Over"Boer"d With Planning

 A couple of months ago, I got the great idea that I should plan to mate my dairy does to a Boer buck next fall. I need to breed my dairy girls in order to get milk but I don't have a need for the kids. I have had some bad experiences with kids (especially buck kids) ending up in bad places after I sold them or gave them away. (I have had lots of really, really good experiences with selling kids too -- don't get me wrong). So I wanted to avoid the mad scramble to find homes for kids by crossing them with meat genetics to get a meaty kid that I could butcher for home consumption. Ideally I wanted to buy a Boer buck to use, but a pregnant Boer female landed in my lap at exactly the same time I was lamenting only having one pregnant goat on the farm this spring. "Ruby" came to stay on my farm in January. She was pregnant. My plan was that she would have at least one buck kid that I could raise until the fall and then use for breeding before turning him into goat-burgers. My plan was also that she would be able to raise her own kids so I wouldn't have to bottle feed them. That part of the plan didn't work out because she came back CAE positive. Time for a new plan...

Well, I got my one buckling out of her when she finally kidded with TRIPLETS (two does, one buck). But the whole situation hasn't worked out quite like I planned. My plan was to bottle feed all three kids and use the buck for breeding. A local dairy had contacted me wanting a buck for their breeding too. My plan (there's that word again!) was to use the buck for my breeding and then sell him to the dairy in the fall. The two does would be sold as breeders or made into sandwiches.

 The first doe born was Vindaloo. She's a beast who loves to eat. She ate so much yesterday that she is very sick today. I am hoping she is okay by the time I get home from work.

 The next doe is Curry. I tried and tried to get her to take a bottle the first day she was born and she wouldn't have anything to do with it. She would root around like she was hungry but as soon as I put the bottle in she would spit it out. After three hours on my hands and knees making grunting and "baaing" sounds with her stuffed under my belly to try to get her to nurse, I hauled her outside and dumped her back in with her mom. She immediately ran to her mom's udder and began to nurse. She'll be CAE positive and have to become BBQ.

 Finally, the buck was born. Ruby left him in his birth sack and he got very chilled. My husband found him and thought he was dead until he went to pick him up and he moved. The buck was brought in the house and given a bath and then wrapped up in front of the woodstove. It took about 4 hours to revive him and get his temperature up to where he could eat. He was born a runt and had lots of extra skin. I think the other two kids took all his calories and nutrients while in the womb so he wasn't able to grow as big as his skin. He stayed in the house for a few extra days. I took him out to the barn but he got chilled again. I brought him back in the house and nursed him back to health. He's out in the barn now. He's still very small. I am worried that he won't be a good breeder because of his runt status. Unless he really starts growing, he will become sandwiches too.

With two does and one buck, my new plan was to keep one of the does for breeding as part of the herd. That plan faded when I flipped over each kid and counted their teats. The buck has four teats. Vindaloo has two teats but one is a bad fishtail. Curry has FIVE teats (see picture) - two small teats, two big teats, one fishtail on a big teat! Her udder looks like a tree branch! Both does having fishtail teats means that they are unusable for breeding. Fishtails are double orifice teats that are very difficult (often impossible) to nurse on or milk out which leads to issues with feeding kids and huge potential for mastitis. Any does with fishtails should never be bred. The buck having four teats isn't that bad. According to Boer goat websites, four normal looking teats on a buck is not considered a disqualification for showing or considered a major fault. Since he doesn't have to produce milk, his multiple teats do not exclude him from breeding. Unfortunately his multiple teats does increase the chance that his daughters may have teat issues so any kids from him should be slated for butchering and not expected to be used for breeding.

In conclusion, as usual my "plans" have become a shambles. This pretty much happens all the time so I can't say that I am surprised. I can say that I am awfully tired of my plans never working out. Of course, this hasn't stopped me from planning. My new plan is to eat my entire stupid Boer herd this fall. Ruby and her three kids will be butchered once the kids are market weight or as soon as I get tired of feeding them. I can't say what my plan for breeding this year will be yet, there's still too many months for things to go wrong to start planning on next breeding season. All I want to do is get through the spring and summer without accidentally killing any goats. THAT is my plan!!

