Humble Garden

Kidding Drama

Things have been very busy around here due to it being a long drawn out kidding season. We had girls who got pregnant over several estrus cycles so the babies were kidded out over quite a long period.

We ended up with 10 kids I think. 6 of them are female which we will keep (and have all been disbudded now) and the 4 males will be sold.

This brings us to something like 22 goats total, lots! We have been letting the babies nurse but tomorrow we will separate them and start milking. At first the milk goes to the babies and then we will wean them and have the milk for ourselves.

All the babies kidded out well and healthy except for the very last one (figures huh?).

The last baby was a singleton of average size but her legs were really long. Because of this the baby had been very cramped in utero so her fetlocks had contracted. What this means is that, as you can see in the photo below, her little hooves were forced back under so she was walking on her little tiny newborn knees.

This doesnt need to be a permanent defect and can be fixed by using splints to force her legs into the correct position and allowing the tendons to stretch a bit and begin to mineralize from the milk she drinks.

The following photos show how we made homemade splints from cut up milk jugs, rags, and duct tape.

Above you see the splint as we put it on the fetlock below her knee. We tested to see if it fixed the defect.

It didnt work out as I wanted because she was just bending badly at the knees. We put on a second course of splint, up above her knees so that her leg dynamics were more about using the hoof correctly.

You can see below that it worked out better with the second course.

After a few days we removed the splints to test her out. We found one hoof well positioned but not the other so we replaced that splint.

Above, you can see her lounging (she is a great lounger). She is very tenacious and stubborn and has a distinct personality. We named her Rosie.

Above, you can see Rosie nursing from her mom Spelt.

Since these photos we have been able to remove her last splint and now she runs and frolics and is growing like a weed!

Spring Cleaning

We have put in some new fencing and segregated the goats from their usual pens so that we can clear out all the muck. This will require disassembling the pens and using a tractor to rake out all the stuff!

Goats go psychotic and loco and get super angry if they get rained on so we have build temporary rain shelters during this time of cleaning. The one you see below is one of two, the second (not shown) is much bigger.

New Garden Beds

Below you see a panorama photo of our early spring garden (older beds on the right) that shows the tree clearing (background) and new raised beds on the left.

The photo below shows a closer view of these new beds.

They are amended with a LOT of llama manure and will be planted with a mix of perennial and tender annuals.

Planting has to wait until at least after this weekend because we are looking at night freezing and snow (sighs).

Meet Nibblet! One of our new LaMancha baby goats.

Our goats have begun to deliver their babies. We had 3 arrive yesterday alone. Sort of tiring! I have posted a Flickr slideshow below for your viewing pleasure.

To get rid of the tiny thumbnails along the bottom of that slideshow, just pass your cursor over the display.

If you can not see that, click here to go to that flickr set.

When kidding goes easily, its all fun and games. Problem is, there are always possibilities for things to go terribly wrong. If you have read this blog in the past you might have seen that we lost one of our does last year, see this post: RIP Wheatie, our sweet goat girl.

Well, this year, we had another trying time. You may remember Felicity, who we treated aggressively to save her life from a nasty illness. For details on that see: Listeriosis.

She healed well with a lingering twist to her head. That went away as she exercised and romped so that you cant tell from looking at her that she experienced these challenges.

She is a small doe, so is her sister Calliope. Calliope didnt get pregnant this year but Felicity did.

We could tell by the development of her udders that she was indeed pregnant.

One day I went out in the morning to check on the goats for babies and I find Felicity licking a baby that had been stillborn, definitely premature. It was very small and had almost no hair but was perfectly formed.

I took the baby away and all seemed well with Felicity other than her calling out and looking around. That maternal instinct is so strong!

The next morning my oldest daughter went to check and then flew back into the house telling me that Felicity has prolapsed.

Indeed, Felicity had suffered a prolapsed vagina and cervix. You can see what that looks like below.

I had read about how this could happen but I was worried that this mean that Felicity still had a baby inside, stuck.

