North Carolina Sheep Day

This Saturday we decided it was high time we had a "sheep day." This is a day where we gathered up all the sheep for health checks, get weights on the lambs, and just generally make sure that all is well with the flock. This is something we did weekly at our old place because there seemed to always be at least one sheep or lamb who was doing poorly and needed deworming at the very least. Since we have moved to North Carolina, the sheep have been doing so well that we didn't feel the need for such hands on care. Still, we have 8 lambs on the ground now, and it was time to get our hands on them. 

First order of business was to figure out which lambs belonged to which mommas and get them marked for easy identification. Anthony then checked the color of everyone's mucus membranes around the eyes to make sure no one had any serious issues with parasites. They were all nice and pink!

Anthony's sister Theresa was in town visiting so she helped us get weights on all the lambs. I'm excited to report that the lambs are thriving in their new home so far. They are far and away outgrowing last years lambs. The real test will be in a few months when they are weaned and eating on their own. In previous years, this is when we have run into problems with the lambs. I'm hoping the milder temperature and far better pastures up here will help protect them in that stressful period.

Fred and Rialey are still BFFs. He stole an opportunity to get some snuggles in while Rialey held the sheep in a corner of the barn for us.

Once we were done checking the sheep, we decided to go for a walk around the pond and down to the lake. We moved the sheep into the back pasture to let them graze the lush, untouched grass that is growing back there.

The weather was beautiful and Elliot was enjoying the fresh air and sunshine from the safety of the carrier on my back.

The lake is so beautiful with clear waters and everything turning green all around. 

And apparently we have beavers!

Fencing off the creek

   Sometimes it seems like having goats means being doomed to constantly putting up new and better fences. Our sweet twins Francesca and Lucia seem to be especially good at finding and exploiting the weak point in any fence we put up. As a result, the girls were making forays into the neighbor's yard, munching on his vegetable garden and nibbling his fruit trees. While our neighbor's love all the animals, especially the goats, there is a limit to their hospitality, understandably. 

  Our other problem was the ducks getting into the creek. We have been told that they were making their way up to the road and beyond. Not good. With goats going over and ducks going under, the old fencing we had up around the creek just wasn't doing the job.

  We decided to take down the old fencing and put up something that SHOULD hold in both the goats and the ducks, and hopefully keep out predators. Without a lot of funds for the project, we invested in several 4 foot tall rolls of welded wire and some 7 and 8 foot T-posts. The farm dogs inspected our purchases for quality.

 The first step was taking down the old fencing. Several bouts of heavy rain and flooding had buried the bottom of the fencing in deep layers of mud and dead leaves. 

    In some areas we actually had to use the winch on the front of the four wheeler to pull the old fencing out of the ground.

 Once the fence was down, Gwen decided to take advantage of access to the previously blocked off area and fill her belly with some overgrown forage. She was a very happy goat.

   Since flooding was an issue, we decided to put up the new fence well above the flood line. Here Big Onion is driving in the new post while Luna supervises and Rialey has a chat with her bunnies.

  While Big Onion was doing the manly job of driving in the posts, I decided to move one of the rolls of fencing into place near the bride so we could start securing it to the first post. Well, those rolls are heavier than they look. First, let me assure you that I am no wilting flower in the strength department. I can sling around 50lb feed sacks and wrestle full sized goats with the best of them, but for some reason those rolls were just a little more than I could handle.

  Well, my motto is work smarter, not harder so I thought I'd do the smart thing and start rolling the fencing where it needed to go. I was happily walking along, kicking the roll ahead of me, not paying very close attention to the fact that me and that heavy roll were getting closer and closer to the embankment of the creek. Suddenly the fencing seemed to take on a life of its own and started rolling slowly then with alarmingly increasing speed diagonally down the bank of the creek. I started yelling, "no no No No NONONONONONO!!!" as if the damned roll was going to listen to me and stop its swift descent into the moving water below. Just as I was about to hurl myself forward and onto the roll to save it from a watery, muddy demise, one corner caught the edge of one of the fence posts we hadn't yet removed. The post turned the fencing just enough that it swung around sideways and stopped rolling long enough for me to grab hold of the post in one hand and the fencing in another. A couple seconds more and both me and fencing would have ended up a big soggy, muddy mess.

