Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

The other major thing that happened toward the end of the school year/beginning of summer break is that we welcomed our miniature donkey, Luna, into our farm family. This means that our farm family is complete. No more animals! (Well, except for the constant rotation of various poultry, but that doesn't count.)

A miniature donkey has been on my wish list for a while, just because. Ostensibly, Luna is a companion for the goats. In reality, she is a pet.

Omg I freaking love her.

We weren't supposed to end up with Luna. Bobby put in a deposit on a miniature donkey foal this spring, and we were supposed to pick her up in August. Midway through June, the owner contacted us: Their young daughter was attached to the foal and they had decided, as a result, not to sell her. They were apologetic and even offered us money in excess of the return of our deposit. (To which we said no; we are not the types of people to get pissy because a kid becomes attached to an animal. I was happy to let her go to a loving home. I hope they are lifelong friends.) But this did leave us without our hoped-for mini donkey. Bobby went back to Craig's List, and lo and behold, Luna had just been posted. She came from a miniature horse farm where they were downsizing by rehoming their donkeys. (They'd hoped to breed them, but their jack wasn't interested.)

This meant that we ended up with Luna more than a month before we'd planned. I posted to Twitter at the time, so I'm going to let that thread speak for itself.



It was a unique experience, driving a cargo van with a miniature donkey in it. Lots more Luna pictures are below the jump, if you're interested.

( More Luna Pictures )

She is a very chill, low-key animal. She basically does three things: She eats, she sleeps (including taking afternoon naps, which is super cute), and she stands. She is now pastured with the goats; she's very sociable and was visibly lonely when she was by herself, even though the goats push her boundaries from time to time and she has to snap at them. (That's goats for you.)

We did have one exciting incident when we'd had Luna about two weeks. We were often grazing her in the backyard because the electric fencing wasn't set up yet, and Bobby was leading her from the barn to the yard when my young neighbor and her friend happened by on bikes. They were very excited to see Luna--and Luna was very terrified of the bikes! She broke free of Bobby and galloped full-send down the road to the cornfield at the end of the road. (I-91 is past the cornfield, so this was pretty scary for us too!) She galloped up and down the corn for a few minutes before slowing, stopping, and letting me approach, but the poor love was terrified when I led her back. It took her several days to settle down after that.

She's very affectionate, though a little shy. Bobby calls her spookyhorse because she is easily frightened of things. She likes to be approached on her terms, not ours. Bobby and I will sit in her paddock, and within a minute, she is pushed up right next to us with her head over our shoulder for scratches. She loves "donkey hugs" when I drape my arm around her neck and stand leaning on her.

She can be loud and lets us know when we are not meeting her expectations. One of her biggest expectations concerns what we have termed "scarytime." Scarytime is when the sun descends behind the trees. Now Luna has access to her stall at all times, so she could put herself in at scarytime, but the scary things that come with scarytime are only fully banished if Bobby or I walk with her into the barn.

(Actually, she gets oats at that time, and I think the oats more so than Bobby and me dispel scarytime.)

So if scarytime happens, and we don't come down, she brays to let us know, "Hey! It's fucking scary down here!" She's going to be in for a rude awakening come winter when scarytime happens at 4 o'clock and neither of us are generally even home yet!

The rest of the homestead is doing pretty well. The goats are almost full-grown; we'll know soon if they'll reach breeding weight and if we'll have kids next year. We have entirely too much poultry right now (and ducks still on the way, jeezum ...). I don't even know how many chickens we have. Twenty-two chicks, I think, still under a heat lamp in the shed, plus about eight layers and the two roosters, and four turkeys, out in the coop. But 'tis the season. This is our meat for next year. We are still eating last year's poultry, and this year we are raising more chickens (but growing the turkeys smaller because 45lb/20kg per bird was too much last year).

We had a groundhog family move in destroy a good bit of our garden. Mama had moved out, leaving the two younglings behind. Bobby trapped and relocated one, but after researching more and learning that one has to practically drive across the state to keep them from coming back, when he caught the second one ... well, let's just say that one is nibbling lettuces in God's garden now.

The bees are doing great, but we won't get honey this year.

But the moral of this story is that Luna is awesome and, even if the least productive, the best addition to our farm family ever.