As you might also know, we have been un- and under- employed for some time so we cant just call the vet, just not an option.

I do not recommend that you be the same way. You have to be really intrepid and have guts of steel to wing it. You have to always be ready to put the animal down if things go badly so that the animal does not suffer. I can not abide by suffering. We are all animals and I feel their pain like I do that of my human kids.

I knew that one can stitch the vaginal opening closed but I was worried about the possibility that:

• she could still have babies inside and stitches would be catastrophic if I wasnt there when she went to push them out
• i had not done this stitching before and I didnt have time to get trained by my goat mentor who was busy with her large herd and some 14 new babies being born A DAY

I also knew that sheep have a tendency to prolapse and that there was such a thing as a ewespoon – a device (shown below) that you use to reposition the vaginal tissues and then it is held in place until:

• the babies are born in which case the ewespoon is pushed out
• or the vaginal muscles retain the tissues well enough to remove this support

I thought it might be of use to show images of all this for those of you considering homesteading with dairy goats so that you can see the realities of these animals and the birthing process.

The following set of images might be disturbing to some. Please note that Felicity didnt seem to be in great pain (even tho it might look like it “should”). There are not many nerve endings in the vaginal canal and none in the cervix really. Same goes for us.

MOST importantly, Felicity healed and is quite back to her normal self now!

This fall and this winter I have been thinking about a greenhouse I would love to build. It integrates the heat of slowly decomposing hay bales, chickens, and two 2 foot deep, 16 foot long raised beds. I have to admit that for now, its a dream as I do not have the financial means to put this together for now.

A greenhouse that integrates the heat produced by chickens is something much talked about in permaculture thought. If you google a bit, there seems to be some doubt that people are able to make this happen. As I have not built and tested my concept, I can not make any claims. I think, though, that a lot of the doubt comes from arm-chair gardener types who do not know much about gardening or chickens.

The hay bales are seen in the diagram, making up the north facing wall. There is a gap between the bale wall and the first raised bed. This gap, 16 feet long and 2 feet deep, 3 feet wide perhaps, will be covered by chicken wire, forming a chicken run between the two ends of the greenhouse.

On either end of the greenhouse will be housing for chickens (perches, areas to run, areas for feeding and watering) separated from growing areas by chicken wire. The growing area above two raised beds will be under the sloping roof of the green house. My vision is for this greenhouse to supply us with lettuces and nutritious greens through out the cold cold winter here.

I thought I would share some of what little is going on here, in the depths of winter. I have also been snuggling on the couch with seed catalogs and generally trying to stay warm without feeling too pouty that the garden is out of commission for the season.

We are also watching our 9 pregnant goats, some of them are quite large now with child. I continue to mentally prepare for labor and delivery.

I recently made an arrangement with a local grocery store (owned in MA but a BIG chain) to get some of their produce scraps for our chickens and goats.

The majority of their scraps go to pig farmers who drop off big oil barrels for the lettuce remnants that the pig food trader/merchant/dude picks them up later.

I love that we can take something considered waste and give it to our animals.

They LOVE these fresh greens!

I love it all because it fits in with the permacultural ethic by using a resource effectively and in a humane holistic way – Free inputs.

In the case of the goats – the yields are manure, growing babies (9 does are pregnant) and later fresh raw goats milk!

Witness the goat-silly feeding frenzy.

Chickens LOVE the greens a whole lot too.

In the case of the chickens, the yield is manure, bug-eating, meat and eggs! Free range and very yellow yolked eggs!

Another reason I like this is that it knits our food production tighter into the local fabric. It also brings vitamins to our animals that they would not usually get in the winter. During the summer our animals eat tremendous amounts of leaves and trees in the case of the goats and endless bugs and grasses and weeds (and MY GARDEN) in the case of the chickens.

