Kidding season has arrived!

Lily had her babies on Feb. 24: triplets - all boys. Unfortunately, one of them didn't make it. He was born weak, with a lot of fluid in his lungs, and he died minutes after birth. It was sad, but grilled baby goat is pretty tasty. Anyway, that left 1 brown kid and 1 white one - just like her kids from last year, except male. Zella kidded exactly 1 week later, hours after my mom arrived for her visit. Zella also had triplets, as she did last year: 2 girls and a boy. So we have 5 new kids frolicking around The Haven right now. It is still uncertain whether or not our other 2 does will have babies this spring as well.

Lily had some problems following the birth. She was very lethargic, had a somewhat hard udder, and was not producing much milk. She got treated at the vet, and she is doing much better, although we are still concerned about her milk production. We supplemented her kids' diet with bottle feedings for awhile, using milk from another goat farmer and Zella milk after she kidded. We will start separating Lily and her kids at night this week in order to start milking her in the mornings. Hopefully, she will be producing a sufficient quantity of milk for us.

We got a disbudding iron and disbudded the kids ourselves this year. Hopefully, we did a good job, and none of them will grow horns. At least, we and the kids all appear to have survived the experience.

The mudroom and the hoop house are full of seedlings for this year's spring garden. Paul has already put many plants in his garden beds already, and I have some kale and mustard greens that overwintered in my beds, in addition to the garlic I planted last fall and the perennial herbs. Paul has dug more beds in the front yard and enclosed the area with some chicken wire to keep out the rabbits. We also planted a couple of blackberry bushes in the front garden area and 7 blueberry bushes in an area we cleared on the other side of the driveway. Four redbud trees were planted along the driveway, and an oak and a beech tree were planted near the northwest corner of the house, which will hopefully help shade the house someday. Lastly, some flowers were planted too, including a few irises and poppies given to us by a friend, as well as hundreds of daffodils, which we dug up from a nearby cow pasture. We are still trying to figure out what to do with our remaining yard, full of red clay and erosion issues.

We have separated our Australorps from our other chickens, mostly because the rooster was getting too beat up by the top dog rooster but also to be prepared with hatching eggs, whenever a hen goes broody and is ready to sit on some eggs. The Australorps are our best layers, and they now reside back in a chicken tractor in the first pasture. The rest of the chickens are still in the coop house, which we recently built and is working out really well.

Lastly, I am still on schedule to hatch out my baby in mid-May. Two months to go! My big belly has started slowing me down quite a bit, especially as things get crammed up under my ribs, which is really uncomfortable and even painful at times. Ack, I wonder what the next 2 months will be like! Anyway, Raine is a very active little guy (although he doesn't feel so little sometimes), and we are all excited to meet him in a couple months.

-Annie