Welcome

Been a while.
Our three goats are producing well. Been a challenge to keep them in pasture with all the changes I've been doing to the fencing lately. But they are being kept happy.
We are getting enough milk that we bought another bull calf to feed out. So now we have 2.
Tammy has made cottage cheese and ice cream with some excess milk as well. She wasn't impressed with the cottage cheese but I thought it was rather tasty. The ice cream was fairly decent but we will be trying different recipies.
The two calve are Jethro and Toby. Jethro is about 2 and a half months old and Toby is 3 weeks old.
We have banded Jethro and will be doing Toby this week.
Jethro is off the bottle and onto grain and graze, looks sharp. He has his own hutch that we move as we move his tether.
Toby is loose in the chicken/duck yard and isn't quite up to speed on his grain yet but working on it.
We have 3 duck hens that finally went broody and are sitting on their eggs. We hope to see little ducks this month.
Our chicks arrived June 12. We ordered 30 layers and 100 meat birds. So far we have lost 1 layer to piling when the temps dropped pretty low. The chicks are almost feathered out and we have started opening up sections of the yard for them.
We sold all the billy kids and didn't make a dime after the sales barn deducted the fee for the scrapies tags. We are looking into getting our own tags.
Our neighbor and our former landlord both offered small patches of land we could hay for free so I have been busy getting that made. The garage/barn is full and I have half a load on the wagon to stack somewhere yet.
I cut the oats but it takes a long time to dry and the weather has not been cooperating, I hope I can bale this weekend. The tractor has been operating quite well and the rest of the machinery too. The cheap old baler I bought this spring has been doing good. I like running it on the tractor instead of the big John Deere baler especially when I have a wagon on the back. The poor old WD has a time pulling all that weight and running a baler. The Massey baler is a little lighter and doesn't take quite as much power. Can't run as much hay through it though or it stops up.
We are in the process of getting a loan and talking to our former landlord about buying the area out back where the feedlots are. We went with a home equity loan and are hoping it's enough to do all we want. But we may have to settle for less. Whatever the outcome is it will give us a little more security with our feed situation.
The garden is doing great. Saw some tassels in the sweet corn yesterday. Peas are starting to pod, the beans are blossomed as are the potatoes and tomatoes. Tammy has been over at my folks picking strawberries and has all ready made a batch of jam. The raspberries are just about ready to pick...I think Chris has all ready been sampling them.
Overall we aren't doing too bad this year so far.
sammyd on 07.10.08 @ 04:27 AM CST [link]