[I have cross posted this to Peaknix]

As a proponent of the global Transition Initiative and having been “Trained for Transition” in November 2008 in Cambridge, MA I have a certain worldview. (see Food for Hope: DeGlobalizing – ReLocalizing)

Transition is really about bringing permacultural principles to bear on the current and coming crises around the decreasing natural resources that are in our future. This includes Peak Oil and pretty much peak everything as wealth and societal energies go towards the resource wars and skirmishes and agonies as governments jostle for position in the bread lines for energy, water, food, and diminishing rare materials.

This downward slope is called the energy descent and the Transition Initiative seeks to PLAN for rational energy descent in a way that flows power and resources back to localities where people LIVE (called relocalization).

Its a HUGE thing, deglobalizing. When I first learned about Transition Towns back in 2007 it was this amazing idea happening in real life but in far away England. Transition in England is profoundly different in terms of challenges to here but it took a while for me to be able to articulate why.

Social safety nets. Thats the key. In the US, we dont have much and those we have are failing now or will be failing as the full brunt of the baby boom aging bomb hits it.

Ok, thats a huge topic, huge. I bring it up for one reason today!

Relocalization of food and jobs is a primary concern to anyone serious about making headway during this financial crisis.

Obviously, we personally have relocalized a lot of food in our back yard. Lots of you have also.

This past year was not a good gardening year and it wasnt the year that I thought it would be in terms of working with local community gardening.

We live in a “sparsely” settled area (for this region) and as such have not gotten to know our neighbors well, yet.

I think its important to, once you have gotten your backyard homesteading rolling, you should begin to get the food vibe radiating out and use it to make connections with neighbors so that food resiliency is about more than your own food.

To these ends, I have started a project with our neighbors.

As you can see in the google map photo below, our land is on the right (see box) and then the neighbors across the street, who have lovely pasture (which we do not, we have lovely cliffs!).

I proposed to our amazing neighbors to share a dairy cow (am aiming for a jersey cow – high butter fat) where we put a cow and her baby on their pasture and we tend and milk her. Both families will share in the milk and cream!

This knits us together as a group, working in concert for relocalized food of extremely high quality (we will drink it raw, neighbors will do with it as they wish).
The neighbors thought on it and then said yes!

I am looking forward to this project, will mean work but its so worth it.

We will reskill ourselves and the neighbors will also, as is appropriate for them.

I hope, also, that the idea inspires others locally to do the same. They might start with communal chickens or goats or perhaps cows.

I am positive that most of us can learn these things, its not rocket science.

Helping to mentor others doing this would be an amazing yield!

(Some of the contents of this post might be disturbing to the more gentle or delicate reader. I do not mean to offend you, please accept my apologies. I dont mind if you stop reading and visit other of my posts that are much less gory!)

Make no mistake, if you get goats, you will get your hands dirty, less sleep, more manure, lots of broken fences, some broken hearts, and some experience pretending like you actually know something about goat health and veterinarian practices.

If you are a long time reader, you will remember the excitement of this last early, snowy spring, when we had our kidding season. We lost one goat (RIP Wheatie, our sweet goat girl), gained lots of goat babies and some modicum of caprine midwifery experience.

I even got to reach into the back of a screaming goat momma, up to my upper forearm, to pull out what I was certain to be a dead goat to find it perfectly healthy and I didnt kill the momma either (was certain I would do that too). As I was holding that baby, feeling more alive myself although also a bit shocky, I re-learned something I always know as a scientist – I know little but in knowing that I know little I am open to learning a bit more. As I knelt there, holding a strong little buckling and watching the momma goat de-stress, I knew that I had no idea if she still had another kid inside. I palpated her tummy but it all felt like a round tummy and I had no objective concept of what another kid might feel like.

Our goat mentor arrived and kindly helped re-assure me that we had done well and that the momma had only one kid.

I have been trying to steel myself for the next kidding season since. We have been breeding the girls up in recent weeks so it seems we will go through that hell again!

