I froze today

Like thought I might die froze. It was about -2C outside. It didn't seem all that cold with the sun shining.
So I thought I'd take a run at finishing the paint on the boys barn.

Here are the factors I didn't take into account:
1) The barns are in the shade- no sun- not so warm
2) All the required painting was 6 feet or more up which means a ladder. Ladders are cold steel objects.
3) The paint cans are also metal, which gets really cold in your hands.

I did about 2 hours before the sun was setting. And came in not sure I could uncurl my hands from that wrapped-around-the-paintbrush-claw look I had going on. But the back of the barn and one whole side are completely Red! Yeah. I'm getting close enough, if I finish the front I may fake it and take a picture just to show you how much of a change there has been. It's not gorgeous but it's definitely transformed.

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"

Sometimes being one of the herd isn't such a good deal

We learned some interesting, and kind of hard (well hard on our son) lessons about Goat Herd Behavior in the last month or so.
In case you don't know every herd of goats has a a "Herd Queen". She is usually the oldest most experienced Doe, and tends to lead the herd around. The Queen also expects to be greeted first when you walk out to the barn, and when we start to milk she will have to be the first on the milk sanction.
Although we knew there would be a Queen in our herd we watched for a few weeks to determine who it was.
The obvious Choice was Hopper since she is the biggest. But Hopper is very unassuming and not particularly dominate.
Little One, on the other hand has been the biggest bully in the herd. She is constantly butting one of the girls. She is the same age as Hopper, but has always been smaller.
We monitored this behavior for awhile, and finally came to a conclusion. Although Little One is the most aggressive, whenever she started to bother Hopper, she would be put back in her place so to speak.
Hopper was indeed the Queen.
And we've been treating her as such.

The only problem is Little One still doesn't like this. She's a little social climber that one, and would gladly take over the queen title at any moment.
We watched this behavior and jockeying for position with a detached amusement. Until nearly a month ago.
We were spending quite a bit of time outside working on the barns, and Nathan (our oldest son) was often with us. He spent most of his time playing, frolicking, and leading the goats around.
One afternoon, I was standing only a few feet from the entrance to the barn door and he had disappeared inside with a few of the goats. I heard the sound of hooves moving at a faster rate and then Nathan yelped.

Little One had butted him, right in the stomach.

Since I hadn't seen the events the moments prior to this, I couldn't be totally sure if it had been provoked or not.

I separated the two of them and went on with my day.

Of course it didn't stop there.

Every time Nathan came anywhere near Little One she would lower her head and charge at him. She would even seek him out around and behind other goats.

Of course my Husband and I were there, and would immediately grab a hold of the goat and separate them so no one got hurt. But we knew this behavior couldn't continue.

So I hit the Internet.

My first search was "Goat Discipline" hoping to find a way to curb her aggressive behavior through some form of discipline.

Just so you know its not a very valid search in terms of goats it turned up many parenting discipline blogs because people refer to their kids as like a bunch of goat kids climbing on things.

So I looked up "butting" "butting problems with goats" and a few others until I ended up on many forms talking about how to handle a goat that butts.

The advice ranged
Many people suggested that once a goat starts to Butt you may have no choice but to sell it (although we were aware that may be the end result we were hoping to correct the problem)
Another suggested a much more aggressive approach- smack a goat across the horns with a piece of wood.
(We weren't about to teach our 4 year old to hit the goats with a stick)
The last piece of advice we found suggested that with Bucks you may have to pin them to the ground and rub their nose in the dirt to show that they cannot dominate you.
We also reread a lot of information on overall herd behavior.

That's when it all clicked into place.

We had been allowing Nathan to run with the herd. In some ways I think he was being adopted into the herd. This is where the herd hierarchy was coming into play, if you add a new goat into a herd the doe's will butt and carry on with the new addition trying to maintain or raise their status in the herd. Since Little One was trying to raise her status, she was butting Nathan trying to make sure she was above him in the social standings.

