love The New Henry Milker!

I was the lucky recipient yesterday of the new Henry Milker.  I continue to be blown away by the service, the teaching and the connection with customers from these people!  I had emailed them looking to replace my pump, which has had some challenges lately.  Admittedly, we'd dropped it a couple of times, Farmer Man was doing clean-up and waterlogged it, and the usual stuff of day-to-day milking.  They sell replacement parts (and many other great goat things) on the Henry Milker website so I'd emailed about shipping to Canada.  The response I got was that Mr. Henry's been enjoying my blog and appreciates the mentions so he was sending me a whole new kit - for free!

The new version of the Henry Milker is awesome!  If you have a small herd of goats you should consider this tool.  We've liked it from the start because the whole connection from teat to milk receptacle is closed, so cleaner milk.  It uses large canning jars, easy to deal with, easy to clean and perfect for refrigerating milk for our use.  It's extremely lightweight and portable - a fact I have so appreciated when Mabel has rejected kids and I'm crawling around in the birthing pen trying to get that all important colostrum!  It's fast and no aching hands!

Well, the new version is a big step up.  You can milk both teats at the same time!  Yes, Mr. Henry has figured an awesome little system so that you can cap both teats and milk into the same jar.  I admire people who are so inventive!  There's a wee bit of a learning curve to juggle both teat caps, and Mabel was a bit surprised last night but milking her was over in a couple of minutes!  I'll so appreciate that tomorrow morning when I feel the pressure of having to get to work on time!

There's some other great new features, too.  The new lids are one piece plastic, the previous version used the usual canning jars lids.  I think these one piece lids will be more sanitary - less places for debris to be trapped and bacteria to grow!  The teat cups have an insert, easy to put in or pull out, so you can adjust to the size of the goats' teat.  Both sizes of tubing (one for joining to the teat cups and one for connecting the two cups to one pump) both come with their own little cleaning brushes!  Everything you need, except the goat!  The whole instruction manual has been expanded and improved upon, too!

So, if you've got goats I really think you should check out this wee machine here.  If you've got goats I think you should just go to the website anyway: lots of great stuff and info for goat people!  From cheese making supplies, to accessories like scratch posts and coats for cold climates to plans for milking stands and hay feeders to help with marketing!  The Henry Milker site is becoming a great resource for goat lovers!

It's Been A Whirlwind!

Muffin gets lunch!

Happy Easter to everyone!  I'm finding it really hard to believe that April is almost upon us!  Perhaps that has something to do with the freezing temperatures and three feet of snow outside!  This time last year the snow was completely gone and buds were swelling!  It's been such a loooooooong winter this year; it seems hard to get excited about Spring because it still seems so far away!

March is a bit of a blur for me.  So much happened, so fast and I feel rather like I stumbled through the whole thing.  We've both been sick, we've both gotten some work off the farm, we've been dealing with a predator in the chicken coop and we've had a passel of baby goats!  I have vague memories of cold nights in the barn with the goats, finding murdered chickens in the coop, studying for a new job, sneaking around the house while Farmer Man sleeps after working a night shift, trying to find the energy to get groceries and coughing and sniffling during every event!

The end result is that we have six beautiful baby goats: five girls and a boy!  Mabel had triplets first, on March 9.  She produced a boy, Monkey and two little girls, Mink and Muffin.  If you follow this blog, you remember last year she rejected them completely and her kids were bottle babies.  This year she was more accepting and cleaned them up, but could not seem to feed them.  It was also very cold the night they were born (-25 C) so eventually they came into the house and became bottle babies.  Once again, I was so thankful for my Henry Milker, so light and portable, with clean milk ready to use.  Farmer Man was at work, so it proved to be a long, stressful and tiring night for me!  And, admittedly, we weren't as organized as we could have been because we thought we were at least a week away from having babies.

So imagine my surprise when I go to the barn to refresh waters the very next day and hear the wee cry of a baby goat!  Sixteen hours after Mabel, Choco produced the cutest little dark brown baby girl, Coco Chanel!  Everything was going well with these two; Farmer Man set up a heat lamp, we helped clean up and put a little coat on the baby and mother and kid were bonding and feeding very nicely in a short time.  We didn't think Choco was even near her due date: she didn't look very pregnant, she'd been very placid and hadn't exhibited any signs of nesting.  Last year, she was the last to have babies, fully a month after the first birth, so we assumed she had resisted Randi's advances again.  It being a weekend, I was around and continued to do hourly checks.  It was still very cold outside, so we wanted to make sure the new mommy and baby were taking advantage of the heat lamp, mommy was getting lots of water (the water was freezing quickly, and needed replacement often).

Early evening, as I went to check on things I found Goldie in the throes of birth.  One baby was already out on the straw and she was obviously working on a second.  Fortunately Farmer Man was home and he worked on getting a second heat lamp installed in an 'adlib' birthing suite for Goldie and her babies.  We helped clean up and dry off the babies and got everyone in the warmth of the new birthing suite.  Goldie had two girls: a lovely, almost ivory coloured kid we've named Ghost and a little chocolate brown girl named Giggles.