But, of course, I always have something new to learn. One is that its not just kidding season that can bring medical emergencies. About a week ago last Saturday we noticed one of the 6 month old kids was acting odd, tilting her head, acting dizzy, eyes sort of vibrating around in their sockets, back and forth.

The followng images shows you a bit of what it was like. She essentially had no control over one side of her body because the bacteria were attacking her brain stem. The movements or the odd positions you see were involuntary and also very painful for us to watch.

This first shot shows the improvised enclosure we made for her.

Here are a few positions of note.

My first and relatively long lasting response was to feel panic, panic I KNEW was counter-productive but which was there anyways. Panic because we have no way of affording any vet care at all. Period.

I looked in our goat health books and realized how hard it is to do a differential diagnosis while in a panic and also while looking at these diseases for the first time. I googled her symptoms and was able to triangulate closer to the possibilities.

I finally settled on two diseases which are commonly co-diagnosed because they are so similar: Goat Polio (thiamine deficiency – easy to treat) and Listeriosis (HARD to treat and bad prognosis).

What is Listeriosis? Its a bacterial infection, run away infection of listeria. It occurs in goats, cows, all sorts of animals including we humans.

Wiki says this about this disease:

Listeriosis is a bacterial infection caused by a gram-positive, motile bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes. Listeriosis is relatively rare and occurs primarily in newborn infants, elderly patients, and patients who are immunocompromised.

The symptoms of listeriosis usually last 7-10 days. The most common symptoms are fever and muscle aches. Nausea and diarrhea are less common symptoms. If the infection spreads to the nervous system it can cause meningitis, an infection of the covering of the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms of meningitis are headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance, and convulsions.

Listeriosis has a very low incidence in humans. However, pregnant women are much more likely than the rest of the population to contract it. Infected pregnant women may have only mild, flulike symptoms. However, infection in a pregnant woman can lead to early delivery, infection of the newborn, and death of the baby.

In veterinary medicine, listeriosis can be a quite common condition in some farm outbreaks. It can also be found in wild animals; see listeriosis in animals.

More specifically, in non-human animals:

Listeriosis is an infectious but not contagious disease caused by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, far more common in domestics animals (domestic mammals and poultry), especially ruminants, than in human beings. It can also occur in feral animals—among others, game animals—as well as in poultry and other birds.

The causative bacterium lives in the soil and in poorly made silage and is acquired by ingestion. It is not contagious; over the course of 30-year observation period of sheep disease in Morocco, the disease only appeared in the late 2000s when feeding bag-ensiled corn became common. Moreover, in Iceland, the disease is called “silage sickness”.

The disease is usually sporadic, but can occur as farm outbreaks in ruminants.

Three main forms are usually recognized throughout the affected species:

* encephalitis, the most common form in ruminants
* late abortion
* gastro-intestinal septicemia with liver damage, in monogastric species as well as in preruminant calves and lambs

Listeriosis in animals can rarely be cured with antibiotics (tetracyclines, chloramphenicol) when diagnosed early, in goats, for example, by treating upon first noticing the disease’s characteristic expression in the animal’s face,[4] but is generally fatal.

The Merck Vet Manual describes the symptoms as follows:

Initially, affected animals are anorectic, depressed, and disoriented. They may propel themselves into corners, lean against stationary objects, or circle toward the affected side. Facial paralysis with a drooping ear, deviated muzzle, flaccid lip, and lowered eyelid often develops on the affected side, as well as lack of a menace response and profuse, almost continuous, salivation; food material often becomes impacted in the cheek due to paralysis of the masticatory muscles. Terminally affected animals fall and, unable to rise, lie on the same side; involuntary running movements are common.

I called my goat mentor and she has had the great fortune of never dealing with this disease in her 20 years and 100s of goats (she has a great business – Shepherd’s Gate Dairy). She cautioned that the prognosis was poor if it was listeriosis. She suggested I call Tufts Vet.

I did a postdoc at Tufts Vet and have had animals vetted there so I know how massively expensive they are. I was profoundly fortunate to be able to talk, on the phone, for free, with a vet who was able to tell me some things about this disease.

