Time to trim hooves!

Hi, it's Celia again!

One of the jobs I have as a goat owner is trim hooves. If you don't trim a goat's hooves, the goat can go lame. How often you have to do it depends on the goat and how fast its hooves grow, and whether or not the goat walks on rocks. Rocks would naturally wear away the hooves. You would think since we live on top of Stone Hill we would have a lot of rocks. We don't. We have stones, which are little pieces of rock. And stones don't do the job. We should have bought a house on Rock Hill, which is the next hill over. But we didn't. And because we didn't, we have to trim hooves. You can see in this picture how long the hooves have gotten. They shouldn't be long and pointy like they are in the picture.

Mom helped me trim hooves on Mother's Day. She's a good mom, isn't she? She said she didn't mind because she was happy to get it off the "to do" list. Farmers have a long "to do" list. Mom learned how to trim hooves by watching youtube. She learns a lot that way.

We put Mali in the milking stand and gave her some grain. She is very happy if she's eating. The hooves are soft, like finger nails, so it didn't take mom very long to trim them. She started with the front hooves. They're easier because Mali doesn't mind those so much. But since Mali puts most of her weight on her back legs, she really doesn't like having those hooves trimmed because she has to shift her weight to the front. In the picture below the left toe is almost done. The right toe still needs to be done.

In the picture below Mom is digging out the dirt so she can see better. 

All done! Mali is much happier with trimmed hooves.

No Milk Today!

Hi, it's Celia again!

We milk Mali every morning. We could milk her twice or even three times a day, but we are away from the farm a lot in the evening, so we just milk her in the morning. So what that means is we have to go out every night and separate Babybel, Mali's doeling, from her mom. If we didn't separate her she would nurse during the night, and there would be no milk for us in the morning. Babybel is little so we just stick her in a dog cage that we keep out in the goat shed. I don't know what we'll do when she's bigger. I might need to get Farm Hand Dad to make a stall.

But this morning we went out to the goat shed to get Mali for milking, and this is what we saw:

Not only was she out of her cage, she was standing on top of it. I could almost hear her say, "You will NOT keep me locked in a cage. Victory is mine!" I don't know how she got out. Maybe she's in cahoots with one of the bucklings. You know, trading her portion of grain for a little help.

So no milk for us this morning.

Dead Beehive

Hi, it's Celia again.

My mom is a beekeeper. I don't know if she's a good one or not, because every year most of her bees die. She says it's because people use pesticides and it weakens the bees, but I'm suspicious. I think she annoys them to death.

This past week we went to our church's farm to remove one of the dead beehives. Mom moved it there last year when she split a strong hive in two. Mom was trying to figure out why this beehive might have died. And of course she wanted to tell me all about it! Here she is showing me the honey that was left in the hive:

And here she is showing me the pollen. Pollen is what they feed the baby bees.

There were no baby bees or eggs, so Mom thinks maybe the queen died. She says it's very hard to tell what happened. She did buy more bees from her bee friend, so hopefully we will have honey again this year!

Mud

Hi, it's Celia again!

It has been raining a lot here lately. Rain means mud. Rain means outside chores that can be put off (like weeding) get put off. But outside chores that can't be put off get done in the rain. And doing outside chores in the rain with the mud means slipping and sliding all over the place, and I usually end up on my butt, which isn't fun. Mom slips and slides and falls on her butt, too, and that IS funny.

Here's some mud outside the goat shed:

One extra chore that we have in the rain is putting extra bedding down for the goats. Goats shouldn't sleep on wet bedding because they can get mastitis (I had to look up the spelling of that one). So when it rains we lug lots of straw to the goat shed. We spread it out, they eat it, we lug out more. We get straw in the Spring from cutting down the big grasses that mom has in the flower bed. My brother John and Farm Hand Dad cut it down, and Mom and I rake it up and put it in big bags for storage. Here's the chickens checking out the straw.

And when the straw is gone we use wood shavings that Farm Hand Dad brings home from his carpentry job. He can't earn enough money as a farm hand (especially since we don't pay him) so he does carpentry on the side. Here's a picture of the goat shed with the nice dry wood shavings.

Micro Farm in Pictures (2)

Hi, it's Celia again!

Before we get to the pictures, I wanted to let everyone know that Farm Hand Dad and two other people thought the unknown piece of farm equipment from my previous post was a corn planter. Now you know!

And here's a review of my week on the mini farm in pictures:

Milking Woes

Hi, it's Celia again!

Mom and I started milking my goat, Mali, about two weeks ago. Except for having to get up early, it's going pretty well. Mali is learning to hop right up on the milking stand. We bribe her with food to get her to stick her head through the stanchion (that's the thingy that keeps her head in place so she can't move around too much). Mali is a lot like my brothers that way--they'll do things for food, too.

