NotSoThoreau

Things are pretty quiet around the little place in the woods. Jeffrey is still collecting poles for building material. We are still trying to get an enclosed porch set up before winter gets here. We have help from a friend and there’s still time to do it.

We’ve got five baby chicks running around. Unfortunately, we lost the two older chicks. They had been nesting in the goat barn and they moved to an unsafe nesting place when we tried to set up a stall for the sick goat. We haven’t seen them since. So far, the new chicks are doing fine and getting their real feathers. If we can get them to move into the chicken house at night, they just might make it.

The goats continue to grow. We are down to four little ones. We are keeping both of Scamp’s kids, now named Pete and Repete. They need to be re-wetherized as it doesn’t seem to have been as successful as with Ragnar. We plan to start training these goats to pull a cart. Jeffrey has visions of having the goats pull us to church in a cart. It will be a sight to see, if it does happen.

No news on Jeffrey’s potential job. He may have a part time lawn care job, which would be okay too. It was sure nice to have the holiday off with him.

Jeffrey just may have a job with the state, tutoring folks. I don’t know the details yet. A part time job would work out fine. Most importantly, it would give us some additional cash to do some of the projects around the place. For one, we need a real fenced in area for the goats, with a new goat shed. We need real living quarters for us, complete with a driveway.

And my thinking now, is to build a yurt. I’ve wanted one for a long time. I’d like a solid wall style. Plans from the Yurt Foundation are inexpensive. So I think I’ll get those soon and start to gather more building supplies. We’ll finish the porch on the trailer for now.

I didn’t really intend for this to become a goat blog. So I’ll post today about what I always think about this time of year: farm work. I’ve done both farm work and office work. I can tell you that farm work is far more satisfying. It’s hard physically. But there is a rhythm to it. Things get done and are finished. You can see results. This time of year, pears would be starting up. We’d be doing bartletts. Packing pears is a strange art. You wrap pears in special paper and arrange them in a box based on size and weight. You need to be within two pounds of the correct weight or you get your box back and repack. You are paid by the box, so this matters. Pears with a lot of sugar weigh more so you have to compesate. You move on to anjous, which are the main pear crop. Sometimes you get something like forelles or seckels. Seckels are tiny. You can do 2 or 3 hundred in a box.

I’ve also picked apples so this would be thinning time. You’d go out and thin the apples to space them a bit. In a few weeks, you’d start to pick. You are paid by the bin, so you can work as hard or slow as you want. You learn to pace yourself. You’re out in the trees so there is some shade. If it rains, you don’t pick because the ladders are too slippery. Winter/early spring is pruning time. In the pear packing world, you do repacks, where you go through unsold boxes, pull out the bad ones and repack them with additional fruit. There are always breaks in the season, where you are on unemployment for a bit.

It’s so different from working in an office. You get to be outside, in the weather. You get to see things. No one is looking over your shoulder. You just do your job. You don’t have to learn something new every 20 minutes. Pear packing today is the same way it was in the 40s. Same thing with picking apples. The downside is that it gets harder when you get older. I stopped packing pears because my left thumb joint was starting to go. It’s common to have surgery on that joint. You slam pears into it all day and it breaks down. Still have arthritis in it.

There’s a big pear crop this year and the plant is just across the river from my current job. There are some mornings that I want to just drive to work there and see if my body can still take it. I can’t, of course. I’ve got a land payment to make that I can barely afford with my tech job. But I would love to sink back into that rhythm again.

This is Laverne.

She is our latest goat. She is eight years old. She looks like she has been photoshopped and stretched. I think she is about six inches in width. Anyway, she was free, so we thought we would see if we could get a few kids from her before she passes on. She is a Toggenburg/Nubian cross, but looks Nubian to me. We thought she might be well behaved, but she wound up on the rope due to some mishaps yesterday. I think I am going to need a coat for her as she seemed cold this morning. She is reported to be a good milker and usually has triplets. She seems happy with the amount of browse we have, as she came from the east side where it was pretty slim pickins’. She sort of reminds me of Granny Clampett.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the same day I posted this picture, Laverne came down with pneumonia. We had to put her down the next day.

I was late re-registering this domain, so things were down for a few days. I will try to find time this week to upload the latest goat kid pictures. We’re going to keep two. We’d already planned to keep the orphan buck, Ragnar. (And we are debating whether or not to turn him into a wether or keep him for a buck.) Well we also want to keep his sister, now renamed Lily. She is so affectionate that I think I would really miss her. So I’ll pay the balance owed so we can keep her. We are also thinking of maybe selling Bucko and getting a different buck. I want to go with milk goats and he is probably not going to bring good milk lines into the mix. Oh, and it looks like I will also be getting an old milk doe, probably next month. Not a lot of details about her except that she is Togg/Nubian cross and is free. Was quite a milker at one point.

I’m off on Friday of this week and am still hoping to put in a fall garden. I’ve got to clean out the goat shed to get ready for fall. There’s still time for fall crops.

