Well, the time has come to start getting milk from our girls. That has been pretty exciting, and we now are getting around 1/2 gallon of milk each day.
Something odd is going on with the girls' udders, however. Each of them seems to have one high performing side, and one under-performing side. It seems possible that if they were both working at full capacity we would be getting 1 gallon of milk each day.
The udders also appear uneven, which is a warning sign of mastitis - a bacterial infection of the udder and teats. So we used our mastitis test on them today, and it seemed to come back negative. Which was a good thing, except it left us without an explanation for the unevenness. (Lily had tested positive earlier in this cycle, but it was good to see she tested negative today.)
We are going to treat them with garlic balls. Which is to say raw garlic (which reportedly has the capacity to fight infection) mixed with molasses (which reportedly has the capacity to get goats to eat raw garlic) and ground oats (along with molasses helps hold the whole thing together).
We already did that some with Lilly, which presumably is part of her improved status.
Also, we counted up our eggs for the past month (ours plus Paul and Terra's so we don't have to try to keep them separate). Our count steadily increased, and for the last two weeks we gathered 181 eggs per week. That's an average of over 2 dozen per day.
So those are the goings on here, we're also applying for a building permit to build a barn over at this place, and Paul made another garden bed over here yesterday.
Jeff
Something odd is going on with the girls' udders, however. Each of them seems to have one high performing side, and one under-performing side. It seems possible that if they were both working at full capacity we would be getting 1 gallon of milk each day.
The udders also appear uneven, which is a warning sign of mastitis - a bacterial infection of the udder and teats. So we used our mastitis test on them today, and it seemed to come back negative. Which was a good thing, except it left us without an explanation for the unevenness. (Lily had tested positive earlier in this cycle, but it was good to see she tested negative today.)
We are going to treat them with garlic balls. Which is to say raw garlic (which reportedly has the capacity to fight infection) mixed with molasses (which reportedly has the capacity to get goats to eat raw garlic) and ground oats (along with molasses helps hold the whole thing together).
We already did that some with Lilly, which presumably is part of her improved status.
Also, we counted up our eggs for the past month (ours plus Paul and Terra's so we don't have to try to keep them separate). Our count steadily increased, and for the last two weeks we gathered 181 eggs per week. That's an average of over 2 dozen per day.
So those are the goings on here, we're also applying for a building permit to build a barn over at this place, and Paul made another garden bed over here yesterday.
Jeff
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1 comment:
Lots of eggs! Great! Hope you find out what is going on with the goats' udders.
MOMd
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