  Once I had recovered from my ordeal, we started putting up the fencing. Once again the four wheeler was key in getting this job done. Big Onion built a fence puller using a 2x4 and some hardware. Once it was hooked up the winch on the bike, we were able to stretch some pretty tight fencing. Before we moved to the farm, I had no idea that tension is the key to good fencing. A loose fence is a saggy fence and nobody wants that (except maybe the goat who will happily pull it down and hop right over).

  Big Onion and Rialey holding a length of unrolled fencing.

  Once the fencing was in place and properly stretched, we secured it to the T-posts and the job was done! About halfway through the job, Big Onion finally broke down and purchased a clip bender and that little dojobby was well worth the cost. It saved us a lot of time and busted knuckles.

  The final product. It's been several weeks and the goats have not managed to knock it down or figure a way through so we consider that a success. The next fencing project will be replacing the 3 strand electric line that's running in the second and third pastures with real fencing. Hopefully we can wait until the weather cools a bit before tackling the next area. Whew!

If a tree falls in the pasture and no goats are around, will it still be dinner?

 About a month ago we had a large tree go down in the back pasture.

The goats just thought this was manna from heaven. The trees come to us?! This is great!

Even the kids were getting in on the buffet.

As you can see, this was not a small tree. The trunk actually snapped in half about 8-10 feet in the air. It looks like this tree may have fallen victim to some kind of rot or termites.

 Of course, I saw this as a training opportunity for the pups. I've been asking Luna to climb up, walk on, and jump over weird things her whole life so when I asked, she jumped up into that tree lickety-split!

Rialey was game to give tree climbing a go as well.

 Here I am guiding her a little higher up on a rather narrow branch while making sure she doesn't fall (...again...oops!).

She was quite happy to be lifted down afterwards.

 Puppy love! (more like, "Mom can you please put me down now!?")

Meanwhile, the kids didn't need any help getting up or down the fallen trunks. Heck, they even started climbing each other! 

From bottle to teat and back again

  Normally it takes about 3-4 days for a mother goat to stop producing colostrum laced milk so when Francesca and Lucia, the baby goat girls, reached 4 days old, it was time to switch them from their mother's very carefully heat treated colostrum to regular goat milk. Luckily, we recently added Elanore to the goat herd. She's a big LaMancha doe who we tested for CAE just about the moment she stepped hoof on the farm. Thankfully she tested negative, and we have actually been freezing her milk since she got here just in case we needed to bottle raise any of the positive does' kids.

 Early on we decided to see if we could have the kids feed directly from Elanore instead of using bottles. We used this method very successfully with Thea and Gwenny.

 
   Both girls actually latched on quite quickly and drank until they were drunk with milk.

 Elanore didn't seem to mind having these two little monster feeding on her one bit as long as there was feed in her bucket.

  Unfortunately, Josie, the girls bio-mom, was onto us and started giving us the stink eye from the next room.

So full. 

  We tried having the girls nurse directly a couple more times and unless Elanore was secured on the milk stand, she was less than pleased with the two little ones attaching themselves to her udder. Ultimately, we decided that it was more work to try and tote the two girls out to the milk room several times a day and risk the wrath of Josie than it would be to just milk Elanore ourselves and make bottles for the girls so we have gone back to bottle feeding the beasts. 

  In a related note, we have just discovered these bottles from Premier 1 Supplies, and I cannot recommend them enough! The Pritchard teats screw securely onto the bottles so no wrestling on the leaky rubber ones. They also have an air flow valve that lets air back into the bottle as the little ones nurse so no more collapsing nipples and stopping to let air back in the bottle. Plus the bottles themselves are marked with ounces for easy measuring at feeding time. These bottles have seriously made life with bottle babies SO much easier!

Blue Eyed Boy

Look we what got yesterday! 

  We finally found a suitable boyfriend for our lady goats. We have been looking for just the right buck to bring on the farm for quite a while now and yesterday we think we found him!

 We needed a male that was small enough to safely breed with our mini goats like Gwen and Eve but big enough to physically breed the larger, taller ladies like Thea and Elanore. This handsome dude is a 3 year old Nigerian Dwarf. His previous owner was calling him Willie after a character on Duck Dynasty. He's a sweet boy with beautiful color and a great build. He's a little on the large side for the breed and he has experience breeding full sized goats in one of his previous homes, so we think he is just the boy we were looking for!