BlamO! Kidding Season Starts and Stops in Under 24 hours!

Kidding season for me was a whole lot of crazy the past two days. I only had two pregnant goats this year so I assumed this would be a piece of cake kidding season. One goat was bought pregnant with no known due date. I normally have a rule about always knowing the due date so I don’t spend 3 weeks in the barn staring at a goat’s butt, but I thought that since I have been breeding goats for 10 years that I know the signs of impending labor by now so I can accurately predict when this goat should kid. Umm…. well, that’s not how it worked. Three weeks ago her ligaments softened and her udder started to develop. Those two things usually signal to the seasoned goat owner that birth is going to occur soon. Every day I would stakeout her pen and watch her butt for the slightest tail twitch or tiniest discharge. I would then announce to my family* that she looked closer than yesterday and could go at any minute. *My husband gets great joy out of harassing me about my prediction skills. 

The other pregnant goat was my senior Alpine doe. She was on her fifth set of kids and always likes to kid at the very end of her gestation – 155 days. For some reason I forgot this fact when I scheduled a meeting at Dartmouth three months ago. I remember thinking “Let’s have the meeting on April 17 because my goat will have kidded DAYS before that. She’ll be at day 150 on the 11^th”. Suffice to say, I did not go to Dartmouth on the 17^th! 

Lucy had her kids right on time for her – day 155. At noon she was nesting a lot and looking very restless. She went into labor at 5pm. She would push two times and then stop for 30 minutes or so. By 8pm she was pushing two times every 10 minutes. I got worried then because things seemed to be going very slow. She was pushing only a few times and there was no discharge at all. I got my hand in her and could not feel a kid. I waited another hour and tried to feel again, with no luck. Finally at 11pm she was pushing a couple of times every 5 minutes. At that point I could feel that something was coming into the birth canal. I could feel a hoof and maybe a nose. Finally some discharge started and we got down to business. As soon as the bubble appeared, I popped it and grabbed the hoof. The kid was jammed in tight because it was big and there was one hoof forward and one back. Luckily Lucy is a big doe so passing a large, compact kid was not impossible. I helped pull the kid as she pushed. The kid came out and was a big brown and black buck. 

Lucy immediately stood up and started to clean him off. About three minutes after the buck was born, while Lucy was still cleaning him, she squatted down and quickly pushed out a smaller brown and black doe. I grabbed the doe and got her cleaned off. 

Well, all while this was going on in one stall, the pregnant goat in the next stall decided to get in on the action. Ruby started to make a nest and lie down and grunt. I kept looking over the fence to check on her while Lucy was in labor. At one point I told Lucy that if Ruby kidded first, Lucy was FIRED! It kind of felt like a race between the two goats. 

Luckily Ruby did not have her kids that night. By the morning she was still nesting but had no discharge. I decided to head to work since she could give birth in one hour or five. I was pretty worn out from waiting on Lucy most of the day before and just didn’t want to sit in the barn for another 5 hours. My husband was going to be in and out of the farm for the day so I left him strict instructions to call me at work as soon as he saw anything happening. 

At 10am I got the call that there were three new babies in the barn. Two were up and getting cleaned off by mom but the third was not moving and not cleaned off. I rushed home. My husband took the third kid into the house and washed it off with warm water then stuck it next to the woodstove. When I got home the kid was very week and breathing heavy. It was a buck. I grabbed the other two kids from the barn and brought them in to dry them and warm them. They were does. One was chilled and needed to warm up. The other was up and started to nurse on a bottle within one hour. Finally the second doe warmed up enough to try to look for food. She would root around but whenever I put the bottle in her mouth she would not suck. I knew she wanted to eat but she didn’t want anything to do with that bottle. I worked on her for 3 hours before I gave up and took her back out to the barn. She immediately nursed on mom and mom was very happy to have her kid back. 

The buckling took a long time to get warm but he eventually started to eat from the bottle and move around. I kept him in the house until he was able to stand on his own. He got to go out to the barn after screaming his head off while I tried to make dinner. I don’t have much tolerance for noisy baby goats while I am eating! 

It was a whirlwind kidding season that took less than 24 hours from start to finish. All kids and moms are doing well!