The consensus was, put her down. I have grown an aversion to killing and I do not own a gun or injectable drugs to do the job so I chose to do the treatment and see what happened.

At that point I was less worried about the sick goat and MUCH more worried that my son was going to get it from the does in milk who might have it and be asymptomatic (we drink – drank – their milk raw). My son has seen enormous healing strides from a non-verbal autistic child to a verbal intelligent child who just started preschool today. He got almost a year of daily one-on-one ABA therapy and gallons upon gallons of raw goat milk with I think was instrumental in his progress.

Now, I was panicking that the raw milk was also going to kill him. Panic is an evil evil human emotion. Must remember to be more Vulcan next time.

I found this amazing resource on treating listeriosis at Onion Creek Ranch.

So 8 days ago we started injecting our little goat, Felicity, with 3.9 ccs of 300,000 IU Penicillin, subcutaneously, every 6 hours, 24 hours a day. She was almost paralyzed when we started. I pinched up her skin over her ribs and injected the milky white antibiotic into the gap between her lifted skin and the muscles and ribs just beneath.

Our schedule was this (rain, shine, wind, light, dark, cold, chilly, somewhat warm) 12 noon, 6 pm, 12 midnight, 6 am, rinse and repeat.

She was a trooper and continued to eat. My daughter was my vet tech this whole time. She forced water into the goat’s mouth the first few days but the goat has been eating and drinking on her own.

We have likely 2 more days, possibly more, of this schedule. She, against all the odds, is healing! She still seems to tilt her head so we need that to resolve. She is HATING her isolation and she gains strength every day.

You can see her here. She fears me now, thanks to the brutal injection schedule.

We have to be careful when we stop treatment with the antibiotics by treating her with probiotics to repopulate her rumen with beneficial bacteria.

Right now, she is one sick animal but I think she is going to make it.

Before this, I had never given an injection to anything but chicks, rabbits, and mice. Now I am quite a pro at it.

I would prefer to not have to do this ever again.

We love her now, have grown attached.

The rest of the herd seems perfectly fine.

Homesteading is all about the DIY worldview. You may gain some sense of mastery but its illusory! We are now battling a massive drop in milk production due to the seasonality of this breed and we STILL need to get things ready for our -20 F winter days.

Lily, one of our silky-old english game hens went broody and then, after lots of hard work, became the proud mother of 5 precious little chicks (of various parentage).

Lily is a fantastic mom. Another chicken, Jenny, who refuses to stay in the hen house has adopted Lily and babies and they all walk around the garden beds and forest undergrowth and compost heap together.

Lily taught the babies how to scratch for food and they do it with great energy and tenacity.

Yesterday we came across a different sort of chicken in the woods! This is an edible mushroom called Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

This shot helps to show how huge this mushroom is!, size of a basketball.

We have many of these chicken of the woods in our forest and its always net to come across them unexpectedly.

Laetiporus sulphureus

Kingdom: Fungi
Division: Basidiomycota
Class: Agaricomycetes
Order: Polyporales
Family: Polyporaceae
Genus: Laetiporus

(I have been debating with myself about which blog to post this at, this garden/homestead blog or my peak oil blog, Peaknix. I decided to cross post it to catch both audiences)

Over at Kathy Harrison’s wonderful The Just In Case Book Blog, (Kathy wrote “The Just In Case” book on the practical aspects of preparedness in the home) a post today “How much is too much?” has some great comments (all of her posts do).

One of the commenters wonders about how to chose the “right” meat to store. Should one focus on low cost “low quality” meats grown in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) so as to maximize the ability to buy a lot of meat on a limited budget or buy and store organic pastured meats. Its an important question and one that will impact your health. One can ask the same about any part of their food storage.

Meat, thinking about it makes me wax philosophical, angry, perplexed, confused, hungry.

It will require several hands too.

On the one hand meat is what we in the US are raised to eat, lots of it too. Its the main attraction. It means satiety. It defines it.

