Good-Bye Beau, Hello...

So sorry for the delay in the update! It has been a wild and crazy ride around here lately. Work has been insane, having me log in 10 hours of overtime over the weekend and battling a cold of epic proportions at the same time. Then there has been all the upkeep with the “farm”. You know…barn must be cleaned, water containers bleached, TDL (to-do list) to be whittled away at, and all that sort of stuff.

We said good-bye to one of the little boys, Beauregard, on Monday. Beau is the brown one. He went with a local goat farmer to meet his new “harem”. They are all just a couple of months older than Beau, so I expect him to be earning his keep by the fall. In his place, we had an unexpected addition to the farm…one that I am determined to make sure does not decide to take up permanent residence!

No one is sure where this pigeon came from. Our neighbor, who occasionally raises pigeons, said that none of his birds are missing. This mess-leaving, feather dropping creature MUST be caught! I quickly tired of coming through the shed, minding my own business, heading to the barn to have the living daylights scared out of me by the sudden flapping of pigeon wings! And, mind you, this has happened more than once...in the same day! Jumping completely out of your skin, stepping in some brown and white goo in the process, on a routine basis must surely NOT be healthy. So catching the scare-monger is a must.

The mama goats seem to be picking up a little in the milk department. That will help tremendously in the plans to get some Feta started and aging and with the experiment with goat’s milk soaps.

The goat babies are growing by leaps and bounds. They are also getting a little rambunctious! The two older ones especially. Oh to have their energy for a few hours…but only a few hours because more than that could possibly leave me in a state of exhaustion from which I’d never recover! They love to jump and climb…the higher, the better. I think that Princess would be on the top of the barn roof if there was a way for her to get up there. Spartacus still seems to be the “baby” of the bunch. He wants to be carried or cuddled all the time. When we let them out of their barn stall, he stands just outside the stall in the barn. He will not venture out into the pasture, even with the other little goats. If I pick him up and carry him out into the pasture, he mostly stands there waiting to be picked up again. Hopefully, soon he will out grow some of that.

"STOP...following...us!"

The wee ones are so fun to watch. They often run sideways (I should mention, too, that they would give Speedy Gonzales a run for his money…ándale, ándale, arriba!) and perform the most amazing acrobatic feats. This, in turn, excites Samson to no end. I have to keep a close eye on him because he has not been fully trained and tends to play a little “too rough” with the babies if not under constant supervision. He loves to chase the little darting balls of fur but is not sure what he is supposed to do if he catches one. “Am I supposed to eat it? Smack it around? Slobber all over it until it looks like it fell into a slimy lake?”

We should be starting on the garden in the next few days. I have been drooling over seed catalogs for a while now and have gotten a few seeds. I hope to expand on what I did last year and do things a little different. I just love those fresh salads and tomato sandwiches! I may outline what I have planned for the garden in a future post. Until then…shalom and blessings!
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