Anniversary continued...

Like I said before Yesterday marked the 2 year anniversary of the creation of this blog. It was started the day after our offer was accepted on  the Acreage. The first post is Here. And Here is yesterdays post re-capping our first year.

Which leads us to 2010.

We went into it with an attitude that was kind of similar to get serious or go home. We were determined to add more animals and have a much more "farm" attitude the second year. (Most of these pictures have links to the blog post about them)

The Spring of 2010 marked Nathan's first Rodeo. He rode his first sheep at a Bull-a-rama, and was the greatest Mutton buster ever. He got to meet some real cowboys behind the chutes and this one let him check out the real gear.

We bit the bullet and order 25 baby chicks. That was an experience of trial and error. We definitely learned a few things stumbling our way through a first season of chickens.

We had another bird move in about the same time. The fact that she would so fiercely defend her claim on the hay bale lead us to believe she was sitting on a nest.

We had lots of outdoor meals this year been campfires and tent picnics with the boys. As well as lots of pool time in the summer months.

We started a bunch of seeds indoors hoping for better garden success. Nope. Garden #2 was also a gigantic FAIL.

By June we got better at recruiting help. Like my Dad who spent a weekend up here cutting down dead trees, or watching playing with the kids while Chris and I tackled insulating at least one wall in the garage.

Nathan did a second rodeo event in June. He was even better. Clinging to that poor sheep for all his was worth.

We eventually discovered that Mama Goose was in fact sitting on a nest, and when she just disappeared one day, it was over to the dug out with all the hatchlings in tow. We had a fun afternoon tracking them in the field and the pond trying to get a count of how many little ones were there.

By the end of summer we added our goats to everyday farm life. It's been an adventure getting the dogs and kids used to goats and goat antics.

It also lead to some farm lessons when we were outside with the goats and the cat caught a mouse in front of Nathan.

Most of our chicks survived and grew and GREW. We bought and constructed a chicken plucker machine, but in the end wussed out and took them into a processor.

The warmish fall saw us busy. We painted parts of the house, built, dug  and painted new fences from scratch. Sourced hay for winter feed. Painted and insulated barns.

And as the snow began falling we learned some hard lessons about hypothermia and goats. We heartbreakingly fought for and eventually lost one of our favorites. Added another just to lose him too.
It's made us reconsider a lot of things.
We have so many more plans, for how to do things differently in the years ahead. What types of animals we're interested in pursuing, and what we might give up on completely. But again this post is getting long. So I think I'll share some of what lays ahead and where we are so far this year in another post tomorrow.

An Anniversary of sorts

I've been thinking about and writing this post for more than a few days now.
Today marks the second anniversary of this blog you can see the first post here, I wrote it and started this blog the day after our offer was accepted on the acreage in hopes of chronicling our journey.

Rather than doing the Sunday Round Up I wanted to talk about the BIG picture. What we've done and where were headed (hopefully). To be honest it's not the greatest week to be doing a re-cap. Having Little One abort her pregnancy means we're at 3/4 of the hopeful offspring and milking ability that we wanted this year. Both Chris and I are frustrated right now. But we are working on some alternative plans. Like buying goat milk from another local producer and spending the summer experimenting with cheese and soap recipes anyways.

But before I go into a lot of detail about what were planning on doing I want to show you some of the successes and failures we've had in our almost 2 years here.

When all the snow melted in the spring we discovered that there was a lake in what was suppose to be a yard. One of our first major undertakings was jetting water from the yard to the field.
(or as you can see by Nathan and Maggie in the picture the major goal was splashing and playing in this fun new lake)

Next came A LOT of fencing. Poor Chris. The wire addition was an attempt to keep a tyrant two year old out of the dug out. Who knew it might also come in handy for penning in future goats.

We made an attempt at a garden (FAIL) with morning sickness it became nothing but an untended weed patch.

In May we started to add animals. What's a farm without animals. Most of these attempts were MAJOR FAILS as you can probably guess by the fact that only one of the above animals still resides here. (You can click on the pictures to read the stories.) or here is the stories of what happened to Mac and the baby goat

We added our first (only) piece of farm type equipment in July. Wow did that make mowing over an acre of yard easier.

We also made discoveries about the water cistern (like if the float shut off isn't working properly the entire basement may flood) leading us to make the acquaintance of small local creatures like this salamander, who thought the nice wet basement might make a good new home.

The fall finally saw us add a pick up truck. Nathan and I loved (okay mostly me) to take it bumping across the field to gather some firewood in the trees.

We also added Jasper to the mix that fall. Our second Pyrenees but really? our only official guard dog since Maggie is a little to city-fied, read sissy.

Of course our Biggest and smallest addition was the surprise arrival of Greg in 2009. On Christmas Day. He wasn't due until January. But what a sweet Christmas present and way to finish off the year.

