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Just Kidding!

Apr. 24th, 2020 08:52 pm
dawn_felagund: (newgrange)
This morning, at 8:30 AM, Bobby woke me from a dead sleep by calling my name: "Dawn!"

My first thought: Oh shit, I overslept. I was interviewed for the Tolkien Experiences podcast and was doing a live premier with my interviewer, Luke Shelton, at 9:30 this morning. I'd been up late the night before due to a combination of 1) drinking a beverage that consisted of the day-old coffee and amaretto at about 9 PM, 2) getting hooked into research lately, late at night, huddled up in the corner of the couch under my blanket, and last night no exception, and 3) Hermione pooping the bed last night and so changing her bedding and wiping down her crate at 1 AM.

Then: "Come outside, quick!"

Which at that point I thought: Denali's out. Or something got eaten. Or Denali got eaten.

(This is not as randomly morbid as perhaps it seems. Guinevere was very keyed up last night and kept going out onto the deck to bark at the darkness. Then we heard a single gunshot, which in the country, at night, usually means that some animal has gotten into someone's livestock.)

Then: "We have goat babies!"

So despite my brain rushing to all manner of tragedies great and small, it turned out to be a good thing. In thirty seconds, I was running down the steps of my front porch, pulling on my coat, to the barn. They had just been born. One hadn't even stood up yet, and they were both still wet. If Bobby was five minutes earlier, he would have seen it happen. The doe was Elanor, which is not surprising: She is the youngest but also the daughter of a champion milker, and she is ambitious. Always shoving to the front for everything, the biggest, the pushiest, the loudest. Even her hooves grow faster than the others. While I am fond of Lobelia, and Bobby prefers Estella, a.k.a., Brother Silly, Elanor is hard to like because she's so intense. Naturally, she'd be the first to freshen.

We had begun preparations for freshening, but we didn't think it'd happen till mid-May based on our math. We brought home our buck, Denali, in mid-November. His owner didn't have him on grain, so he was tiny, and ... how do I put this politely? ... he frankly couldn't reach our does, who have been on grain since they were little and were large animals by this point. We started him on grain, and he grew fast after that, and we figured he could reach by mid-December, giving us till mid-May. Well! It seems where there is a will, there is a way, and Denali and Elanor figured something out because, by the math, she got pregnant in mid- to late November, shortly after we brought Denali home. Anyway, Bobby had a birthing kit set up, and thank goodness he'd gotten Denali moved out into his own bachelor pad a few days prior, but we weren't expecting to need any of this stuff for a few weeks yet, so there was much scrambling around to get it and the usual miasma of nerves that attends doing anything like this for the first time. But we did it. We got the kids dried off and dipped their navels; they wouldn't nurse right away, so we milked out colostrum from Elanor and bottle-fed enough to them according to their weight.

I missed my podcast premier.

I reached a point where I thought, if I make it, I hope this not on video: I was in my pajamas with unbrushed hair, literally covered in wood shavings and straw, dabbed here and there with blood, iodine, and goat colostrum. But I didn't make it, so it didn't matter. There is the truism that goats freshen at the worst possible time, and this was probably the worst possible time for me all week because this was something I was really looking forward to.

Elanor, true to character, did not seem enthralled with motherhood. So we milked her and, when the time came, dutifully heated up bottles ... and discovered that they had already been nursing! So, so far, no bottle feeding. No bottle feeding. If we had to bottle feed, of course, I'd deal with it. We bottle-fed all three does. Which is why it's not something I find enchanting anymore. We bottle-fed all three does, for months. It was cute and fun when they were little and got old fast after that. I'd much rather leave this work to Elanor.

And the stats: We had one little doeling--about 1 lb.--and a little buckling at about 3 lbs. We won't name them--their eventual owners can do that--but I've given then placeholder names of Stoicism (the buckling) and Persistence (the doeling), based on their personalities.

So. This is another huge step for our enterprise (which we have named Forn Rhûn Farm) as homesteaders and maybe someday small business owners. We now have our own source of milk and all the wonderful things that come with that. We were down to see the babies about an hour ago, and all are doing well. Elanor has settled in; the kids are content and either toddling around or nestled in the straw.

Lobelia and Brother Silly are next. Brother Silly is huge; it would not surprise me if she has triplets. Lobelia, on the other hand, is the smallest, and it would not surprise me if she singled for her first. At this point, we have to expect that they could arrive any day now because who knows when Denali managed his magic. Keeping with the freshen-at-the-worst-possible-time trend, I fully expect Brother Silly to freshen during the SWG book club on Sunday.

Naturally, I could not ask y'all to sit through all this and then not post pictures of the kids.

Goat Kids )
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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.

Luna's Arrival Twitter Thread

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.
Me and Estella, Lobelia, and ElanorThe kids are here!!! What a perfect way to celebrate Beltane. This morning, Bobby and I drove down to Stowe to pick up our two little doelings. Well ... you can see that "two" turned into "three" quite easily. We arrived to the farm and a pen of six little kids, all a week or two old: five does and a buck. The owner remarked that this is the time of year when it is hard to sell kids, so if we wanted three instead ... she then went away for three minutes, which was enough time for Bobby to look at me with eyes taking up half his face and remark how cute the little black one was for me to know: Yep. Totally going home with three.

I'm glad! They've only been here a few hours, and it is already hard to imagine not having one of them.

We named them after female Hobbits. I had initially suggested naming them after family matriarchs, but we're approaching the point where we might start selling what we produce here, so Bobby has been poking me about coming up with a name for our homestead. He would like a Tolkienish name. Naturally, I did not disagree. The Hobbit names fit better with that. Twist my arm.

So I am happy to introduce, from left to right, Estella, Elanor, and Lobelia.

Estella, Lobelia, and Elanor

More Goat Pictures )

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