Spring is comming!!

The weather is almost spring worthy here and we are so happy to see the snow and cold go. The farm is very very wet sloppy but it should dry out soon we hope. This is officially our first spring living on the farm and the receding snow means we get to start working outside again trying to clean the farm up. There is a never ending list that only gets longer but we are slowing working our way thru it along with working our off the farm jobs and trying to keep the animals as dry and happy as we can.

Kid/lamb Update...

Our house goat girl and my sweet little lamby maggie are doing great. Maggie is growing so fast now it is amazing you can can almost watch her grow. Tomorrow maggie girl goes back to the vet for hopefully the final visit and her cast coming off.Our house goat girl whose name is Deliha is so very friendly she is always running around after us and wanting to get pets and play. Here are updated pictures of both from today.

                 

And here is a picture of Greg playing with Deliha!!

In other news our twin buck boy goats are going to be 4h kids, they leave for their new home in a week or so. I know Phobe their mom is ready for them to go but she is being a great mom.

On top of that we have a friend of ours using some of our barn while he moves into a new house and gets new fences put up. So this is a picture of 2 of the triplets that Dear threw. That's Dear being all stand offish to the right.

I think thats all the news we have for now. We will be here on the farm battling the constant wet problem. Hopefully we can get the farm re-tiled this year and it will be much drier next year for us.

Kids in the House....

While it is always exciting to have goat kids in the house this year we also have our little broken leg lamb. I love this lamb so much, her personality is just so great and she is a fighter. We took Maggie(lamb) back to the vet on friday because her cast was getting a bit snug and she had an infection in both of her eyes that was effecting her eye sight. We did not know it was an infection until we took her to the vet. So now she has a new cast and get ointment in her eyes 3 timesa day but even losing most of her eye sight didnt slow her down at all. Here is a picture of her and her goaty friend with her new cast.


And here are some more random kid/lamb pictures because they are so cute!!







In other news we also traded one of our dwarf goats for a very nice Alpine doe. She is really a nice goat and appears she will be a great milk producer for us though she is a tad over weight at the moment nothing to bad.

Snowy Days

We were very pleased because almost all of our snow was melted and the weather was pretty warm for febuary. The animals were thriving and enjoying the warm weather and what sunshine we did get...then it happened. Someone did something bad because we were punished with a 12 inches of snow in less then 12hrs and vicious winds. We had to lock up the poultry for fear of losing them in the mini blizzards. Luckily that was a few days ago and we had two days in the 40s so most of the snow is again melted and the animals seem happy.

We have noticed a developing problem with all the warm weather and the snow melting. Our beautiful old barn is a drain thru barn which means it was smartly constructed so the water from the top of the hill where the corner of the barn starts, will run under the man door and thru the barn to the other end down hill. The walk ways are sloped in this direction and towards the gutters, at the end of the gutters there are holes thru the wall to drain the water out with tiling to send it out to the boggy area at the back corner of the property. This works great unless the tiling is old, unkept and collasped, then you get a lake outside the barn at the end of the cow ramp and a very damp barn floor. The floor being concrete is wicking moisture into all the animal bedding except on the old feed alley walk ways. So we have plans to fix the field tile this spring and to renovate the large tiles areas on the property that direct water flow to the boggy area.

Our property is very wet, compacted by the fact it is almost 100% heavy clay with very poor drainage and a small river more of a creek that runs along one side and thru the back corner. In order to keep our barn black water out of the creek the black water is diverted to a separate place in the boggy low corner of our property and the rain water goes to the creek. After we get the  water ways fixed this spring i have ordered 4 weeping willow trees to put in this corner to give the livestock some shade and suck up water since they do a good job at it. This will also provide some natural forage, perches for the poultry and the livestock will keep them trimmed nicely. The trees will be approx. an acre from the barn so no worries on the roots growing into the foundation and 3 acres from our well.

Lots of plans for the spring. Our broken leg lamb is doing great and goes back to the vet for a check up and likely new cast on tuesday the 7th. i did get my camera but my sd card has not arrived yet and without it the internal camera memory only holds 5 pictures. In the mean time here are some old pictures!!

And some newly hatched chicks because spring is coming!!!!