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!

First baby goats born on Easter.

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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.

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 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 .

Down the hill a ways, at the edge of the woods, are the buck shed, the old milker shed, and the shed I would really like the chickens to sleep in at night.  But they prefer the trees.  All except mama hen.  She insists on sleeping with her babies in the buck shed, in a pile of hay in the corner.

I have been watched by a pair of foxes on several occasions while feeding the horses, so for several nights I was picking up mama hen and her chicks and bringing them up to the house at night.  One night I forgot and the next morning mama hen was out with all 7 of her babies, so after that I just left them in the buck shed at night.  I figured the foxes were not really that hungry.

Three nights ago Chloe, our “road kill” puppy was barking frantically on the front porch.  I put on my bathrobe and went to see what she was barking at.  There was a small, shiny, healthy-looking possum behind her dog crate on the porch.  I got a stick and poked it out of there and it ran off.  It must have ran past the sleeping mama chick and her bitties because the next morning there was one less.  But, I didn’t think about the possum.  Until last night.

While I was outside, I heard the chicks suddenly start screeching.  I ran down the hill as fast as I could, yelling all the way, hoping whatever was getting the chicks would drop them and run.  By the time I got down there I had two dead chicks.  That same little slick and shiny possum was sitting in the corner of the buck shed looking at me, with a dead chick in his mouth.

I got a stick and ran him off and went outside to gather up the rest of the chicks.  The three that were left were all huddled together outside near a tree branch laying on the ground and were only too happy to let me gather them up.  Where was mama chicken?  UP IN A TREE!

After I gathered the chicks I noticed Chloe was barking frantically outside the fence. I knew she was barking at the possum so I yelled to her to “kill it”.   As I started up the hill I saw that the possum had decided to play dead and Chloe was pulling on its tail.  I watched it for a minute.  Its mouth was open and I could see a whole lot of really sharp teeth.  It wasn’t very good at playing dead.  It kept twitching, and when Chloe would back off it would open its eyes a little and look around, closing it’s lips over its teeth.  When Chloe would poke it, it would smile again, showing its teeth and close it’s eyes.

I had been hoping Chloe would kill it, but when I saw the size of those teeth and how many there were and how sharp they were, I told her she better leave it alone.

This morning, mama hen was at the front door, sqwaking about her chicks that were inside a hay-filled cat carrier locked in Chloe’s dog crate on the front porch.  I let them out and she immediately ran off with them, not even stopping for the food and water I had put down for her and the chicks.

What an ungrateful hen!  She would have let that possum have every one of her babies if I had not intervened.  I guess chickens really are one of the dumbest animals alive.  And most maddening to me!

Maybe it’s the wool sweater a friend gave me several years ago that you couldn’t destroy if you tried.  It’s light and airy, but not a single wisp of cold air manages to get by those woolen fibers.

I’m thinking it even may have something to do with the buttery-soft cashmere sweater I got for Christmas two years ago.  I have worn that poor brown sweater just about to death, under every piece of outer wear I have, day after winter day….and it still looks bran new, and I have to pry myself out of it to even wash it. 

But, what I really think started this fascination was seeing other vendors at craft fairs this year with their adorable woolen pieces of art.  I did not realize wool could be used to craft so many items.  From the cutest felted animals, hats and wall hangings, to durable sweaters, scarves, mittens, and more.  Well, whatever the cause, I’ve caught the wool crafting bug and just yesterday I received my very first package of wool ROVING in the mail!

The roving on the left is called “domestic 56″, the darker roving on the right is labeled “New Zealand”.

And to think, two weeks ago I didn’t even know what roving was!

I decided that I’d like my first wool project to be felted soap, and I actually made a bar of felted soap last week using a raw fleece a friend had given me.  I washed it myself and combed some of it out a little but I didn’t realize I needed to card the wool, so my bar was far from beautiful and didn’t felt very well.

This is the very first bar of felted soap I made.

The internet is great though.  I did my research and watched several videos of people felting soap, and here is the batch I made yesterday afternoon.  It is dry now and it seems to have worked.  We will use a few of the bars ourselves to make sure the felting does not come undone.

Variously scented bars of felted soap.

I’ve got my kitchen counter and water pots all set up to do about 20 bars of Love Spell felted soap this morning.  If you’d like to order the lovely roving you see here on my blog, go to Brush Creek Wool Works at Etsy or The New Store .  They have lots of other types of roving, supplies, herbs, spices, sheepskins, etc.  Great, fast service too.

The machine in question is a Maytag Centennial High Efficiency machine that is two years old and cleans clothes worse than the broken machine it replaced.  The spin cycle is wonderfully quiet and doesn’t shake the house at all.  But that is the only thing good I can say about the machine.  And looking back, we should have returned it right away, instead of me thinking I just didn’t know how to operate it and trying different solutions and cycles and expensive detergents.  It’s out of warranty now, of course.

Here is a pair of pants I pulled out of the washer this morning.  This is normal.  This is everyday.  This is highly annoying!