Since this post is getting awfully long and crowded already I think I'll break it up and talk about our second year 2010 in a post tomorrow stay tuned...

Milk stand is starting to come together

Way, way back in November I mentioned that I had roped my brother the welder into making me a milk stand for the goats?

I'd sent him these plans from the scroungeman website. Which shows step by step how to make one with lumber. But since the welder was making ours out of metal I sent him a few other examples like this of metal ones available commercially.
And then left the designing in his more than skilled hands...

Today I got some pictures

Hurray the goat stand is starting to take shape...

Sparks are flying....

I'm so excited. I looks even more amazing than I expected.
From what I can tell only the neck/head piece are missing right now...

Hopefully it'll fit in the back of my Dad's Blazer and we may see it up here in the next month or so.

Happy Dance~~~



wrappin' it up

My Goat Hypothermia course wrapped up this week. As usual Kathy's course was packed full of great info.

I mentioned before that I'd sent off the kid coat pattern to my MIL. We're meeting her for lunch on Sunday, and she already has two coats ready to go. I'm excited to see how they turned out.

The next project up from this course is the kid warming barrel. I'm on the hunt for the supplies ( like the 55 gallon plastic barrel). but it's next on the to do list. I found plans on the net to make a similar one here if your interested.

Now lets just hope that the sweaters and warming barrel is enough and I won't have to use the resuscitation techniques I learned!!!

Sunday Round Up (Jan. 17-23)

Okay so I'm a day late with this one...

But it was kind of an interesting week around here.

* The weather finally broke, and we've seen plus side temperature a couple of days.

* The Goats are nuts for this weather, running, jumping and butting heads at being released from the barn (two weeks straight in there would probably make anyone nuts)

* Maxxie the Beagle has also spent the last two weeks cooped up in the house, we've been throwing her out the front door and she comes straight back after her business. Of course when it warmed up on Saturday I was leery about continuing the practice, but gave it a shot anyways. After 3 minutes when there was no scratch at the door I went to call her. She was on the range road down past the driveway. No amount of whistling or calling would bring her back. All of a sudden she took off like a shot right in the direction of the highway. By the time I got my boots on and ran all the way to the highway she was across it and in the Buffalo paddock across the road. CRAP! Someone was watching over both of us this time. She responded to my whistle finally, and thankfully there were no cars coming when she mad her mad dash back across the highway for me. Maggie had come out to see what all the commotion was about and actually herded Max back to the house. After getting knocked into the snow a few times by a dog 20 times the size of you running full steam to the safety of the house suddenly seems like the best idea "you've " had all day. So Miss Maxxie is back to going in her dog run during outside time. Beagles and their noses, shesh!

* Our land finally made us some money! Hopefully not the last. But we got a cheque this week for the seismic work that was done. It was good feeling to have some money back, since it seems like most of the time we just are shelling it out to live here.

* After a week of crazy kids I found its great therapy to take a 4 year old outside and chuck him into snow drifts. Watching him have to fight his way through snow is not only amusing but a great way to exhaust him! Yup, another mother of the year award for that one I''m sure.

* But the biggest news around here was the final demise of  Evil Cat. I hadn't seen her or even heard her in about 3 days. That's pretty normal around here, she seems to disappear as soon as the weather warms up, so I didn't give it much thought. But Chris borrowed my Van for a run to town, and before he hit the highway he realized he was out of windshield fluid. He popped the hood to add some, and made a bit of a gruesome discovery. Guess who had crawled onto the engine block to take a final nap?!?!
Hey after all the havoc that cat has caused around here, I'm not even going to pretend I'm sad. The only gross part about it is I'm not sure I haven't been driving around with a dead cat under my hood for three days. Ewwww.

* And my MIL is nearly done the first "goat coat" from the sweater pattern I sent her this week. Apparently she's knitting them in bright orange and bright green. No chance of losing a kid in the snow! I can't wait to see them.

A pattern and a confession

Last week I mentioned how I was going to sign up for the goat hypothermia class with Kathy at HMFF?

The class was up and rolling as of Monday. Today we received an e-mail detailing the pattern for Kathy's ever so cute little lamb/kid coats.
Which I promptly forwarded to my MIL

*Gasp*

Why?

This is the confession part...

I can't knit

*double GASP*

Yeah, I know. I have all these great plans that may or may not include getting animals like sheep, alpacas, and angora rabbits. Maybe even some angora goats.
All fiber animals.
And yet I myself can't knit.

Growing up I can remember my mother knitting me exactly one sweater. I also remember getting yelled at if you talked while she was doing this. "BE QUIET I NEED TO COUNT!!!"- My super crafty mother got right stressed out by knitting. In fact after she finished the sweater, I don't recall seeing her ever knit anything else.
This is probably why I have no idea how to knit.