Without meat, your snacking, your nibbling, your waiting for supper.

For lots of us, that goes a step further and its a meat/starch combo that really signifies a filling meal. I was raised on rice and meat (rice being hugely important to Colombian cuisine, pork being THE meat).

On the other hand, in terms of climate change, meat is a curse to our ecosystems in MANY ways and it endangers the futures of our children.

On the other hand, thanks to swine flu, pork has NEVER been cheaper and when you are on the financial edge, that is deeply welcomed.

On the other hand, the low prices are killing the US pork industry.

On the other hand, we are talking CAFOs here, and they really are the infectious disease problem in terms of being GINORMOUS viral bioreactors.

Its at least 2 fold:

• massive use of antibiotics and growth hormones to make it possible to grow pork flesh in the CAFO setting – that inevitably leads to the breeding of antibiotic resistant strains and meat doped with hormones that ruin our metabolism
• then there is the issue that porcine genetics and anatomy are such that their lungs represent a unique environment where flu viral particles from MANY species can be harbored (and without significant lethality for the pig), side by side, leading to what is called reassortment. The viral genes are swapped back and forth such that new strains arise that can be pandemic in nature, case in point – this is EXACTLY how H1N1 Swine Flu arose in the Smithfield CAFOs in Mexico.

By not supporting this industry through buying their meat products, you the consumer vote against the many dangers that this sort of capitalism generates. Its very simple.

I know that people’s livelihoods depend on CAFOs. Things change and change can be painful. Take for example, my grandfather who used to farm and raise pigs for market in Illinois. He left farming in the 1950s or 60s exactly because of these CAFOs. I have a certain perspective, if you will. After leaving the farm, he never again found a job and sank into alcoholism and died at 61 from congestive heart failure and untreated diabetes.

On the other hand, even just FINDING pastured healthy meats can be quite difficult. It will also be more expensive.

Being raised in a natural setting their immune systems will be INTACT and thus will not require 24/7 vets to pump them full of antibiotics.

More importantly to this discussion – living this way means that the pigs do NOT ingest GMO and species inappropriate feeds that leads to meat and fats literally poisoned with the transfats you thought you were avoiding.

You can eat the fat of pastured animals (beef, pig, lamb, chicken) and receive health benefits. You will not when eating CAFO meats, the reverse is true, you will be eating toxic fats.

Thats just the basic truth of the matter.

(This little guy is a CSA tamworth pig, sold by the Many Hands Organic farm in Barre, MA. See more photos about Many Hands at this flickr set link.)

Now, after all that, I have really run out of hands.

I have a certain bias after thinking on all of this for a while. I do not ascribe to simply storing away a few months or years worth of store bought dried foods. I have never had the money to do that and I dont think I could feed my kids that either.

My sort of preparing is building self-sufficiency so that these skills are passed on to my kids (as this blog has covered at length!) and part of that has been about growing and raising protein.

As The Smiths and the runner duck on “Babe” say, Meat is Murder. Meat requires the death of an animal. Until you have killed your own chickens or pigs for you to eat, you simply do not understand meat.

Now, I am not saying to not eat meat.

I am saying that long term self sufficiency requires serious thought about meat. The health issues mentioned above will ebb away as one raises and butchers their meat. This will be a Good Thing.

The need for meat to be the starring attraction on the dinner plate will likely also change to a more vegetable diet that is accented by proteins that meet the needs of the body not just the corpulent mindset.

I know from personal experience that if I have to go out and kill a chicken to have meat my worldview shifts. My mind runs a calculation – does my body really need the meat or can more vegetable do the trick. If I had no children I would likely be 100% ovo-lacto vegetarian because my calculation really is weighted more to the NO side in terms of an answer.

But when I think about the bodies of my kids, meat gets a big thumbs up! I know that is absolutely my own bias and that many people raise their kids as vegetarians. To each his own, especially in this aspect.