We decided that although we could keep dragging them apart the best way to solve the problem permanently was going to have to be teaching him to show her that he was in fact higher ranking than her.

Chris went into the pen with him and waited for Little One to make her move.
When she came over with her head lowered. Chris taught Nathan to grab her by the horns before she could hit him, and turn her by the horns forcing her head to turn back towards her body.

It took several attempts for Nathan to perfect the move, and for Little One to realize that she wasn't going to win.
Overall Nathan still has to be on the lookout for her when he enters the goat area. She will still try a sneak attack once and awhile if she thinks he's not watching. But this seems to have solved the problem.

It was hard to do, because you want to make sure your kid isn't going to get hurt. I also didn't want to have to sell her. We realized that we couldn't keep separating the two of them, if the problem was going to be solved, we were going to have to let him do it himself. Since she was treating him like a goat our intervention was not going to ease the situation. He needed to put her in her place and show her that she could not be above him in the herd. It was something we couldn't teach her for him. So we had to teach him how to stop her, and show her that he was in charge. I know it wouldn't have worked if he was younger or weaker, but it's worked for now.

The Hay finally arrived!

Yeah!

Our goats won't starve this winter. We finally got 5 huge bales of hay. and for only $10 more per bale they delivered it. Saving us a huge headache of moving it one bale at a time on the back of the truck. The # of trips would have sucked.

All 5 bales on the trailer

But to get the top bale off the trailer, Chris hooked it to the back of the truck and started to pull

And Pull

Until finally!

Ahhh the joys of not having a tractor for some Jobs!

The rest of the bales were easily just tipped off the sides of the trailer by 2 guys pushing.

And Chris manged to rock-and-roll them all into two neat little lines by himself after the guys left. So they are all piled neatly against the tree line in the yard.

Interesting Goat Links

I know my goat obsession is getting a little out of hand...Just for fun I've been searching around webland looking up different goat related items.
These are some of the cool links I found

California golf course using goats for natural bush clearing on rocky terrain. .http://www.golfweek.com/news/2010/oct/26/golf-courses-employ-goats-maintenance/

Incredible gravity defying goats in Italy
Article or Video

Love watching goat antics? you can watch 2 goats live 24 hours a day
Goatslive.com

and of course...I'm in love with the idea of fainting goats. If you've never seen a fainting goat you have to check out this Video. Although I would love to get a couple, I know I'm a little to playful to get a goat that has a reaction like this.
Yeah, I'd probably start doing something crazy like the Chuck Norris vs. Fainting Goats Video
I'm sorry even if you're not a Chuck Norris fan that's darn FUNNY!!!!

My top 5 problems with chicks

It's been just over a month since our chickens all went to their final resting place. Our freezer.
And to be quite honest I'm not really missing the work they created.
I have a good friend who bought a few acres of land down in New Mexico recently and is thinking about raising chickens next year. She's asked for my "expert" chicken advice on a few things, which has made me think about the things I wish I'd known before I jumped in.
Don't get me wrong I did do some research before I order 26 peeping chicks. But considering 26 chickens arrived and 18 Chickens are in the freezer, I'd say there was some learning curve there.
I read a lot of articles in hobby farm type magazines that lead me to believe that raising chickens was so easy pretty much anyone could do it. Shelter. Water. Food. not hard right?

Let me state for the record.

Chickens may be low maintenance for theses sorts of things. But raising them from day old chicks requires a little more finese than the basics.

All the chicks that we lost (8 of them) we lost as chicks. And after the reading and research I've done since I'm kind of surprised we didn't lose more.