  When we went to meet him, he happily took corn from my hand and stood still for us to attach the least. He was a little reluctant to walk with us to the car but hopped right up into the crate when he saw it was filled with hay. He happily munched on hay and alfalfa cubes on the hour drive home.
  In his last home, the poor little guy really didn't have access to any greenery so the minute we got him out of the car he started chomping down on grass.

  Big Onion brought him over to the "garden" in front of the house. Really it's just a flower bed that we don't maintain very well at all. Why waste time, money, and energy growing flowers when you can be growing goat food? He took no time at all to start chowing down on huge mouthfuls of everything in front of him.

  We have decided to call the little guy Gimli after the dwarf in Lord of the Rings. I think the name really suits him. I mean, would you look at that beard?!

  He also has blue eyes which is not something we were specifically looking for, but if we want to sell his kids (and we do) the blue eyed babies can often fetch a higher price.

  For an adult buck, Gimli has been incredibly sweet so far. He walks well on leash and likes being around people. For these reasons, we suspect he was a bottle-raised baby. I may be a bit odd but I don't think he even smells bad. Of course all of this could change once he meets the girls and goes into rut.

  His first meeting with the dogs did not go so smoothly. Barley was being a bit pushy so Gimli dropped his head and gave him a little push back. I guess Rialey did not appreciate some new upstart of a goat threatening her friend so she ran in to defend Barley, circling with big barks and nipping at the goat's sides. Luckily we were able to diffuse the situation quickly, and no one was harmed in the scuffle. I'm sure it will take some time before Gimli will feel comfortable around the dogs, but at least he learned to have a healthy respect for them from the get go.

  He will stay quarantined in the backyard pen for the next week so that we can get him cleared of parasites and make sure he isn't carrying any obvious illnesses. He is already causing a bit of a stir amongst the lady goats. Gwen was the first to catch a whiff of him. She spent the next several hours pressed against the backyard fence and making little goat love calls. I even caught her backed up to and peeing through the fence! The hussy!

Gwen and the gang

 Just thought I'd share a couple pictures of our pretty girl, Gwen.

 Look at how well her beard is coming in! Such a grown up lady!

I have no idea what the Big Onion was doing here, but it sure was making him popular with the goats.

  Despite how looks in this picture, the newest girl, Elenore, is really fitting in well with the group. I think she and Thea have bonded over their lack of horns as we often find the two girls taking turns using each other as scratching posts for their head nubs. Goats are weird.

Rialey's First "Sheep Day"

  About a month ago Rialey got to help with her first "sheep day." This is a time we set aside about once a month to do health checks on the flock including checking to see who needs worming and trimming hooves if needed. As you can see, the pup was thrilled with the new challenge...

Gettin Hitched!

  I would like to apologize for the long delay in posts here. You see, the Big Onion and I have been a little busy the last couple months....getting married! 

  We had the wedding here on the farm so life got a little hectic for a while with all the planning and preparations. We also provided a lot of the food for the wedding including our very own chicken, rabbit and lamb. We provided our baker with blueberries from our bushes and lemon curd made from our trees and eggs for the cake filling. Big Onion even had a selection of homemade brews for people to drink! We entertained our guests with a viewing of the Saints game for the reception and had a huge bonfire out in the pasture afterward.  

  It was a crazy couple of months, but we managed to pull off a fun, if unusual wedding that was a real reflection of us as a couple. I'd like to share a few of our engagement and wedding photos with you...

 We had to get a shot with our little Gwenny. 

 Of course we wore our boots for the shoot, and I wouldn't be caught dead without my trusty hat! 

 The sheep were happy to provide an interesting backdrop. 

On to the big day....

 Little miss Gwen was our flower girl. She wore a lovely wreath around her neck and a wonderful and trusted friend armed with pockets full of corn walked her up the isle for us. She kept herself occupied during the ceremony by nibbling on the front hedges. They needed pruning anyway.

 Luna was our ring bearer, and of course she took her job very seriously. We wouldn't have dreamed of having our big day without including these two girls in some way!

 And of course we had to get some shots with the birds. Can you believe they got me in a dress and make up?!

Wonderful day.