None of us asked to be born in such complex, conflicting, and confounding times. Its not our fault that our world is filled with about 5 billion too many people (WELL over its carrying capacity). Its also not our fault that a guy at the beginning of the previous century figured out a way to use the technology created to make chemical bombs in the first world war and apply it to the making of artificial fertilizer – leading to the profound shift in our food production systems and a mortal link to non-renewable fossil fuels that has a significant impact on the global climate.

It is said that without that innovation, making artificial fertilizer from fossil fuels, 3/5ths of the people alive today would not have been born.

These are all facts of our modern world. How we weather the changes or how we prepare our children to weather the changes will be important, even if its a small choice between CAFO meat or organic pastured meat (supporting small farms who value their land) or if it means eating less or no meat at all.

Two days ago we noticed a pile of feathers on the grass around our house. Then we saw some on the driveway. We knew then, upon inspecting the feathers, that one of our old english game hen roosters had met a bad end. I think it was the rooster on the left in the photo above.

We then found another pile of feathers closer to the chicken tractor where all of our layers were kept. In the photo below you can see two downy feathers.

The chicken tractor is not predator safe by any means so I decided as soon as I saw the feathers above to bring an end to the pastured chickens for now and have all the girls in with the roosters in the hen house.

I made sure to patch all the holes in the hen house run and now they should be all set for a while.

Here are a few shots of the chicken run.

That rooster that we lost, he had been loose a few days and in that time he visited with one of our small chicken hens and now she has gone broody. She laid her eggs in this broody house we had made up in years past and has been sitting on them. So, even though we lost this rooster, his genetics were passed on. I dont know if these chicks will hatch or make it, but the hen is working hard on it.

I have the fence there for her protection. According to my daughter, the broody hen really only wants off for about 30 minutes a day to run out and “use the facilities”. My daughter opens the fence and takes the hen out for this time. Then she closes it back up. We learned the hard way that the other non-broody hens and roosters will smash the eggs under a broody hen and then if chicks hatch, they will kill and eat them. Broody hens and chicks need to be protected.

I have learned that “old wives tales” and old sayings like “Dont count your chickens before they hatch” and “No use to crying over spilt milk” have a real profound meaning when you are caring for these animals. Not counting the chickens before they hatch is a guard against putting too much planning and intent into a delicate process (such as gestation) so that one can deal with the inevitable losses that WILL come.

The other day we were milking by hand in the morning because I didnt want to have to drag the milker out twice that day. We had just finished a load of milking and then, poooof, the goat lifted her leg and splashed her filthy hoof down into the pure white milk.

It made me white hot angry – all that work and all that lovely milk – but I was able to let it go quickly and cool off. The moment that hoof touched the milk, it was no longer useful. There is no halfways about it. No ambivalence. I just had to let it go. Thats what the saying “No use to crying over spilt milk” is all about, you have to let it go because it is 100% irretrievably lost.

Here are a few shots of the cucumbers that are WAY behind (like the whole garden) but which are coming along. I think they will have time to bear before the frosts!

These are pickling cucumbers

And these are lemon cucumbers (which I thought had died!)

Chickens are always busy looking for something to eat. I love putting them to work in the garden, you just have to be careful how you do it.

You cant put little leashes on them, you have to put them in a tractor (like you see below). I put them in the tractor so that they can eat clover and make delicious eggs.

I am putting some other chickens to work by putting a temporary tractor on one of the beds where I have pulled out bolted lettuce and want to get rid of grubs and other excess bugs.

The chickens also scratch up the ground, sunbathe in the soil, taking dirt baths (to clear out any bugs in their feathers) and they also fertilize the garden a bit.

At the end of the day, the boy rooster, Barley, will go back to the chicken house and the girls will go to the pastured chicken tractor.

Here you can see our asparagus bed (that has started to slow down) mulched with hay. Asparagus likes to live with tomatoes, thats what you see growing there.

Here is another couple of shots of our milking Lamancha does and then some of our other goats and llama.