Lambing!

Today, I decided I needed to get outside and check things out for myself. According to my husband, my walk has been upgraded from a hobble to a limp, so that's good enough for me! I've been getting reports from the kids and my husband, but it's just not the same. First I was planning to head across the creek to see how the goats were doing with the second pasture in their rotation. They needed to be moved from the first to second pasture after only one week, because they ate the grass down so quickly, and it didn't grow back that fast. As I was headed down towards the creek, I looked out across the pastures and saw something small moving in the far pasture where the sheep are grazing. I stopped and looked closer. It was a lamb!

Running around near a black ewe were two little white lambs with black spots. One is covered with spots, and the other only has the black spots on his eyes, and one big black spot on his neck, just like our new Icelandic ewe, Dottie. I wasn't sure if the mother was Minerva or Pocahontas, so I started looking for the other two-year-old black ewe, and I couldn't spot her. After a few minutes, I noticed Mike coming back from the other side of the creek, and I called to him. He came over and jumped the electric fence into the sheep's pasture. I wouldn't try that even if I did have two good ankles! He looked in the shelter and behind it, and then I saw something move in a little gully behind a tree in the far corner of the pasture. It was a black head -- no horns meant it had to be the other two-year-old ewe. I told Mike, and he slowly walked down there. He found a little black ram with a white head, white tail and white socks! The lamb was still a little damp, but the placenta was already out, so he'll be a singleton, which is kind of unusual for a two year old ewe, but that's okay. It's not like we need a lot of sheep.

There are still three ewes left to lamb. Fee was grazing happily, while Majik and White Feather were laying next to the water trough, looking huge and uncomfortable. The little white ewe lamb that was born almost two weeks ago runs across the pasture with her mother now, never missing a step.

Boring, time-wasting injury

Sorry I haven't posted in a few days. Things on the farm are pretty quiet at the moment. Tuesday I was in the ER for what I thought was a broken ankle, and Wednesday I was at the dentist for two chipped teeth. I'd love to tell you some really exciting story about a runaway horse that kicked me in the mouth and knocked me down -- well maybe not -- but it's really very boring stuff that could have easily happpened in the burbs. Sunday, I was eating and reading and "forgot" to take the fork out of my mouth before I started chewing. The very loud crackling sounds alerted me to the problem!

Monday evening I was watering my flower and herb beds because my transplanted echinacea was wilting, and after I turned off the water hose, I turned around to walk back to the garden to start weeding, and next thing I knew I was on the ground screaming in pain. I had apparently stepped on something that caused my ankle to turn. That happens far too frequently, so I didn't think much of it after I stopped crying and moaning. I could hardly sleep Monday night though, and lifting my two toes on the outside of my foot was impossible, so Tuesday I decided I should take a trip to the ER. They said nothing was broken, but if it didn't feel better by the end of the week, I should see an orthopedic doctor.

My trip to the dentist in the suburbs yesterday was definitely not what the doctor ordered, and my ankle looked very fat by the time I got home. But I am very happy that my teeth now look like they have level edges again, rather than jagged ones. I spent today in bed with my foot elevated, so the swelling is very much improved. I am still in quite a bit of pain, but it is improved, so I shall not be seeking any additional medical opinions.

Sickness and injuries are such a waste of time. I kept looking out my bedroom window at the garden today. It was such a gorgeous day, and the moon is still in the right phase for planting root crops -- and I need to get more onions in the ground, as well as carrots! I'm hoping to make it out there tomorrow for a quick planting session. With a little help from my daughters, I'm hoping it doesn't set back my healing.

Sickness and health

The Illinois Sustainable Living and Wellness Expo was quite an interesting event. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the people were interesting. I can see why so many doctors insist on merely medicating people rather than even suggesting that they change their life (diet, exercise, meditation, etc). Our display was situated between two supplement vendors, and they easily had twice as many people stopping at their tables as we did. We'd listen to people tell them about their arthritis or fibromyalgia or other medical conditions, which can be improved by lifestyle changes, but all of them wondered which supplement would help them. It never occurred to them that our display would be of interest to them -- they weren't interested in healthier eating.