I HATE HORNS ON GOATS!

It’s time for my annual vent-fest about dumb people who let their dairy goats grow horns. I hate horns on goats. I think all goats should be disbudded at the first sign of horn growth. This rule applies to all goats in my herd, even if they aren’t dairy. I disbud meat goats, fiber goats, ALL goats on my farm. If the horns are small enough to fit in the disbudding iron, I am going to cauterize them. 

The only goat who is allowed to have horns right now is Ruby, my Boer doe who I bought pregnant and horned. The main reason I bought her is because she is pregnant and I fully intend on keeping her kids, disbudding them, and eating her at the first chance I get in order to rid my farm of her horns. 

I see so many ads on Craigslist and Facebook this time of year with perfectly good goats for sale but with perfectly awful horns. There have been so many good goats that I have been interested in buying that I won’t touch with a 10 foot pole because they are not disbudded. I think it is a disservice to the entire goat community to unleash horned goats on the unsuspecting public.

This week I was shocked to open my new parenting magazine and see an article on “10 Great Places To Take Kids” with the huge first page picture of a cute child holding a baby goat while a very large, VERY HORNED goat loomed in the background in a very ominous pose. The picture was taken at some fancy petting zoo / agro-tourism place. I couldn’t believe that a place like that would allow random children to play openly in a pen full of horned goats! There was another picture with the article of a toddler playing with some horned younger goats. She was petting one but the other goat was up on its hind legs in full “I am going to butt you in the belly with my sharp little horns” mode. Both goats horns’ were short (because they looked to be young goats), but pointy enough and sticking up enough to be a very serious hazard for a toddler. I can’t imagine the tourist place’s insurance company would be very happy to learn about the dangers of keeping goats with horns, especially in a situation where the random public are allowed in close contact with the animals. 

I have no love in my heart for goats with horns. You can give me every excuse in the book for why you would allow a goat to keep its horns, but I don’t buy it. People will say, “Oh, but horns are natural!” To that I say, nothing we do in farming is “natural”. We take goats out of their natural environments in the hills and valleys of Europe and plunk them in a stall in a barn. We limit their normal territories from acres and acres of free space to a 20’X50’ paddock. We take their kids and milk them twice a day for 10 months a year. Nothing about this is what a goat has evolved to do “naturally”! 

Then people will say, “Horns are for protection from predators”. Well, if you think about it the most common predator of a goat is usually your dog or your neighbor’s dog. I have heard very few stories of goats being eaten by coyotes, wolves or mountain lions, but I have heard thousands of stories of goats being torn apart by Lassie and Rover. I have NEVER heard of a story where a goat was able to fend off an attacking dog by using its horns. If a dog is hell-bent on killing a goat, it will not be deterred by horns. Dogs prefer to chase their prey to exhaustion and then strike the belly or neck area, basically eviscerating the animal alive. Horns don’t help much in this situation because unless the goat is willing to attack the dog head-on until it is dead, the dog is not going to give up the potential for a kill. And in the wild (nature), most of the herd defense is done by the dominant buck goat. He is in charge of fending off predators and protecting the herd. He is prepared to fight a predator head-on and kill to protect his herd. In farming, where do we put our buck goats? They are usually sequestered far from the female herd in a small space of their own.  I have never heard of a dairy goat owner running a mature buck goat with his does all the time, year round. 

After this I hear “Horns are used for temperature regulation so a goat doesn’t overheat”. WTF? If this was true then all horned goats would have froze to death in the Swiss Alps a long time ago. If horns are so full of blood vessels that they dissipate enough heat in the summer to keep a goat cool, then wouldn’t horns be an extreme heat loss problem in colder climates during the winter? Wouldn’t you hear northern farmers expounding on the necessity for disbudding in order to keep your goats warm in winter? I have yet to hear that.

Oh, then comes the “But I don’t want to hurt my baby goats by burning their horn buds with a red hot iron”. I say “GROW A SET!” Disbudding a baby goat is a 20 second procedure that does not result in long term pain. Every baby goat I have disbudded has returned to normal activity and energy levels within minutes of disbudding. I have seen long term pain and even death result from horned goats being injured by their horns or by other goat’s horns. I have seen goats gore each other with their horns. This was a fatal situation where one of the goats had to be put down. I have seen horned goats beat each other bloody with their horns. I have heard of multiple stories of goats getting their horns stuck in fences and either dying from exposure or dying from the stress of struggling to get free. Goats have hung themselves from feeders and fences with their horns. These problems from allowing a goat to grow horns sound like a hell of a lot more pain and distress than a 20 second round of disbudding. 

