The Garden on Mothers Day

This week we had a horrible wind storm.  I wasn't home at the time, my wife and son both were and were sure we had roof damage.  With the winds roof damage is to be expected and the damage we saw at neighbors was pretty bad, windows on cars were broken and one person had a cab over camper blown from one side of his property to the other.  Today I got on the roof to check the damage, only to find none, no cracked shingles, no missing shingles, nothing.  We were very blessed in this storm.

While I was up on the roof I took some pictures:

Happy Mother's Day

Relaxing in the shade on Mother's Day

The tomato's and beans are really growing.

The chickens free range and the goat pen is soon to be enlarged!!

We recently cleared brush down by the fence line.  You can see the brush piles.

We spend a lot of time out here in the evenings, it's on the east side of the house.

Milking

Our LaMancha is in milk, and is on a once a day schedule.  The previous owner milked all her goats in the morning, so we are maintaining that schedule.  So far we're getting at least a quart a day and yesterday we got more.  Also I'm getting better at milking.  I milked goats a time or two as a kid, so I understand the process and how to do it, it's now just a matter of doing it regularly to get good at it.

The only thing I think I'd change in our whole goat experience thus far is to get an experienced goat that had kidded before and understood the process of standing still during milking.  Our goat is not full milking table trained, and she's a kicker.  Right now either one of the kids or my wife is holds the goats hind legs, I'm hoping that as time goes by the goat will calm down and get more used to standing still during the milking process.  Getting faster as I and others get used to milking will also help.

By the way the milk from our goat is YUMMMMYYYYY!!!

Got our Goats

After a crazy couple of days we got the 2 goats that I wrote about the other day.  After my wife called me at work we started brainstorming what the best material for fencing is.  We had talked previously, about building fencing with pallets, when we talked about doing this though I envisioned having plenty of time to be choosy about the pallets, and having time to collect prime good quality pallets that are in good condition.  Even though we didn't have the kind of time we wanted we decided to build with pallets anyway.  The total project price was probably 50% of the cost that wire fencing would be.

The look of the pallet fencing is pretty rustic, but it gets the job done and pallets are usually readily available.  I even recently heard that pallets were available from a hardware store for free, you just have to load them.  I haven't checked this out, but you can bet I'm going to.  Heck even if I have to take pallets apart and make picket fence panels out of them, it will be worth it.

Knowing how to reuse, recycle and use up is an important part of preparedness.  Previous generations of Americans, did this or many times they did without.  Anyway back to the goats....

The LaMancha's name is Fifi and the Alpine goats name is Rain, although that might get changed.  We got about a quart of milk from Fifi this morning and can probably get more as we get proficient with the milking process.  Below are some pictures of the goat pen, the assembly of the pen and the goats...

Getting Goats

There I was at work, minding my own business working hard when my cell phone rings.  It's my wife telling me that someone we know is selling a lamancha/nubian mix doe in milk, she's also willing to sell us a 3 month old kid doe.  We don't have a pen put up, we don't have a shade put up.  We priced fencing and looked at the cash on hand and decided to get creative.  I went and got some T-posts after work then I drove over and got some free pallets from a feed store in town... not enough to build the whole pen but enough to get started.  I'm going to have to buy some pallets from the same place, but in the end it's going to cost me less than half what non-climb woven wire fencing would have cost.  Tomorrow I'll pick up the pallets and start assembling the goat pen.  Hopefully I can work it so it looks decent and does the job of keeping the goats in.  I'll post pictures once we get the two goats.