This reminded me of a friend from about 10 years ago. Between the two of us, we would order about $800 worth of food from a health food co-op every month. Her husband once complained to her that it was too expensive to be eating all of that organic and natural food, and she said, "No, this is our health insurance." What a great reponse! She was the first person who opened my mind to the idea that what our society calls health insurance is really sickness insurance -- it pays bills when you get sick, but having a health lifestyle is the best insurance you can have to keep you healthy.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to move out here. Although I have been consciencious about nutrition for almost two decades now, I was never able to get as much exercise as I knew I needed. I tried memberships to the YMCA and health clubs. I had a treadmill and a stationery bicycle. I tried walking around the neighborhood every morning. I couldn't keep up any of those things for more than a couple of months. It always felt like a waste of time -- so dishonest. Drive to the Y to exercise? Walk on a treadmill to nowhere? Walk around the neighborhood ... why? I needed to do something real.

Now I get tons of honest exercise. I carry 50-pound feed bags and 3-gallon water buckets. I walk all around our 32 acres for real reasons -- checking fences to make sure there are no new holes or that an electric fence isn't shorting out, checking sheep to see if anyone new has lambed, checking the hay field to see how it's growing. I gained seven or eight pounds over the winter, but just in the past few weeks since spring has pulled me outside daily, I have lost it all without even thinking about it! Some days I never sit down between lunch and dinner, and I don't even realize it until that evening when I notice that my legs and feet are sore.

Overall, I did enjoy the expo, mostly because of the few kindred spirits I met. Looks like I found a source for fresh, all-natural fish, and three different people talked to me about wholesaling my goat-milk soap, which would be wonderful!

Now, I need to get outside and start working on cleaning the barn. Yeah, it's time to clean the barn again. We didn't actually get it completely clean the last time we worked on it. Before moving out here, I never thought about the fact that a barn would have to be cleaned, but it does. We need to muck out stalls again, and we need to continue working on the storeroom. We got half of it cleaned last time. Now we need to work on the other half. I can't believe how dirty it gets over the winter.

We also need to get the milking parlor painted so we can start using it again. Currently, the girls are milking in the middle of the barn, which means there can be cats and chickens around, and that's not the cleanest environment to have your milk sitting around. The milking parlor was built more than a year ago (maybe 2 years ago?), but it's never had walls inside, just studs, so we've avoided adding shelves and things like that, which would make milking easier.

Looks like our young chicks are learning to go back into their shelter at night, so we'll be able to let them out of the smaller fenced area today so they can run around in the bigger pasture. That will be my entertainment for the day!

New turkeys in the midst of a busy week

The creek went down the day after my last post, so we were able to put the bridge back in place, and it's working well. Much of this past week was spent getting ready to be an exhibitor and a speaker at the Illinois Sustainable Living and Wellness Expo, which began yesterday and continues through today. Thursday, when we were really very busy with the expo preparations, our 63 new turkeys poults arrived. After losing 60% of our turkeys last year, I was very concerned (maybe even paranoid) about doing everything right and checking on the new poults frequently. At one point, the heat lamp had mysteriously stopped working, but no one got chilled, and so far, they're doing okay.

If you're wondering why these turkeys are a beautiful gray color, it's because 53 of them are blue slates. There are 10 broad-breasted bronze, which look like the old-fashioned pilgrim pictures that we all saw as kids. Slates were the fifth most popular breed in 1901, but today, there are only a few hundred left in the entire country. With the purchase of these poults, we are hoping to start our own breeding flock to help change that.

Short-lived success

It was great while it lasted ... that feeling of accomplishment, that feeling that we had done something really necessary and worthwhile. That feeling -- and our bridge -- lasted less than two days. It started raining yesterday, and you can see the result.