So please everyone take the time to disbud your baby goats this year. If you do not have the equipment or cajones to do it, find someone who does. Everyone in my area knows that I have a disbudding iron and I travel to disbud for other people. I have no problems with making a trip to someone’s farm to disbud their kids at any time. I get so mad when I see perfectly good goat kids for sale this time of year who have been ruined by keeping them horned.

Shut up about the snow already!

March in the Adirondacks is ubiquitous for two things: snow, and people complaining about the snow. It snows a lot in March in the mountains. March is one of the wetter months of the year and typically still well below freezing which equals snow storms a plenty. Unfortunately March gets a bad rap because it is a snowy month in a long line of snowy months. Some years it starts snowing in October and doesn’t stop until May. For most of the US, March signals flowers and sunshine. People start getting their gardens ready and are doing Spring clean-up outside. Not here. Nope. Here we are still shoveling and still salting the ice. And we have two more months of this by the time March rolls around. It doesn’t technically look like Spring around here until May. And even that is anti-climactic because “Spring” in the Adirondacks is also known as “Mud Season”. It’s not flowers and sunshine, that’s for sure. It’s boot sucking mud and car killing pot holes. I always joke that Spring in the Adirondacks is actually Fall in reverse. We don’t get those lovely days of birds singing and flowers blooming. We just get the snow melting and the leaves coming back out on the trees. Fall in reverse… Not very spectacular…. 

People like to complain about the March snow. I am always surprise when native Adirondackers do it because you think they would be prepared at this point for two more months of winter. I am not a native Adirondacker and I love the March snow. It’s the perfect snow! There’s so much you can do with the packy, wet snow in March that it is very useful. Here are some examples:

1.       Clean dirty chicken eggs – take a dirty egg and rub it with some fresh snow. The chicken poop and dirt comes right off.

2.       Clean water buckets and food bowls – Rub a handful or two of snow inside any buckets or bowls to be clean, then swish out with fresh water. Works great!

3.       Rejuvenate throw rugs – Drag your dirty, dusty throw rugs outside and lay them in the snow upside down. Stomp on them to smash them into the snow. Pick up the rug and move to fresh snow and repeat until the stomped snow is clean and the rug is not dirty anymore. 

4.       Milk cooler – I love milking goats in March because I can instantly cool down the milk. I just cover the milk bucket with a lid and pop it in the nearest snow bank while I finish the chores. I don’t have to rush into the house to cool down the milk. I can take my time and finish chores in a leisurely fashion while the snow cools the milk for me. 

5.       Leftover dinner storage – I don’t have a huge fridge so when I make a giant pot of stew, I have nowhere to store it unless I put it into dozens of smaller containers. In March I can put the stew out on the porch and not have to worry about it going bad (I do have to worry that the dogs don’t get into it!). 

6.       Cake cooling – March is a great time to bake a cake because you can cool it down for frosting by taking the cake pans outside and putting them in a snow bank for a few minutes. This also works well for any other types of food you have to cool down in a hurry. 

7.       Snowmen armies – Since March tends to be slightly warmer than the preceding months, the snow can be sticky and wet. This is the perfect snowman snow. It packs and stacks. It’s perfect!

8.       Snowshoeing and skiing – One great thing about getting to March is that it is finally light out longer in the evening. There’s time to enjoy being outside after work and after dinner is done. This is the best time to strap on snowshoes or skis and hit the trail. Plus it is warmer so you don’t have to pack on 10 extra pounds of fleece and wool to be comfortable.

For all of you grumbling about March snows, hang in there. May will be here soon! Meanwhile, you might as well suck it up and enjoy it.