So here would be my Top 5 things I wish I'd known before getting Chicks.
(and the things I'd do differently if we raise them again)

1) Temperature is VERY Important- Get a Brooder Thermometer.
Although I had the proper infra red heat lamps for the chicks, and raised or lowered them depending on how the chicks were acting. I've since learned that chicks have no ability to regulate their own body temperature for the first 2 weeks. Therefore~ The brooder house needs to be a consistent 95 degrees for the first week. You can then lower the temperature ( raise the heat lamp) by 5 degree each week until you reach 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Since I didn't have a thermometer I can't tell you the exact temperature I kept the chicks at. But I can bet between, weather. drafts and water it was not consistent.
2) Have an Adequate Brooder pen
Adequate doesn't have to mean expensive or even bought from a hatchery.The most important aspect to this is a Round chicken pen. Since chicks tend to gather together especially for heat, it's important that they can't squish each other or trap themselves in a corner. Many Hatcheries sell a Brooder guard which is basically just corrugated cardboard that can form about an 8 foot circle.I used my kids old plastic swimming pool and had I made one small modification (drainage holes) it would have worked perfectly. Next year I'll be drilling holes in the bottom of the pool to make sure that there is a way for water to escape instead of collecting in the bottom of the pool, under the straw. Which leads me to...
3) Chicks do NOT like to be WET!
I talked a little bit about my concerns of having wet chicks in a post soon after we got the chicks. I am absolutely convinced that being wet is what killed most of our chicks. We had a combination of a leaky waterer and no drainage. which meant that the chicks stood in (and ultimately played in) water in the bottom of the pool. Unfortunately it was hard to detect the water underneath all the straw until things got really soggy.
4) Seal drafts
Although this may seem obvious. Do everything you can to make sure your barn or chicken coop is protected from the weather outside. I thought getting our Chicks at the end of April would mean that the worst of the winter weather was behind us, and weather wouldn't be a major challenge. BUT. We got Wind. Snow.and Rain within the first few weeks. and the Chicken coop was simply not air tight around doors and windows. Allowing too much fluctuation in temperature. And drafts of cold winds on wet chick. Which inevitably is a bad combination.
5) Have proper waterers -and check them first
Our biggest downfall was having the waterer leaking into the bottom of the pool. The people that use to live here had left a couple of chicken waterers behind. Thinking that I could save some money on equipment, I used them without properly checking to make sure they weren't leaking. This caused the major issues that led to most of the deaths in our coop. If your using hand-me-down equipment, make sure to check it's in proper working condition first. From now on, I'll even be checking new waterers before putting them in a pen. At the end of the day, if a waterer doesn't sit level, or it isn't put together properly, it will leak. Most waterers are designed to stop flowing when they reach a certain level, but this function doesn't work if they are tilted, or have small holes (like ours did in the bottom pan) that lets water escape. and ultimately allows all the water to flow out at once.

I think Honestly, if I had been aware of some of these things, at least some of the chick deaths could have been prevented. If and when I raise chicks again, these are the things I will be doing differently. Some of it may seem like common sense, but I learned these lessons the hard way. By losing chicks that I probably shouldn't have.

The only other thing that I learned was...
Chickens poop a lot and its gross and amazingly sticky.
People will tell you chicken poop smells really, really bad. and it's true. What I didn't know, is that it has to be the stickiest most hard to scrub off substance I have ever seen. Be prepared to spend  (lots of) time scrubbing it off of pretty much every surface. We actually had an old snow brush that we used to try and clean all the waterers quicker and easier with the hard bristles (while the brush was long enough that you could keep your hands away from the nasty off spray)

Hey- by no means am I actually a chicken expert. But if sharing my short comings in this little chicken experiment saves anyone the hassle of having to learn these same lessons the hard way...

The additional pen

A couple days ago I mentioned the new fence that we got built this month. Although the only picture I could find in our archives was taken the winter we moved in It gives a pretty good idea of how the area and landscape has been changed by the addition of this fencing. Since both pictures are from relatively the same angle and approximate distance. You'll just have to ignore the obvious difference of snow vs. no snow.

