Santa

Today, mom and I carved out a small chunk of our crazy schedule to go get Elliot's first Santa picture. Because I'm a bit of a crazy person, I opted to sit in the picture with him instead of letting Santa with his touching every kid with every god knows what kind of disease gloves hold my baby. Look, I'm all for germs and early exposure and working that immune system, but not with my 4 month old and not right now. We don't even have a good pediatrician picked out in Greensboro yet.

Anywho, here's our Santa pic. We tried to get a smile out of the little guy, but did not succeed. His smiles are frequent and easy but fleeting so by the time the photographer got back to her camera, El was back to his default face. Oh well, he's still his adorable self. 

The day was a bit of a kerfuffle. Everything that could...I don't want to say go wrong exactly, but everything we tried to do ended up being more complicated than usual. El managed to fountain my mother with pee THREE times during one diaper change, the last of which called for a costume change on his part. While we were out, he pooped twice. We arrived to the Santa place while they were out to lunch, and mom didn't inform me until halfway through the day that she had an engagement that evening. So by the time we got half of our to do list done, we had to run home. I nursed a very hungry Elliot then ran out and did chores in about 10 minutes flat. Afterward while mom and her husband did their thing, Elliot, Rialey and I finished our errands for the day.  

My poor baby. By the time we were finally heading home for the last time, he had had it and started crying in the car. I pulled over twice to try and soothe him to no avail. I even tried driving (carefully down back roads) while dangling my cell above his head playing an app that has shiny balls rattling around. Nothing helped, but I did get pretty good at fishing out a dropped pacifier and shoving it back into his mouth blind and backwards though.

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! 

Happy Birthday Gwenny!!

   Friday was Gwen's 1st birthday. I remember the day she was born like it was yesterday....

How (not) to Administer Copper Wire Particles to your Goats

  Last weekend we went to a Small Ruminant Field day at one of the local universities. In addition to learning how to do fecals, getting our FAMACHA certification, and connecting with a lot of other local people who raise sheep and goats, we learned about using copper wire particles as part of a worming regimen for goats and sheep. 

  Our area is very copper deficient, so supplementing the goats with copper is essential to their health. Recent studies have shown that dosing both sheep and goats with copper can reduce their worm load by 30-90%, and since our area IS copper deficient, proper dosing should not cause a toxicity problem with sheep. 

Silly Luna - ducks are friends, not food!

  One of the hallmarks of an all around good farm dog is that they be safe with their stock. That you can trust your herding dog to be calm, watchful, and protective of her flock or herd without direct supervision, without needing to herd them all the time, and certainly without causing them harm....

Life at HighTail Farms

In case there was any question that our animals are free range....

Birds everywhere doing their birdy thing. The goats and the sheep are out there somewhere too.

Even the baby rabbits get plenty of time outside with their feet on the ground and all the greenery they can nibble.

Ms. Ruby has been doing well, getting her bottle with probiotics once or twice a day. She still gets the occasional gas bubble, but we keep a close eye on her and give her lots of rumen massages when necessary.

 Some days, I feel a lot like Dr. Doolittle or the Poultry Pied Piper.

 I have to admit it's not a bad feeling being the most popular girl in the barnyard even if they only love me for the food I scoop out every evening.

Even though 90% of our animals get free access to pasture all day, they are all tucked safely away in pens with a scoop or two of good quality feed at night. It's amazing that most of the birds know where they live and will start making their way to their pens as evening sets in. Any stragglers are scooted in the right direction with the help of our 3 herding Shelties.

We were very fortunate to find a place that was set up to raise poultry with these wonderful indoor/outdoor completely enclosed (even on top!) pens. This has allowed us to raise a large number and variety of birds in a wonderful environment where they can learn to be real animals and not just feathered meats.

Just a little off the bottom

Sunday was a big day here on the farm....a sort of sheep spa day.

I had noticed a while ago that one of our new momma sheep, Rose, was limping. After catching her and getting a good look, I found that she had a mild case of hoof rot. Ick! Hoof rot is basically an infection of the hooves. It's pretty easy to tell when an animal has hoof rot. It smells terrible.

I also noticed that Pepper's feet were starting to turn out on one side so it was decided that we would have our first ever sheep hoof trimming day. So exciting!

We gathered all our tools, hoof trimmers large and small, some soak for rotty feet, a lanolin protective cream, penicillin injections, and I even stole some of the dog's grooming tools to try and remove some of the scraggy, nasty wool chunks hanging off the girls. Can't have unkempt looking sheep now can we?

The next step was getting the girls into the newly secured goat yard and catching them one by one to trimmed. Easier said than done. It took 3 people, a sheltie, and my handy stock stick to catch each sheep one by one.

 Our first victim was Maggie. We wanted to get her done so that she and the newest lamb ewe, Emma, could be put out first and not get run over or smashed. Maggie was actually happy to eat while I trimmed her hooves and our wonderful friend, A, removed loose wool.

Just like a day at the spa. 

 Big Onion was busy taking pictures of ears. This was to help us figure out their previous owner's ear notching system and get her birth records on each sheep.

At first we were putting the girls up on the goat's milk stand, but after Whoopi decided she would rather rest her...ahem....girl parts on my back (don't think that stain will ever come out!) than stand on three legs, we switched to laying the sheep down to work on them. Sheep are kind of amazing in that the minute you overpower them and get them off their feet, they just go limp. Go check out videos of sheep being sheered if you don't believe me. They just turn into giant wooly rag dolls...that fart and burp a lot.

 Even a couple of the babies got their first trimming. Fancy put up with it like a champ, but Optimus was a total handful, bucking and kicking the whole time he was held. Take note of Luna sacked out asleep in the background of this pic. That right there is a good stock dog, ready to work at a moment's notice, but completely fine with just being around the stock and chilling when not working.

Halp!

How can you help but love on something that cute? Even if your affections are neither appreciated or returned. 


In all, we had four girls with bad hooves. All got treated with penicillin and foot soaks. We will have to check them again in a week or two. We also tried to steal a little sheep milk from the mommas that were nursing babies. We learned that it is a lot easier to milk a goat than a sheep so the lambs are in no danger of us stealing their dinner.