Every few days, I think, "I should write in my journal about that!" but then never actually do. Although I'm not taking any classes right now, it's a busy time of the year in the House of Felagund, and I've been staying very loyal to my gym schedule. And I've been busy at work, with a large senior class this year and all of them in some form of jeopardy (usually related to HSAs), plus the after-school program. And trying to get the B2MeM ebook together. Anyway, I've been photographing things, so I'll at least share my photos and some updates will likely straggle along with those photos.

( Pictures below the Cut ... )

Okay, we just had an unsolved mystery. Bobby cut the grass this afternoon and, while he was replacing the push mower in the shed, pulled back the tarp he uses to cover it and found ten chicken eggs underneath. Although the coop is part of the shed, there is no way out of the coop and into the part of the shed where the mower is kept (aside from the door, which is always closed and latched). We have several different breeds of chicken, and it was obvious that several hens had been using that space.

I went into the coop and moved stuff around outside of the coop but could find no place where the chickens could even squeeze through to get from one half of the shed to the other. (Nor have we ever found a chicken loose in the shed or yard.)

I knew hens hid their eggs but dang. This is a bit much!

Well, the rooster saga gets even better.

At our Halloween party on Saturday, my laurel Tristan told me that he thinks the two Rocks are roosters. I told him that I didn't think so ... but I hadn't really looked at them in a while either. (Bobby is their primary caretaker; my role is mostly grabbing them as Bobby flushes them out of the bushes where they hide when they don't want to go back into their pen.) Yesterday afternoon, we had them out, and I took a good look at them, and I found myself agreeing with Tristan. They used to have stubby hen tails, but no more. Their tails have really fanned out and colored up. They also fight with each other an awful lot. Bobby did some more research last night and came to the same conclusion I did: It's almost impossible to tell the difference between Plymouth Rock pullets and cockerels until they either start laying eggs or crowing.

This morning, I wanted to see the Reds crow since Bobby says they look humorously self-important as they do it, and this might be their last day with us. So we went out to the pen, and they all came running over, as usual, since they know that when we come out, they're usually getting something nice to eat like a cup of brown marms or getting let out. Bobby said, "Okay, perform." So Dorothy--one of the Rocks--threw "her" head back and crowed.

So this is how it went down. We bought six chicks, all of whom were supposedly sexed as female. One died. Four--four!!--turned out to be roosters. So of the chickens we raised, we have one that will actually produce the eggs we wanted. (Incidentally, that one is Rose, who has been my favorite since I first laid eyes on her.)

Thankfully, we have homes for all of them. Even if they don't go to friends, Bobby's been in touch with a farm that identifies itself as a "chicken sanctuary" because they like birds to roam around in the fields. So they don't care about hens and eggs (they probably have 90% roosters from people like us who bought "hens" that started cockledoodledooing). We'll be going to the livestock auction on Thursday to try to buy some actual pullets.

( Cut for Dog Poop-Related Grossness and TMI )

Speaking of animals, the Felagund Family flock is about to get bigger. Literally. Bobby called the town office today and received confirmation that, yes, we can have chickens. Not only that but, apparently, our humble three-quarter-acre residential lot is actually zoned for light agriculture! So we could till up the backyard, plant row crops, and sell them on the roadside if we wanted to. (Actually, after getting over my initial surprise, our zoning made perfect sense since our neighbor across the street does sell organic lettuce and eggs.) We cannot, apparently, have a cow, though, which sucks.

But, as I told Bobby, we were getting chickens no matter what the town said. I was fully prepared to pull a Henry David Thoreau on the Manchester bureaucracy and go all civil disobedient and keep chickens whether they were allowed or not. Two reasons why. Firstly, there are three other houses on our street that I know of with chickens. It's like the time my dad was trying to get a pool permit, and the county tried to deny him, and he pointed out all of the houses on the street that had built pools without permits, while he was trying to go about things legitimately and honestly and give the county their cut in fees. Secondly, sustainability is the closest thing I have to a religion. So there. >:-Þ

While I'm babbling about the town, Bobby and I went to the fire department carnival last Thursday, and I saw five of my students there. I told Bobby that, if I get a job at Manchester Valley, like I hope, when my certification's done, then I will probably know half the kids and parents at the carnival before long.