Whew, all our babies within twenty four hours and freezing cold temperatures.  It was worrisome.  The babies in the house were doing fine, Mabel was getting back in the groove of being milked but she wasn't producing enough for triplets and we didn't feel we could take away from the other new mommas right at this time.  Thank heaven for frozen milk!  We had frozen a LOT of milk while continuing to milk into the fall, long after last years' babies were weaned.  It was intended for soap, first and foremost, but also for our use through the winter.  We really hadn't thought about a stash for this years' babies!  The thing about frozen milk is that it separates and clumps, so feeding time became a little long as we had to warm the milk enough to 'melt' the clumps in it; some of it I've also had to put in the blender to re-liquefy so that it would go through the bottles smoothly and not clog the nipple.

By Monday morning, Farmer Man, on an hourly check, realized something was wrong with Goldie.  She didn't want to get up and was very lethargic; the babies weren't getting fed.  By an early afternoon check, Ghost was lethargic and shivering.  Into the house she came!  Farmer Man was worried enough to call me at work and I raced home as soon as I could.  The little girl was very still and weak: Farmer Man had prepared a bottle and would get it in her mouth and squirt a bit, trying to get her to swallow.  He went off to work and I continued this into the evening.  On a check, Giggles seemed to be fading, so into the house she came, too!  Now five to bottle feed - thank heavens for the frozen milk.  Thank heavens, too, for pals Nancy and Deb, who came to help feed (and to play with baby goats!).  The twins rebounded, a huge improvement in just twenty four hours of consistent feeding!  We tried milking Goldie, but she was producing hardly anything.  She continued to be lethargic the next day so we called our vet, Dr. Sherry of Wheat City Vet Clinic.

Dr. Sherry's visit was not good news, but at least we knew what to do.  Goldie had a high fever and an infection of some sort and possibly mastitis.  There was no benefit to waiting to diagnose mastitis - she had to be treated promptly!  So, we added to the routine two shots and a teat drench.  Mabel, too, had a bit of fever and lethargy so she was included in the treatment plan.  I was squeamish about giving needles so Farmer Man stepped up to the plate on that one!  I did the teat drench - which is kind of like putting a blunt needle into the teat and pumping in medicine.  Goldie's milk production dropped to nothing, and will likely not return - a huge loss for us not only in terms of feeding babies, but also for soap production this coming year.  But, what counts is that everyone seems much improved and all the babies are doing well!  Here's to hoping that April calms down!

Box of Baby Goats....

Farmer Man and I have been very sick.  February was the month of a respiratory viral infection, and we're still not right.  Neither of us have been this sick in years!  Of course, on a farm, there are still chores to be done: someone had to drag themselves out of bed to feed and water chickens and goats.  Doggies still needed to go outside occasionally.  So, somehow, I missed the signs.  We knew our three Mamma goats were going to have babies soon; by our calculations mid-March would be the earliest.  Imagine my surprise when I was hauling water up yesterday afternoon and heard the thin, light cry of a baby goat.

A goat's gestation period is five months.  By our calculations, based on when we put Randi in with the girls, March 16th should have been the earliest possible due date.  There's, you know, a courting period, the females have to actually go into heat which is often brought on by being with a male in rut.  Well, Mabel must have gone into heat in a flash because yesterday afternoon she presented us with triplets!  All girls, we think, but we've been wrong before so we're giving it a day or two.

I knew Mabel and Goldie were getting close.  The babies had dropped, giving the females an indentation high on their hips.  I'd been checking for the mucous plug that indicates the start of birth but had missed that sign.  Everything seemed fine late morning when I checked on them on my way to collect eggs.  Mabel didn't appear to be 'nesting' or pawing the straw or any other signs.  Admittedly, I wasn't there very long.

So, I arrived yesterday afternoon to find one wee baby goat.  I dashed up to the house, called for Farmer Man and grabbed a few things.  I wasn't as organized yet as I could be, thinking I had another week to prepare.  A second baby was coming as I got back to the barn.  The lovely thing was Mabel was accepting them this time and was working to clean up the first one.  Last year she had triplets and then retreated to a corner of the pen and would have nothing to do with them.  When she became distracted by the arrival of the second baby, I continue to clean up and dry off the first.  We are having babies earlier this year, when it's colder, and we're very conscious of that.  The first thing Farmer Man did when he arrived on the scene was to close the barn doors, so that drafts were at a minimum.  Then he got the heat lamp out and installed.

The third baby arrived quite promptly and Mabel and I worked to clean and dry them all.  Then I started showing them where to feed, hoping Mother Nature would kick in.  The babies just didn't seem to get it; only one showed a natural inclination but couldn't quite figure out which end.  The other two seemed to have no idea of why I was standing them up and placing them at their mother's udder.  Mabel didn't seem to get it either and kept walking away, returning to clean and muzzle them.  Time went by and I felt that these little ones really needed to eat.  Out came the Henry Milker and I milked Mabel - not ideal, clean conditions but I felt it needed to be done.  Trying to bottle feed the wee things right there in the pen was it's own challenge, but I got a little bit of colostrum (the initial momma's milk, full of antibodies and good things) into each one.  I kept trying to show them where to feed, and Mabel kept walking away or putting up her leg like she was going to kick.

Even with the heat lamp, the babies were shivering so I went and got some little doggie sweaters my dogs had outgrown.  I kept trying to show them where to feed but nobody was getting it!  After about three hours, one of the babies seemed to be getting weak and was shivering consistently so up to the house into a big cardboard box.  I milked Mabel a bit more and went up to the house to feed the little kid.  I was hoping I'd return to find the other two feeding but slowly, over the next hour, all three ended up in the house getting bottle fed.  We'd really hoped not to have the responsibility of bottle feeding triplets this year but you can't always get what you want, right?