My friend Pam DeMott is a missionary that runs a home for girls in Honduras. It has been many years since I went down to work there but I remember my adventure fondly. Before she and her hubby took off to Honduras, we were freinds and goat lady buddies in south Georgia.
This morning, she had a mild crisis and needed my advice. A young doe kidded with no milk and no colostrum. The province of Honduras where she lives is not known for it's progessive attitudes so there is not much hope of finding any one with frozen colostrum on the frontier. The kid's chances of survival are not good but now we know that she needs to add powdered colostrum to her shopping list for her next trip stateside. She is still going to try to get as much as she can from the new mama and at least give it a good hard try.
If you would like to see more about her adventures, she does have a blog.
www.myhonduranhome.blogspot.com/
My goats are all looking marvelous. I will begin to supplement them with a small amount of grain in the next couple of weeks. Our neighbor dropped off a big bale of hay that his cows would not eat. My does all jumped right on it and wiped it out in about 4 days. It was a wheat straw/ lespedeza mixture. They wasted much of it because I didn't have a hay ring to put around it but they had a marvelous time playing "Queen of the Mountain" on it. Even the heifer calves in that pasture nibbled on it some. I told him that I wasn't sure what the problem was with his cows but he was welcome to dispose of anymore bales like that at our place....
I have been keeping both bread makers going pretty regularly in the kitchen. My boys LOVE homemade bread and we are really pinching pennies these days.
Holly is improving daily and is giving somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 gallons a day. Not alot by dairy standard but enough for our needs and it still works out cheaper than buying milk.
Speaking of dairies, I have not heard anything else about filling in for the folks with the big dairy. I am hoping that means that her father has improved and they don't need me. If I haven't heard anything in a day or two, I'll give them a call. Maybe, they found somebody else..... that would not offend me at all.
Noel is getting prettier by the day. We only milk her in the mornings and I didn't plan on that. She gets very full if we skip milking and is uncomfortable. We are not pushing her for milk production but I think we will just keep thing as they are for now. She is getting more personality and begining to act as if she owns the place. If we are not fast enough opeing the door at milking time, she will bang on it until we do. She used to rush right out as soon as we finished up milking but now she stays until her pan is licked clean and will even try to con us into giving her a little more. I pet her and brush her while she is in the barn. She is settling down but still not entirely comfortable at the close contact. We keep saying that we HAVE to get her halter broke while she is still on the small side.
I have enough milk this morning that I am going to start some soft cheese.
The roosters are still waiting for me over at the barn. I am going to seperate off about 5 of them tonight and butcher them tomorrow
This is what I have to look forward to this afternoon:
This boy insists on going hunting but he has the attention span of a gnat. The good thing about this hunting place is we get to use this really fancy blind. When you pull up the plexiglass shooting flaps, it really muffles the sound. They are also tinted so the deer can not see the movement in there either. Not only does this help because he is squirmy and not quiet but---- unfortunately for him---- it allows us to do school work while we are "hunting". He is in for a really big surprise this afternoon. Right after lunch, he and I are going to do some more target shooting. I am not good with a scoped gun but I am going to broaden my horizons and use Salena's cannon. Yesterday, I missed a nice doe because I was not used to the amount of "jump" from this rifle.
Not only are we butchering a few chickens tomorrow,but we are going to start processing Salena's does too.
Freezers are filling up! Butcher steer expected in late Febuary.
No comments:
Post a Comment