Spring? Time for goat kids!
Here's the video:
Violet had her first kids, two very cute doelings. Jeanne named them Peppermint and Lavender.
Cute kids!
Violet was a good and definitely nervous mother.
Meanwhile, Linc puttered at adding a hot water heat exchanger to the stove pipe on the cookstove.
I'm sure there are more efficient ways of using wood, and I do intend to find them eventually, but this 100 year old stove is going to be hard to beat. In the photo above, it's morning, and the stove is heating the cabin, heating hot water, cooking home fries, an omelette, veggies, making chicken stock, heating milk for processing into yogurt and baking squash in the oven.
We ordered 10 Indian Runner ducklings. Linc picked them up at the post office one morning, and put them under a broody hen, and removed the eggs she'd been brooding. She sure was excited to have her "chicks" suddenly hatch, but she'd panic whenever they jumped in the water dish and started acting like ducklings. She did OK as a mother duck, but we lost quite a few to a variety of predators and their tendency to wander off and get lost. Ended up getting a second hatch that was put under another broody chicken, but kept in a smaller enclosure until they were really ready to be out and about. Two from the first hatch made it to adulthood, and five of the second.
Whenever we had a spare minute, we'd put in a few more rails on the new garden fence. The green mesh fabric shown in the above picture is the old fence. The one will be slabwood on the lower half, and field fence (woven wire grid) on the upper four feet).
We also did some work on the irrigation system, installing an underground valve box for our garden takeoff so that we'd be able to use the system in the shoulder season without having things freeze and break.
Spring barn cleaning. We use a deep bedding method during the winter. We keep adding bedding throughout the winter. The lower layers start to compost and provide heat for the goats lying on the dry newer hay. This works well, but resulted in one huge cleanout job in the spring. We ended up using the front end loader to transport all that used bedding to the compost pile area.
It took five hours and something like 25 bucket loads to clean out that barn, forming these two enormous piles. Lots of mulch for the garden this year.
That's our 4" soil block press tool, and the resulting blocks. The square indentations are for 2" soil blocks to fit into. We start our seedlings in the 2" blocks, then stick the 2" blocks into the 4" once they've all germinated and grown their first set of true leaves.
Wow, we still can't believe that Roger Daltrey from The Who came to visit us. But, why is he wearing a skirt?
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