[BEFORE]

[AFTER]

I am so excited about this fence. Because it effectively gives us three separate pens to rotate the goats through. And because it connects the 2 existing fields, the amount of time spent chasing the goats into one field or the other has also been eliminated. Finally it solved the little problem I had with getting a metal garden shed to drop in the front field (see: a hillbilly backed over my shed). The entire reason I wanted a garden shed in that field was to provide protection from the elements while they grazed the front field. Now that the front area of the girls barn is sealed in they can seek shelter back in their own barn instead of needing a separate one, if the gate is left open between the 2 areas. Or they can simply spend the day playing in this area in front of the barn and have the option of heading in whenever they need it.

The speed that the fence went up has to be a record around here too!

Hubby dug the fence posts holes in a day

(with the handy dandy clam shell auger I found at the flea market for $30 back in August)
And tapped in the posts that day. He let them settle overnight, nailing boards to them and constructing gates the next day. While he was constructing and hanging gates, as well as fixing some miscellaneous holes at the back of the new pasture (not to mention reinforcing the chicken run).I went wild with the whitewash and manged to barely stay one step ahead painting both sides of the fence in one afternoon and the next morning. As soon as the paint was dry he put up the wires and bah boom- New goat pasture in only a few days!

I'm a Little Cranky

I was all set.
My Dad had even agreed to come up for the weekend and babysit the boys.
I was heading to Edmonton for the weekend of November 12-14, for the 2010 Goat West Conference.
And was so excited they had speakers ranging from Vets talking about herd diseases, to topics on marketing goat meat, to coyote predation.
And I was totally psyched to finally be able to slip out of the house, and mingle with "real"
 goat people. I figured I'd learn about a million things.

Of course.

The Alberta Goat Breeder Association now called and said the conference has been canceled due to low interest and registration.

I'm crushed.

Goat-a-rific

 One of my best friends came to visit us in early October. It was "Uncle Noel's" first time up here, and he quickly fell in love with the charm of the place and it's friendly creatures. We even beer can BBQ'd our first chicken. To rave reviews!

Uncle Noel is a dog person, and made quick friends with the whole herd. Again, reinforcing to me that goats and dogs are so similar that most dog people will easily adapt to goats.

And Nathan warmed up (or tried to adopt) Uncle Noel's goat that he came up in. The sweet '69 GTO- also known as the GOAT.

Where did October Go?

Really?
It's been a hectic stressful month around here. I had some very sick kids 2 trips to the Emergency room within 12 hours kind of sick. And a husband who although technically employed seemed to be on "standby" and thus here all month. Although we (and by that I mean HE- to a large extent) managed to get quite a few projects done. The money issue of staying home and working only on the farm has been a nightmare.

I'll try and get some pictures posted of the work that has gone on. The most noticeable to the whole landscape of the yard was about 100 or so feet of fence that my hubby built and then wired in so we effectively have another goat pen. It leads straight to our "big" field out front, which not only means 3 pen rotation for the goats but also no goats chasing across the front yard when they decide they'd rather go on an adventure then head into the front field.

We also finished the boys barn, insulation, new wood, and about 80% painted. So at least its livable for winter. And obviously their pasture is all enclosed now.
The Girls barn still needs some work, but is getting there. It's comfortable enough for our first snow. but I'm not sure it's -40 proof yet.

Right now our big concern is getting hay.
Although lots of people have it for sale. We're finding a lot of people have no way of loading it. (explain that to me?- yeah here's a 1200 pound hay bale -good luck!?!?)
We've also realized it's going to be quite an engineering feat to unload hay bales once we get them here.
If I could go back in time...
We've learned since buying this place, that most people will write the current tractor into the farm offer. And I can't tell you how many times I've cursed us, for not knowing and not doing that.
As of right now, a tractor, just isn't in the tight budget. So although I'm sure we'll be able to secure hay bales and get them loaded. our adventures getting them off the truck may end up being YOUTUBE worthy!