I was absolutely in love with a Patons pattern  called Sally Secretary Monkey. I bought it and begged my MIL to knit me one. Which she did and I got got for Christmas. Awesome gift!

My favorite part is her little high heels.

Anyways, I can't knit. I've made my confession I feel better.
Okay not really.
One of my goals for 2011 is to learn, at least be able to knit a scarf by the end of the year? We'll see.
I don't suppose you could just raise fiber animals for the fun of raising the animals and barter/sell/trade all of the fleece/fur/wool???
Yeah, probably not really the point.

But right now I've talked my MIL into making me a couple of little goat coats. Because I've learned 2 very interesting facts from the workshop so far.

1) Kids can get hypothermia at any point in the year. They go from being inside Mom at a comfy 103 degree F. temp. to being dropped on a barn floor at whatever the temperature outside is sitting at.

and number 2 has nothing to do with why she needs to knit them for me, but it was an interesting fact about goat coats I thought I'd share.
2) They need to be made from Acrylic yarn. -because you can't use real wool. A baby animal can't smell even slightly like another animal to a new mom.
Something I totally wouldn't have thought of, pretty interesting huh?

The monstrosity, I mean dog house.

The monstrosity Dog house I mentioned in the Wood butcher post. I thought I'd post a few pictures to show you just how big I was talking about. And you can decide if I was exaggerating in anyway.

Can you see it?

Or is the better question, could you possible miss it in this picture?

Although it's lined with hay now, and with the weather dropping down to minus 20 C. most nights this week, the dogs are happy to have it.

My Brother the Welder rocks!

So my brother is a welder. A very good one. In fact he or my Dad will send me pictures of his work and I'm always astounded at his skills. He does everything from pipeline welds to work scary high up on new high rise buildings.

But
I've been saving a "special" project for him.

We need a milking stand.
The plan is to start milking the goats sometime over the summer, but short of tying them to the fence and hoping for the best there was no real place to start the milking.

I have plans for how to build a milking sanction that you can download for free from the scroungeman site.
{Awesome site BTW, I love the way he writes about his animals, and his crazy inventions too}
It's a free e-book that you can download here if your interested in building one too.

Anyways, I have the plans for the milking stand, and we were thinking of just building it from the plans. However as usual our to-do-list is about a mile long. And Although I think the plans for the stand are great, it's been rolling around in the back of my head how much greater it could be with a metal grate/mesh table to it.

So I hit up my brother the welder for a favor.
I sent him the PDF file and asked him to look at it and see if he could adapt the basic plan to make it how I envisioned.
He says he'll do it!!!
I'm so excited.
Of course when I talked to him on the phone this morning he was already talking about metal legs, and if the head piece needed to be wood, or how it could be machined to be made out of metal.
So I have no idea if it will look anything like the original plans or be a completely different beast all together.
But he agreed to do it for me and I released the reigns to his creative spirit. telling him I'd sent him the plans to just to give him the basic idea of what I needed.

So I'll keep you updated on how it turns out.

The Wood Butcher was at it again

It's not very nice, but I refer to my Hubby as the WOOD BUTCHER. He's certainly not a wood worker.

Case in point. Last year I told him I needed a garbage bin with a lid to make sure the animals couldn't get into it. Well. I highly doubt any animal could get into it, in fact I'm pretty sure a tornado would have trouble moving our garbage bin. Its massive. You know those industrial metal garbage bins in the back alleys of most retail stores? Yeah. We can rival that in size.
Scale, and Pretty aesthetics are not Hubby's strong points when it comes to creating his wood workings. Hence the Wood Butcher name.

That brings us to last night. Hubby had spent a good part to the day working on the interior of the girls goat barn. That afternoon he informed me he was headed into town for more boards.
Last night he looks at me and says "I think I'm going to build a dog house."
Me: "mmmmhmmm, did you buy enough wood?"
Hubby: "yeah, I think so."
So I just nod and let him start his planning.

He spends the next little while drawing up plans on a sheet of paper. Mumbling something on and off about how big is 3 feet actually?

3 feet? 3 feet is good, maybe this is a scaled down dog house.

Then he disappears into the garage saying he's going to construct the frame tonight and put sides on it tomorrow.

Well it's being started in the garage. Not outside, so it must be movable, another good sign right?

I finally make my way outside after about an hour.

And there. IS THE DOG HOUSE.

Not just any dog house.

but a DOG HOUSE!!!!

I swear to you this structure is 6 feet long. 4 feet wide. and about 4 1/2 feet tall if not bigger.

Granted we have large dogs- weighing in close to 100 pounds each.

But seriously, were you worried one of the Buffalo from across the road would be cold and lonely and might need to bunk with the dogs for a night?

I need to enroll Hubby back in kindergarten or something where he can take another run at that saying
"Bigger is NOT always better"