Easter Baby Syndrome

If you cruise Craigslist or the classified ads this time of year you will see lots of ads for baby goats for sale starting at 3 days old. The babies are plentiful and cheap ($10 - $50 each). This is great if you are an experience goat owner and maybe you have some other babies from your own herd to bottle feed. Adding one more kid or a few more to the bottle feeding pile is not a stretch. Unfortunately, this is a terrible idea if you are new to goats and have never raised a baby goat before on a bottle. Baby goats are super cute and the temptation to go and buy a couple for $10 a piece is huge. But baby goats need an extraordinary amount of care in order to survive into adulthood.

Any goats under 8 weeks old will need to be bottle fed milk or milk replacer in order to survive. Bottle feeding a baby goat is not always very easy. There's a lot that can go wrong for a novice goat owner. Unless you already have goats or have a close neighbor with goats, the likelihood of having a fresh supply of goat milk is very little. So you will have to use milk replacer. Unfortunately most goat milk replacers are not actually healthy for baby goats. Milk replacers tend to be made up of all sorts of ingredients that don't include milk. These ingredients add necessary fats or proteins or vitamins and minerals to the replacer, but they don't always end up as a digestible form of milk. One of the things that makes goat milk so unique is that it is differently formulated than most other mammalian milk. It is easier to digest and contains different proteins than cow milk. It has a very high mineral and vitamin content compared to many other milks. This makes it great for using as a "universal foster" milk for most other mammals. Everything from calves to puppies can typically survive on a diet of just goat milk. The flip side of this digestibility is that baby goats are adapted to drinking this universal milk and don't do well on anything other than goat milk. It's very hard for a new goat owner to feed milk replacer and get it right the first time without major digestion issues and even fatalities.

The second problem with buying truckloads of young baby goats is that baby goats are all born with horns. There are very few naturally hornless baby goats in the world. Horns aren't generally a problem until the goat gets 6 months old or so. By that time you are very attached to your little baby but now she is a weapon-wielding, dangerous animal. Even extremely friendly goats can accidentally gore someone with a sharp horn. Most of the ads I see don't include disbudding (horn removal) at the time of sale.

The third problem is that there are a myriad of parasites who love to colonize goats under 6 months old. Experienced goat owners know kids are constantly plagued by parasite problems and have developed elaborate prevention rituals to try to keep the baby goats from getting sick. Novice goat owners typically don't realize how many parasites they are dealing with until the kids start dropping dead or get very, very sick. Parasites are nasty monsters that enjoy killing baby goats in order to reproduce and spread to other goats. They are hard to stop once a baby goat is fully colonized with them. The best thing you can do is to try to stop full colonization with preventative treatments. Parasite prevention takes a lot of knowledge and research to come up with a plan for your herd.

A final problem is a problem inherent in any cheap baby animals for sale. They are super, super, super cute! Most people have a very hard time passing by a pen full of baby chicks, or kittens, or baby goats without stopping to "Oooh" and "Awww". And if the babies are for sale at a very cheap rate, many people have a hard time leaving without buying one or two or TEN! This creates a huge problem once the baby animals grow up and aren't so cute anymore. Add to that some less than desirable personality traits that tend to surface as a baby goat gets older, like fence jumping or head-butting, and you have a recipe for disaster. For every one ad I see on Craigslist in March for baby goats for sale, I see three ads in August for 6 month old goats for sale because the owners realized they aren't ready for adult goats and all the hard work they require. I call this the "Easter Baby Syndrome". It's when people start feeling springtime in the air and they go out and buy baby chicks or baby bunnies or baby goats because they are small and super cute. Fast forward to 6 months later and the landlord is pissed you have three goats in your bathroom and you find out your town has a "no chickens" rule and your kid hasn't cleaned the rabbit cage in 5 weeks. Now you are stuck trying to find a home for these animals. No one wants them because they aren't cute anymore so you give them away to anyone who shows the slightest interest.

I don't approve of selling baby goats before they are weaned unless it is a personal sale to another goat owner who is aware of what they are getting into. I don't approve of over-producing baby goats and not being ready to raise them until weaning. I know many dairies dump baby goats (especially males) because they need the milk and don't need the kids but they should have a more responsible plan in place to dispose of unwanted kids.

The PLAN!