I have this theory that if "they" did it 100 years ago, we can do it today. They've been building bridges for many years, so surely we should be able to build one, right? Well, this was not our best effort. We never expected it to last forever, but we did expect it to last for at least a few weeks, maybe a few months.

Although I am the type of person who worries far too much in the human world ... worry about what people think, what they mean, why they do things, how I should do things differently to win friends and influence people ... I worry very little about things on the homestead. There is absolutely nothing I can do about the weather, and that seems to dictate a lot of our success and failure out here. Although some people might go insane from the lack of control, I find a certain amount of comfort in knowing that all I can do is my best. I do my best, and I don't worry about it. If my best isn't good enough, I'll have to try harder next time or study harder or find a smarter mentor.

A really crazy, very busy, incredible day!

The day began with a visit from a family that wanted to buy a couple of pet goats. After two hours, their five children couldn't decide on just two, so they got three. It was really fun helping them to pick out their new pets.

After they left, we had lunch and talked about the afternoon. We knew we had very ambitious plans! First on the agenda was building a bridge across the creek. We put up fencing and a shelter over there last fall when the creek was down because of the drought. Of course, the drought ended, and now we can't get the goats over there to those wonderful lush pastures filled with grass, flowers, delicious weeds, and crunchy bushes that goats so love! Mike and Jonathan worked on the bridge, while Margaret and Katherine and I worked on preparing a multi-purpose shelter to accept the chickens that we've been brooding in the barn for the past two months. Our task was made mentally more challenging by the fact that one of the ewes currently in the pasture was in the shelter acting like she mght be in labor, and we didn't want to move her if she was in labor. Our concern was heightened by the fact that we had been surprised by a lamb this morning! It was a ewe that was not supposed to be bred, but when I looked in my planner, I saw that a ram was loose five months ago. So the good news is that we know who Daddy is and can register the ewe lamb.

So, the girls and I spent an hour watching White Feather to see if she was just exhausted from being in the final weeks of pregnancy -- or if she was indeed going to lamb soon. After a bit of waiting while yearling goats climbed all over us, I suggested that we could take this opportunity to trim the hooves on those goats. Margaret got the hoof trimmers and we gave the goats pedicures while keeping an eye on the ewe. After an hour, I was convinced that she was acting just like all the rest of the ewes who are so very pregnant, so it would probably be okay to move her to the other pasture.

By then, the bridge was ready to be put in place, and although I did little more than offer moral support for this project, it was thrilling to see it actually happen. Mike and the kids carried the bridge down to the creek and sat it on top of cement blocks. Yes, it will wash away in the first flood, but it is also tied to a post, so hopefully it won't go too far. As long as it isn't busted up, we'll be able to bring it back and continue using it.

After we got the bridge in place, we decided to move the sheep to their new pasture. Rather than trying to move all 12 like we usually do, this time, we moved whatever number would go into the adjoining pasture, and then we'd close the gate and get those to their final destination. Then we went back and repeated the process. It only took three times to get everyone to their new pasture. I'd still love to have a herding dog though!

Then I used a pan of kelp to tempt three yearling goats to go across the new bridge to the fresh pastures on the other side of the creek. Everyone else grabbed a goat by the collar and walked them across. Most walked across the bridge nicely, but Coco freaked at the sight of it, so she had to be carried, and Georgie panicked halfway across, but Margaret was able to coax him the rest of the way.

As the sun started to set, we put the front wall on the shelter that we were transforming from a sheep shelter to a chicken shelter. We decided it was too late to actually move 100 chickens, because no one had even begun the regular evening chores yet. We'll do that tomorrow.

The only down side to today is that we found so many ticks on ourselves, we lost count. This is already the worst year for ticks we've ever had. Last year was so great. We only found a total of three or four ticks on everyone in the whole family. Each person today found that many on ourselves.

Overall, this was the kind of day that I truly love! I am so tired, and my muscles are so sore, but I feel that we accomplished so much. I suppose I'm probably experiencing the type of euphoria that a runner gets after finishing a race. What a genuinely wonderful day!

