The Big New Fence

New Perimeter Fence

We finally finished clearing a fence line around our 10 acres across the road, and hired a fencing company to put up the fence.  It is a 4 foot 4x4 wrapped wire fence.  It took the workers about a week to get it done, and it looks good.  We are now contemplating turning the goats loose inside the new fence and just using the electric fence to protect certain areas of interest.  We are eager for the goats to do enough clearing so that we can determine our future housing site.  Jeff will be attending a two week cob building workshop this fall to get his feet wet (and dirty!), learning lots of good things about building earthen structures.

Timbuktu

Our herd has now grown by 2 for a total of 8 goats.  We bought two young purebred Kiko goats about a month ago. They were both sired by Katmandu, so we went with an exotic city theme and named the male Timbuktu and the white female Geneva.  Timbuktu is a nice big buckling, and we hope that he will throw kids that grow faster than the Spanish kids born here this spring.  There are a few possible factors that could explain the slow growth of the Spanish kids, which we can correct during the next kidding season, so that should help too.

Geneva

 Xander appears to be doing a good job staying with and guarding the herd.  The fence workers said that he barked at them a lot, as a good guard dog should, when strangers are nearby.  We've had to make some adjustments to the feeding system, but hopefully the "moat" we created around his self-feeder will keep the darn ants out.  We were able to find the other dog a new home, so we will probably get Xander a new girlfriend at some point.

The other new additions to the farm are the chicks that hatched out in June.  The Dominicker hen hatched out 11 chicks, and there were no issues with snakes this time, even though we didn't end up using any snake repellents.  When the chicks (or, as Raine likes to call them, peep peeps) were 2 months old, we moved them into the chicken house.  All of them transitioned well, except the one New Hampshire Red cockerel.  I found him dead under the roosts in the chicken house on the second day after the move.  I'm not sure what happened to him, but I've heard that chickens will attack a chick if it looks different from all of the rest, and that cockerel was the only light colored one of the bunch.  The chicks are now like teenagers, and someday soon the 6 or so males left will be ready for harvesting.  This year, we have started banding the chickens so we can tell one hatch set from another.  The 2013 chickens have green bands.  

The gardens are doing fairly well.  I had a pretty good cantaloupe harvest this year.  I was particularly happy with the flavor of this year's variety, but almost every melon had worm holes and/or blow outs (from too much rain).  Since they weren't saleable, we ate tons of cantaloupe and froze the rest.  We are looking forward to trying out a new cantaloupe ice cream recipe that we found. :-)  There were a bunch of pickling and canning sessions at The Haven this summer, using the combined produce from my garden and my in-laws' garden.  Fred, Pat, and I made green tomato relish, several different types of cucumber pickles, dilly beans, and green salsa, among other things.  Most of the tomato and squash plants are finishing now, and I am getting the fall garden underway.

-Annie