Visitors

I didn't realize how long it had been since I posted - 2 weeks!  To get it out of the way right now, no I haven't had the baby yet, I've just been horribly unmotivated  - I'll certainly announce the birth here when it does happen.  

Last weekend, we had some very special company.  Our WWOOFer from 2 years ago, Benjamin, came back with his family on a visit from Germany!  We have kept in touch, but hadn't seen him since, or met his parents and brother, so that was a wonderful visit.  

It was also very serendipitous for Caleb.  That Friday, while he was bush-hogging the next few days-worth of internal fencelines for moving the animals, he noticed that someone had, in the last few weeks, come along and cut out 3 sections of perimeter fence in the outside farthest corner (over the hill where we can't see it), and stolen the metal T-posts.  Fortunately, they left the wooden posts, and the actual wire fence - apparently they just desperately needed about 10 or 12 T-posts?  And were willing to work pretty hard to get them for "free", rather than just driving to the local feed store...  There was also another spot that appeared to have been crashed into with a car or truck, and it had bent a post without actually breaking through the fence.  Benjamin and his brother and father helped out, and they all got everything put back together within just a couple of hours.  It was especially useful that Benjamin had done enough fencing with Caleb 2 years ago, that he remembered how to do it and was able to supervise, really speeding things up.

 It's also been a while since I reported on the dairy goats.  I'm still milking, but getting a bit less (deliberately), so I'm backing off on the cheese-making (it was just getting tedious with my current lack of mobility and motivation!).  Several weeks ago, I thinned the ranks - I'd been feeling for a while that Sophia was not actually putting out that much, so I measured one day.  Of the 6.5 cups I was getting, only 1.5 was from her, so we put her and Samantha her kid back in with the main herd.  The beauty of keeping the kids on the mamas, and having non-dairy goats is that they don't need drying off of excess production - Samantha was very happy to take care of the bit of extra milk, I'm sure!  Since then, I've been milking just Snow Pea and Katydid.  Of those two, Katydid is proving her worth surprisingly well - we bought her last fall as an experiment, to see if an actual "dairy" goat was that much better than what I already was milking and therefore worth buying.  Even with having lost her kids, and only getting milked once a day - no nursing all day like Snow Pea - she is milking the most.  I'd guess 3-3.5 of the 4.5-5 cups I'm getting is hers, the lesser part Snow Pea's.  I'm not sure how long I'll continue milking - I'd like to keep it up until fall, but I just don't know how things will work out with a newborn.  It may be just too inconvenient to have to leave the house at the same time every morning (an amazingly impossible task sometimes with a baby!) or if Liam will be able to keep him/her happy while I'm gone for those 15 minutes.  The biggest consideration is that, as long as Katydid is milking so well, I can't stop, or she'll have trouble  since she has no kids to take over for me.  I could deliberately dry her off over a couple of weeks, but that seems a shame if I don't have to.  Apparently, from what I've read, you really want to milk a "first freshener" (first-time milker) as long as possible to improve their capacity and ability for the subsequent years, so that's another reason to continue if at all possible.  Based on her production as an FF, and without nursing kids, I have high hopes for her next year.  We'll see what happens...