Pay attention!

The past two days have been happily productive. Yesterday I planted 25 lilies and 10 gladiolas. I'll plant more glads in a couple weeks and more a couple weeks after that, so I'll have fresh flowers in the house for a month or two this summer. I love fresh flowers, and glads make a beautiful bouquet.

Today we started cleaning out the barn -- not just your usual cleaning, but real cleaning. We mucked out two stalls (farm talk for shoveling manure and soiled straw) and dumped it in the front yard. I'd love to be a fly in the car of country neighbors who drive past. I'm sure they're looking at our piles of straw and manure on our front lawn and saying, "Look what those crazy city folks are doing now! Don't they know that's going to kill the grass!" Yes, indeed we do know it's going to kill the grass, and that's the plan.

I spent a portion of the winter looking to the experts for answers. Our gardening has been pretty dismal for the past four years, and last spring we visited a place that has a permaculture system. It looks like the Garden of Eden, but when you get up close, you realize that the vast majority of what you see is actually food! They have garlic, squash, tomotoes and other vegetable plants growing in the shade of trees! You can check out pictures yourself at the Greenhouse Bed and Breakfast. Most of what you see in those pictures is edible!

Anyway, yesterday as I was planting the lilies, I started wondering how I would keep the chickens from digging them up. I was planting the lilies in the shade of a small plum tree. We have been putting barn muckings under our trees for at least three years. It kills the grass and provides time-released fertilizer for the trees. (manure + decomposing straw = compost) It also looks like our trees are mulched.

Then today Margaret said the reason we can't keep the chickens out of the barn is because they have too much fun scratching in the straw. She said that if we get the straw out of there (it's in the aisles and the front storage area), the chickens wouldn't have any motivation to go in there.

Things started to add up in my head, and voila! We dumped large quantities of straw and manure between the apple trees so that the chickens will go there to scratch in the straw. The combination of the straw smothering the grass and the chickens scratching will kill the grass and make a wonderful bed for planting! It's no tilling and no nasty herbicides to turn my front yard into the Garden of Eatin. (And I think it'll keep the chickens from digging up my freshly planted lilies, because they're having so much fun scratching in those piles of straw that we scattered in the yard.)

Now I don't want you to think that experts have no place in my world. Obviously they do, because I read a lot. I just think we sometimes get too dependent upon the experts. Sometimes, when we just pay attention, we can figure things out on our own. Experts can give us ideas, but when it comes to applying them to our own lives, we have to pay attention to our situation. I sat in the house all winter trying to figure out how I was going to create a permaculture system on my homestead, but in the space of a couple of days, it all came together as I was spending time outside and paying attention to my world.

Now for the really fun part of today ... we moved the goslings to their new home outside. They've been inside under a heat lamp since they arrived three weeks ago, but with the incredibly warm weather, we decided to move them to the little chicken coop in our yard. It's a halfway-house for a lot of critters around here ... chickens, turkeys, ducks, goats, rabbits, and now goslings! They seem so hyperactive, running from the waterer to the feeder to the grass and then inside their little house!

The best part however was seeing Lucy's reaction to their arrival. We started with a pair of adult buff geese three years ago, and two years ago, Ricky died. Lucy was so sad, she disappeared for a week, and when she came back, one of her wings was broken. She eventually recovered and decided to live with the ducks on the pond. Today was such a special day for her though. When we put the goslings out in their new yard, they started making gosling noises, and we heard Lucy honking! We looked up to see her bustling towards us at top speed, honking non-stop. She got to the fence of their little yard and stared at them and honked for five minutes! Then she just stood and stared. I looked at Katherine, who has been taking care of the goslings since they arrived, and I said, "Wow! Seeing Lucy so happy makes it worth all that work, doesn't it?" She smiled and agreed.

Spring guilt

Today was one of those days where I wound up feeling really guilty for not getting more done. Yeah, there is a lot to be done around here! I should have made soap, trimmed goats' hooves, worked in the garden, etc.