This is the plan for 2013 for the farm and garden and such. I like to plan stuff, especially this time of year when there is lots of sun and warmer temperatures but still 12 friggin' inches of snow on the ground so you can't do anything with the buildup of new found energy, except make plans. My plans have ways of not working out all the time (um, you have read this blog before, right?!) but I still can't help myself get all excited as new plans start popping into my head. Sometimes I even try to believe that if I think of a plan and then write it down, it might actually come true. Probably not, but anyway, here goes...
The Farm PLAN:

Goats - I have finally mashed it into my brain hard enough to realize that I can only keep FOUR adult goats. Four goats may barely qualify as a herd for some people, but that's all I can manage with the size of my barn and the length of my patience. Right now I have six adult goats and I am losing my marbles over it. Two of the six are pregnant and I have no where to go with the kids when they come. If I had four goats I would have one pen free for the babies. But with six goats, I have no pens free for anything. So I decided to get rid of two goats this week. I was originally thinking of trying to dump find good homes for my two oldest Alpine does.

One of the does is pregnant and I really, really need her milk this year to make soap and feed her kids. She can't leave the farm until at least the fall so planning to get rid of her won't help out the immediate situation at all. The other doe is retired from breeding due to being a 9 year old, super high production, mastitis prone, large uddered, hard to milk beasty. She's been my solid herd queen for 9 years and I love her dearly but I am not set up to be a nursing home for old goats who can't contribute to the farm anymore. I know this sounds harsh but it's the truth. I thought about butchering her but realized that she doesn't have enough meat on her to justify the time spent processing her myself, nor the money spent sending her somewhere for someone else to do it.

At first I was thinking that if I could find an adoptive home for the old goat and then sell the other Alpine in the fall after milking season was over, that would be a good plan. But then I got to looking at my younger does who I was planning on keeping for next year's breeding. The one is a Saanen doeling that a friend gave me. She is huge and gorgeous and should be a spectacular breeder and milker. The other is an Alpine doeling who is the daughter of my 9 year old Alpine. She has gorgeous coloring but unfortunately never filled out they way she should have. At one year old she should look like the Saanen with a long, straight back and good flesh to her. Instead she short-backed and frumpy. I keep waiting for her to lengthen out and start looking like a dairy goat, but she hasn't yet. Comparing the Saanen and the Alpine side-by-side is a painful exercise in what not to look for in a dairy goat. It finally dawned on me that selling my older bred Alpine who has a great udder and dependably gives birth to healthy kids, for the sake of this younger goat who doesn't look very promising, is a stupid idea. Why sacrifice the known for the sake of the unknown?

Thus both the 9 year old Alpine and her yearling daughter found themselves listed on Craigslist this week. I was shocked delighted to get a call that night from someone who wanted both of them. The guy raises and trains LGDs (Livestock Guardian Dogs) in the form of Newfoundlands and Great Pyrenees. He has one goat but wanted to get a few more to help with the training. He is not necessarily interested in breeding the goats but doesn't mind if that is a possibility. It sounds like an amazing fit for a retired goat and a frumpy yearling.

This means that my herd will soon consist of one pregnant Boer goat, one pregnant Alpine goat, one wethered Angora, and one yearling Saanen doe. The Boer goat is part of my new plan. She was purchased this winter with the hope of producing a buckling that I can use for breeding to my dairy girls in the fall. I have decided that I don't want to produce kids for selling or for my own herd proliferation. There is a huge goat community in this area with tons of really dedicated dairy goat producers within two hours of my farm. I don't need to be flooding the market with my piddly kids. Also I can save myself a ton of hassle by just buying new breeding stock when I need it instead of working so hard to produce kids who may or may not amount to anything by weaning time. I will still have kids each year and give them the best care, but the pressure will be a lot lower because I will be producing meat kids for butchering and not production kids for milking. I won't have to worry as much about conformation or shape or even CAE, for that matter, because they will all be going into the freezer in the fall. I much prefer eating my kid goats over struggling to find them good homes and then hoping that those homes will work out for them in the long run. After a few years of seeing goats, wethers especially, neglected and mistreated, I would really prefer to know where my little male goat kids have found a final place to stay (IN MY BELLY!).