We had something try to get into the chicken house last night around 2am, most likely an old male coon. We think they were using a hole at the bottom of the house to reach in and grab eggs from under the sitting birds. We had a Rock back in that corner that turned out to have no eggs under her after sitting for a month. We’ve had a turkey sitting there recently. Well, brother coon grabbed our rooster by the tail, the one that we’ve been working with all week to even get him in the house. When I heard the noise, I yelled out the window and could hear the rooster run off across the neighbor’s place. He turned up okay today with a few tail feathers missing. We went outside to check but couldn’t get a good light on the trees. I’d heard nails clicking in the maples above the house, so I knew he was still there. About an hour and a half later, I heard him come down. Jeffrey is working on repairs today.

I have the Fourth off and will likely spend it doing nothing. I have a large, grapefruit sized bruise on my left arm from Bucko. He startled as I was stepping across the fence holding onto his rope. It pulled me down onto the fence. Jeffrey thinks it looks like a tattoo. I would call it “Picture of my goat”. The little goatlings are spending less time with mom. We could easily wean all of them, if we had a pen to separate them. It will be good to see the does go off to their new homes. They will pay for Bucko. We will wetherize the bucks and likely keep the orphan wether to train as a cart goat. It’s looking like we will eat the other three. If you’re not willing to eat them, you shouldn’t raise meat goats. Besides, goat meat is tasty!

I’ve decided to make this site a blog only. I’ll need to update a few more things to have all the links working correctly. I just don’t seem to have enough time to do the work on the site that I’d like to do. So I can at least stay in touch this way. I’ve gone back to Blogger on the Spindlitis site and have my fiber and GTD blogs going again. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add some content there. I like having the Thoreau blog, but I guess I really don’t need it. Still, I’ll do my animal updates and random thoughts here for now.

So it looks like we finally have things up at the new web host! I’ll bring over the old posts as soon as I have a chance. Time to update the picture on the front page, as we are long past snow season. Still waiting on the goats to kid out and trying to put in a garden.

Lucky Pierre died a couple of weeks ago. Was fine one day and started to fail the next. We found him dead in the hen house. Still miss him. He was handsome and had absolutely no interest in attacking us. This is not a good time to lose a rooster. It won’t be long till the hens will start going broody. So the search was on for a new rooster. I picked one up from a co-worker. He was handsome, with a crest of feathers on his head. He did not enjoy riding in the car. We left him in a cat carrier that night and turned him loose with the hens the next day. Jeffrey saw him that afternoon, when the hens were drifting off a bit. We haven’t seen him since. Don’t know if a hawk got him or if he’s moved over to the neighbors.

This week, Jeffrey told me that he’d seen him and that he was hanging out with the hens again. And, one morning, I did see one of the hens come in with a rooster. Only, it wasn’t the rooster I’d gotten from the co-worker. It was a rooster that I hadn’t seen before. He seems to be moving in, spending the day with the chickens but returning to the woods at night. Sort of the phantom chicken of the woods. We are waiting to see if he will finally move in with the hens.

We lost two turkeys, an old broadbreasted hen and the tom, to coocidosis. Didn’t realize what was going on. I’ve medicated the others and they are doing fine now. We’ve decided that we can’t raise turkeys up here. They don’t do well in this weather. If I can figure out how to brood chicks without electricity, we’ll add more chickens and then more geese. I think the “more goats” will happen without much aid from us. Should start to have goat kids in a month or so.

We’ve finally moved beyond snow to mud season. We’ve been here before. The snow cleared off and then we got hit with more. But this time, it looks like spring is here to stay. The goats are shedding. Green things are starting to grow.

We’ve been pretty busy with church stuff lately. Jeffrey was elected trustee so he is now on the board too. We are trying to come up with things we can do that will benefit the community and also bring people to the church. It takes up a bit of our weekends, but it’s something we need to do.

The chickens are laying regularly and it looks like both the geese and turkeys are ready to start. We are trying to come up with some shelters for them, as we’d like them to go broody and nest. We’ve got some building plans for this year but that will need to wait until summer. First we need to put in a garden. I think we are going to try digging up a spot next weekend and let the chickens dig through it for a bit. It’s still too early to plant, but not too early to prepare. And I think I can finally uncover the big rosemary plant and find out how it came through the winter. Some of the bulbs I transplanted are about to come into bloom too.

We had more snow this weekend. When you think you are finally in mud season and moving towards spring, a foot of snow is a disappointment in a way. Having to shovel out the driveway again is tough to deal with. You start to wonder when it will end. Back when we worked at the nursery out here, it would do this to us every February. We’d be called in for a week, then snow would set in and it would be weeks before we called back in. You’d screw up your unemployment and it was a month before you’d get your first check from the nursery. I guess you could say that we weren’t too surprised at this snow. Like I told Jeffrey that night “I guess the nursery won’t be calling us back any time soon.” (They closed out the nursery many years ago. When they closed down the woods, there was no reason to grow seedling trees to replace the ones they cut.)

The goats are disappointed. They had gotten used to going up and browsing every day. There’s too much snow for that so they are stuck in the pen. We think at least two of the goats are pregnant. The nubian, Glory, is likely three months along. We think Maddie may be pregnant too. I’ll know more when I work on their hooves this weekend.