To my credit, I did make yogurt, but I spent way too much time on the computer. I spent about an hour in the goat pasture, sitting on a log, petting whomever walked up to me. I also put some goats outside who had been in the barn for the past three weeks with a buck, hopefully getting bred. It was fun to watch the group dynamics as they re-entered the herd. There was a great deal of head butting and goats climbing all over each other ... "I'm the alpha!" "NO! I'm the herd queen!" "No! Me!"

Spring should be a time of energy, right? Katherine took today's picture of the robin in front of the daffodils. I am oh-so-optimistic about tomorrow ...

New kid on the farm

Hercules seems to have survived his first night at Antiquity Oaks. He is eagerly gulping down his bottles, but he doesn't seem very interested in hay or grain. I wanted to get a picture of him, but he is so friendly, he rarely got far enough away from me for me to get a good picture. I took five pictures and this was the best one. Sorry his face is blurry, but you can see his spiffy splint on his hind leg. He will be our first full-size buck on the farm; he is a la mancha, which explains the lack of ears.

Yesterday was such a roller coaster of emotions. It's nice to have another mellow day on the farm, and the weather is beautiful again! Buds are forming on the trees, and all the ewes are getting udders, which means lambing isn't far away. This morning I noticed four turtles sunning themselves on the side of the pond, and after lunch, I went outside and gave the ducks some crackers on the pond. As soon as they saw me coming, they started swimming straight towards me. I wonder if that means they're spoiled ... maybe just a little bit.

I'll be spending more time outside this afternoon, checking fences, observing animals and just relaxing.

Not so perfect

Perhaps I was high on fresh air yesterday, because on second thought, it wasn't exactly perfect. The really tiny little annoyance from yesterday was that one of the goats had her head stuck in the fence between the goat pasture and the ram pasture. Unfortunately, her head was stuck in front of a post, and when I put one hand on each side of her head to free her, Monet (a ram) came charging to the fence and rammed my hands. The goat's head appeared to be okay -- probably because she had my hands shielding her from the ram's head and the post. My hands were not so great. One is swollen today, but I don't think anything's broken. It's really just a minor annoyance compared to how I really spent today.

Yesterday I received a phone call from a woman who was transporting our new la mancha buck from Texas. She said he tried to jump out of a pen and broke his leg. Margaret and I met the transporter at 10 a.m. this morning, and I took him -- Hercules -- straight to the vet for x-rays, which showed a spiral fracture. That vet wouldn't touch it -- said he needed to see someone who does orthopedic surgery. I called the U of I vet clinic and very literally almost fainted when he said it would be $2,000!!! I was short of breath, dizzy and seeing blue spots!!! I called an experienced breeder of 30 years in Texas who had seen the goat shortly after he broke it. I was hoping she would say that it really wouldn't cost that much, but she said she has been faced with the same difficult decision, and she asked the vet to just splint it, and she hoped for the best. The leg did heal for her goat, but her joint was immobile.

I did find another vet who said he'd do the surgery for $300-800, but he'd have to see the x-ray first. Mike encouraged me to take in the x-ray and at least get a definite prognosis from him and a definite price. So, around 2:00, Margaret and I headed to Ottawa, which is an hour away. We left the goat in the truck and took the x-ray into the office. After a short wait, the vet looked at the x-ray and said he could splint it. I wanted to hug him! He said the fracture goes into the hock joint, so there is the possibility of arthritis in that joint, which means it would get stiff, and he wouldn't be able to bend it. There is also another possible problem. The break is very close to a growth plate, and if it was damaged, he said that leg would not grow any longer, regardless of whether he did surgery or simply splinted it. We opted for the splint, and an hour later we were on our way home.

That's the crazy thing about living out here. When I wake up in the morning, I frequently have no idea how I'll be spending the day. Of course, everyone has unexpected things happen, but they seem to come far more frequently out here than in the burbs. I certainly did not expect to be driving all over the place with a young la mancha buck today.