Garden - My garden is kind of an inside joke at my house. I am the laziest gardener in the history of gardening. I don't weed, I refuse to thin plants, I don't usually remember to water the plants, and I much prefer to buy stuff half grown from the local greenhouse than ever try to start stuff from seed myself. I just plop the plants or seeds in the dirt and wish them luck. The one thing I am diligent about is mulching. I use my dirty goat pen bedding for mulch on my garden. Add this one to the lazy list though, because I mulch my garden because it is easier to dump the manure in my garden than in my manure pile. I don't really care what the beneficial effects of mulch hay are for my garden plants but I really get excited over the beneficial effects on my back of dumping the stuff in the garden versus my hard to get to manure pile.

This year the plan is to get slightly more professional in my gardening. Last year I had a great garden that grew crazy amounts of stuff with very little effort on my part. The problem was that the deer and woodchucks gained more benefit from the garden than I did. After the "Great Carrot Debacle" of 2012 where the deer actually dug up every single one of my carrots from all three rows, I have decided to buck up and buy some dedicated garden fencing. I am going to get a roll of PoultryNet PLUS from Premier Fence. I use their ElectroNet for the goats and totally love it. It's electrified netting fence that is very easy to move and manipulate but it runs about 3000 volts through it so the goats do not even test it. The PoultryNet PLUS has smaller holes than the goat fencing and it has the posts closer together to prevent sag. It comes in shorter lengths than the goat stuff so I can get a piece that will fit perfectly around my garden. And I now don't need the solar fence charger for the goats since I bought the "Zap-o-matic" Zareba 100-mile shock-your-socks-off plug-in charger for the goat fencing last year. I can put up the garden fence and hook it to the solar charger and hopefully not have to worry about deer or woodchucks again.

The other reason for getting the fencing for the garden is that I can put the chickens into the garden area in the spring and leave them there for a few days. They don't normally venture all the way to the garden when they are free-ranging so if  I put up a fence, throw a dog house for shelter in there, and stick the chickens in, they can stay in there and prep my garden for planting while being safe from the resident foxes who live across the street (yet another reason the chickens don't go to the garden now. I don't let them free-range a lot because foxes think free-range chicken is a great meal!).

Speaking of chickens, I hope to upgrade the chicken pen a little this spring. I found a great idea on the internet a few months ago where a guy took some 2X4s and made frames and then put hardware mesh over the frames and laid them down in his chicken runs. Then he seeded under the frames with grass seed. The grass seed grew protected under the frames. Any grass that grew out of the top of the frames was eaten by the chickens but the chickens could not get to the seeds and destroy them. Anyone who's kept chickens in the same run for a few months knows that nothing escapes the chickens and is allowed to grow under the watchful eyes of 10 hungry hens. My chicken run is currently a bare dirt pen with not a speck of green at all (unless you count the green chicken sh!@#$). I happen to have a 2X4 frame with hardware mesh already on it. It was a leftover from a long ago dirt-sifting project. I had been holding onto this frame for years because I am not one to toss out perfectly good pieces of wood or hardware mesh. So this spring the used dirt-sifter will become my new chicken grass grower. I can't wait to get the stupid dirt-sifter out of my barnyard help the chickens have something fun to eat!

So that's the PLAN. Now that I have written it down, this means it must come true, right??! I'll keep you posted!!

T.M.D.G.

I am suffering from a strong case of T.M.D.G. (Too Many Darn Goats). This is a seasonal disorder that strikes goat farmers small and large in the fall and the spring of the year. The disease comes on gradually during these times of year, but illness can be induced at any time by the addition of one or more animals to the goat herd. The symptoms include:

Dizziness - while trying to count all your goats

 Nausea - when looking at the feed bill

Anxiety - about hoof trimming and vaccination days

Increased heart rate - during pen cleaning

Unexpected weight gain – from drinking all that extra goat milk

Unexpected weight loss – from chasing new additions around the pastures

Knee or back pain – while moving all those hay bales to feed the goats

Headaches – from trying to figure out where to put all your goats

Symptoms can be alleviated by the subtraction of one or more goats from the goat herd. Also applications of large sums of money tend to provide temporary relief through building a bigger barn or more goat houses. The only permanent cure is the removal of all goats from the farm.