Nothing Much

Our friend SJ is coming Monday to take the horses. None too soon, as we are quickly running out of hay! I think we’re going to have to hunt down more for the cow and sheep once the horses are gone.

I’m making a batch of chevre this morning, as Tallulah and Jessamine are giving a fair amount of milk right now. We’re struggling a bit to get Jess to let hers down—she tries to save it for her kids. But she’s starting to come around. The next in line to kid is Cookie, who is due on the 5th of March, though it’s hard to imagine she could make it that long! And who knows what’s going on with Maggie. We had her marked on the calendar as being due the 9th of February, though we knew back in January that that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe March? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Sometime in the next week or so I am going to butcher the two ram lambs. I’m actually really looking forward to it, and I’m really, really looking forward to having a freezer full of lamb!

February 22, 2007 | Comments Closed

Selling the Horses


It is with some sorrow and much discussion that we have decided to sell the horses. Our farm at this point is too small to support them—when we were on 85 acres there was no problem—and they make it difficult to support the other animals. They eat more than half the hay we feed, and that’s with 5 sheep, 10 goats, 2 pigs and a cow eating the other half! They’re just too much. The good news is, our friend and neighbor SJ is buying them, and they’ll be living close by, and we can visit them often.

February 13, 2007 | Comments Closed

More Babies

So we went yesterday and picked up our new puppie. She’s Pyrenees, Komondor, Sarplaninac, and Anatolian Shepherd. Her name is Liath (pronounced Lee-ah for those who don’t have the Gaelic) and her job is going to be to whip Fionn into shape. Oh, and she’s extremely cute, sweet, and stoic. She’s six weeks old, and is already positioning herself so that she can keep an eye on everybody, not that she’s much of a threat to anything quite yet!

When we got home with the pup, Tallulah was all cold and shivery (she’s so skinny!) but she ate like a pig when I put her on the milking stand for her evening meal. She still had ligaments and she didn’t have any kind of discharge, but she was acting friendly towards me, which made me very suspicious (she has a vile personality when she’s pregnant). We decided to take her up to the house to sort of keep an eye on her and let her warm her shivery bones, but once we got her in the kitchen (where she thinks she belongs) she proceeded to start pushing, and had a huge buck kid, and a tiny doeling! We couldn’t throw them outside at that point—it was 15°—so they spent the night in the kitchen, and we put them out in the sun this morning. The babies are really cute and really healthy, and Tallulah’s fine, though her foul mood has returned.