But today Mali was feeling a little ornery. She's a Nubian goat and Nubians are known for two things: making milk high in fat (they're called the Jersey cow of goats) and being stubborn. And today she was being stubborn. She was wiggling all over, and don't you know she stuck her foot right in the milk! That is bad news, because all of the milk needed to be thrown away, and the pot (I mean sauce pan) had to get re-sanitized, all while Mali had her head stuck in the stanchion. So to keep her calm I fed her raisins. They are one of her favorites.

Here's Mali getting a "hug" from her doeling, Babybel. Happy Mother's Day!

So...What is It?

Hi, it's Celia again!

Mom and I were on our way to Darrenkamp's and we got behind this:

If Farm Hand Dad had been with us he would have been able to tell us what it was immediately. He was born and raised in Lancaster County, so this kind of farm-y knowledge is in his blood. But Mom was born and raised in North Jersey so she's better at identifying other things. Like cockroaches. Seriously! She can tell an American cockroach (light brown) from a German cockroach (black) from 20 feet away.

Anyway, neither one of us knew what it was, and we were stuck behind it for a long time, so we started taking guesses:

~A liquid poop spreader. It is the season for spreading poop on the fields, after all!
~A back massager for a giant.
~A field packer-downer or smoother-outer.

By the way, if you know what it really is, let me know. I might need to use one someday!

And when we FINALLY got to Darrenkamp's, Mom let me get some candy. So many things to choose from!

Feeding the Goats

Hi, it's Celia again!

Most people think that goats eat anything. That's not true. Chickens eat anything, but goats are very picky.

We feed our goats grain in the morning. Mali, the goat we milk, gets the expensive stuff. Mom says if we're going to the trouble of milking her, then we are going to feed her the good stuff. Plus, it's the only way we can get her to walk to the milking stand every morning. Mali also goes out on pasture every day. Mom and I REALLY, REALLY want to fence in the whole property, but for now Mali gets tethered, and the other goats stay in the goat yard and have food brought to them. Like they were at a restaurant. It wasn't too much work when we had hay, but the hay is gone, so now we have to harvest the food. Harvest. I like that word. It's all farm-y.

We harvest whatever is growing. For the past few weeks it was the weeds from the flower beds. But now it's wild raspberry, roses, and small trees. Some of our property is wooded, so we have lots of wild things to choose from. It's like a giant goat pantry.

Mom does most of the harvesting. She's not afraid of bugs, snakes, or other things that I won't go near. You know what she is afraid of? Horses! She says she doesn't like animals that are bigger than her. Anyway, she uses this knife thingy and whacks away at the tree or bush.

And then she throws it in the goat yard for the goats to enjoy. This top picture is of Brie eating a rose bush, and the second one is of Babybel eating a raspberry bush.

Hunting for Nests

Hi, it's Celia again!

Our hens are kooky. They have a nice hen house and a safe yard surrounded by electric fence to protect them, and what do they do? They fly the coop. Every morning four of them climb high into a tree and fly over the fence. They spend their whole day wandering around the property.

Mom says this is both good and bad. Mom wants the chickens to have free range, just not all day. She lets all of the chickens out of their yard in the afternoon, after they are done laying eggs in the hen house. Because if you let them out before they lay, this is what happens:

They build a nest somewhere, and then we have to find it. This one we found in the woods. And this one we found under the porch:

Hunting for nests isn't so bad for us kids, because Mom usually offers a cash reward for finding one. But it's bad for her because she can go days or weeks without finding the eggs. When we find a nest, Mom follows this little procedure that she read about on the internet. She takes all but one egg out of the nest. This egg she marks with an X so she knows it is old. All the other eggs she either gives to the cats, or cooks up for the chickens. Or if she's mad at Dad she gives them to him for his breakfast. (JK Dad. She doesn't really do that.) Then she puts the egg with the X back in the nest. This way when the hen sees the egg is still in the nest, she knows it is safe to keep laying there. If all the eggs were gone, she would know something (or someone like Mom) took them, and the hen would build a nest somewhere else. And then we'd have to hunt for it again.

I think Mom thinks the hens are smarter than they really are. After all, there wasn't an egg in that spot when they started laying there, so why do they need an egg to continue laying there? And if they really felt unsafe when they find their eggs missing, then the WORSE place to lay would be in the hen house, where most of the hens do lay, because Mom goes in there a few times a day and takes out their eggs. You think they would be scared silly! But they keep laying there.

Anyway, Mom goes to the nests every day and gets the new eggs. Of course Mom could just clip the hens' wings and keep them from flying out in the first place, but she would have to go into the hen house at night with a flashlight and clip all of their wings, because she can't tell her hens apart. She doesn't want to do this because she's afraid the roosters will attack her. I told her if they did it would make a really good blog post, but she still said no.