May Showers Bring….HAY!

I’ve heard that April showers bring May flowers, but since it’s may now and central Virginia is getting hammered with “showers” aka…torrential rain, I’m sure that can only mean one thing…that the hay season will be GREAT this year…if the hay farmers can ever find a dry window of time to cut it, that is. 

Driving country roads I see beautiful hay field after beautiful hay field.  Miles of thick green grass of uniform height and not a weed in sight…wish my pastures look like that.  I have to settle for green and clovery in the goat pasture, and just a smidge of green over rich, dark brown, horse-manure enriched dirt in the horse pasture.  Even with piles of hay they still scarf every blade of grass they can find, and the rye grass I planted for winter cover is all gone now.  But with all this rain I’ll bet we’ll get a bumper crop of…mushrooms…haven’t put anymore seed out this spring for summer grass.  Darn it. 

Happy Spring!

It’s APRIL!

First baby goats born on Easter.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Animals and Children…go great together.

These are some pictures my daughter took of me and her son (my grandson) Ryland this week.  It’s amazing to me how children just naturally gravitate toward animals that are so much larger than they are.  Animals who can be naughty to each other, but in the presence of a child, are much more careful and inquisitive than normal.

Ryland is getting ready to pet his own little horse, Smokey.

Smokey likes to nibble fingers, hoping for a treat.

Ryland wants to touch Amira on the head, RIGHT NOW!

Ryland was pretty sure it would be a lot of fun to help rake leaves…but, the rake just wouldn’t do what he wanted it to…

Short people don’t get to go into the pen with the piggles, so we got to watch them eat from the outside. Ryland did think they needed to eat goldfish out of his hand though….but throwing them in worked pretty good too.

Lyrik Likes to Lick Hands

Caritas is wearing a soaking boot for yet another abccess.

Our Dog Chloe, All Grown Up…Almost

Chloe

This is Chloe.  Back in the spring of this year my daughter and I were driving to an early morning farmers market to sell soap, about 2 weeks after having to put our labrador, Onyx down, when we saw two tiny puppies in the road.

One puppy was huddled up on top of the other, shivering and trying to get comfort from the poor little pup underneath that had been hit by a car and was dead.  We gathered up the live puppy and moved the dead one off of the road into the grassy ditch.

We named our little “road kill” puppy Chloe, just because we couldn’t think of anything else, and this is her now.  Mostly grown up.

To pay us back for saving her life and getting rid of the hundreds of fleas and ticks she was infested with, she has made it her personal job to escape the fence every single day and pick up all the litter along side the road and bring it home to us as “gifts”.

I do appreciate the gesture, but honestly, we have enough trash here already.  And the road is dangerous, and she really doesn’t need to temp fate any more than she has already.

So we fixed the fence and made it Chloe-proof.  We hope.  When we put up the fence we were mostly concerned about making it goat-proof, not realizing that Chloe just sees a fence as a minor impediment to her “litter gathering” duties.

She can make herself as flat as a pancake, or as skinny as a toothpick, and get under, through, or around, just about anything.

She really doesn’t like to be in the house for more than a little while.  Besides picking up litter, she has also hired herself out to be Malachi’s personal exerciser, and she takes that job almost as seriously as she does her litter patrol job.

Poor Malachi stays exhausted, but well exercised, all of the time.  His barker still works though, and that’s what keeps the goat-eating preditors away.

The Three Little Bitties…whose mother sleeps in a tree at night

There used to be seven, how we have three.

These are the three little chickies that must be gathered up every night as the sun goes down because their mama flies up into a tree, leaving them prey to the foxes and opossums that have begun to prowl the buck shed and old milker shed since we moved the milkers up closer to the house and their guard dog came with them.  I didn’t realize how many species of sharp-toothed wildlife Malachi was keeping at bay at night with his barking and patrolling the fenceline until we moved him out of that area.  Now he and the milking girls have a much bigger pasture but the poor chickens have been left unguarded.

All the chickens are free range, but at one time I kept them locked in a yard with a shed until the baby goats tore up the chicken wire run.  (Chicken wire and goats do NOT mix!)  The chickens still roost near the old shed, but use the trees now and not the shed and I can’t seem to talk them into roosting in the old milker shed at night…which is nearly predator proof.

So, baby chicks have to start fending for themselves just as soon as they are feathered and their mama’s think they should be able to jump up into the trees with them.  It happens with every clutch of chicks without casualties.  Until now.

So, for a while I get gather them up at around 5:30pm, which is when mama hen jumps into a tree, and bring them up to the house for a safe nights sleep.

Atticus Says “Hi”

This is Atticus, our 6 year old registered American Alpine Buck.  Atticus would like to find a new farm to live on where he can have more girl friends than he is allowed here.  He is closely related to most of our does and as I have explained to him many times, we just don’t get to fornicate with close relatives.  No, he doesn’t understand, but he agrees that a new farm would give him a better opportunity to strut his stuff, spread his manliness around and enjoy more feminine attentions.

Atticus is well behaved, but does need good fences.  He’s never been aggressive toward humans and I can lead him easily…although I would really prefer not to this time of year as he has “perfumed” himself quite nicely….which is attractive to the girls, but not to me, much as he’d like to think I am impressed by it.

I’m not.

He can be traded for a pile of money, about $300 dollars would do it, along with a warm shed or barn and a nice pasture with lots of grass or weeds. Atticus has been a great buck, producing really nice daughters and sons and I want to make sure he goes to a new farm that loves him and will keep his feet trimmed, keep him wormed, etc .