Look What Came in the Mail Today!

A Fool and Her Bacon Are Soon Parted, but Eventually Reunited

After the piglet escape fiasco of 2013 (see http://cottonhillfarm.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-swine-are-fine.html), I was trepidatious about getting new piglets this year. But in our imminent incarnation as a licensed dairy, we'll have a lot of whey, and someone's got to consume it. On May 5th, our friend Farmer Josh delivered two tiny piglets. We drove them up the hill, and Farmer Fin dropped them into their pen, securely ensconced in brand-new, fully charged electric netting. 

They sniffed at the fence, registered a bit of pain, and proceeded under it, and then under the lowest high tensile wire on the pasture's perimeter fence. We stood there wincing, and the piggies were gone. After a pathetic hour of searching the woods, Josh advised us to leave some hay for bedding and a few piles of dried corn around the area where we wanted them to be, and he took off. 

Super-Zoom Piglet Spy Cam

My hopes for their return were not high. A few days later, a neighbor in a pickup truck pulled in to the drive while I was milking in the shed, and informed me that he'd seen two little piglets on the road. Great! They were back.

That's Like Being Hypnotized by a Chicken

Two weeks of intermittent piglet sightings followed, and then last week, they took up residence in the apple tree grove right behind the house. They seemed to really enjoy milk and hanging out with chickens. The pigs followed our (also unreliably fenced, bad farming!) flock around as if that were a good idea; they trampled the chicken fence to roll in gross chicken mud and nibble layer pellets, and trailed the chickens all over the yard. 

Farmer Fin and I are terribly busy these days. The pigs were overturning buckets, breaking garden beds, and rooting up lawn in their obsession with the chickens, but we really couldn't get to it until the weekend. Finally, on Saturday, May 24th, nearly three weeks after their escape, we captured them.

It took a whole morning and then some, but thanks to Farmer Fin's catlike reflexes and our slightly superior intelligence, Kim and Kanye are finally within the fence line. They seem pretty comfortable in their hilltop pig pen. Hopefully they'll stay for a while.

Now we have several months to figure out a more secure piglet home for next spring.

New Goats of 2014

The last few weeks have been pretty busy here. This is why:

The first (and second) of the kids were born in early April. Then there was a two-week lag, and then the rest came fast and furious: five does kidded in one week. We're up to 11 kids now, all hungry and growing fast.

On nice days, the biggest ones go outside with the herd. They run and play...

 and make new friends. They're learning all kinds of new skills, like grazing and drinking water.

Many, many more baby goat pics, and a dramatic story, after the jump.

Capricious April

The first kids of 2014, a buck and a doe, were born to Juniper last Tuesday, April 8. We made a little nursery in the barn, and they are growing fast. These pictures are from their first few days.

Little Jem, Truly Outrageous, Sucking Down Milk

Tiny Little Jem and Big Little Boy

It's spring! It's spring! Crocuses and honeybees.

Sunday and Monday were beautiful and in the 70s. I planted seeds and got a sunburn. Then last night we got three inches of snow. It was 65° for morning chores yesterday; today it was 20° and I had to apologize to Junie for my cold hands when I milked her. I guess April really is cruel. One of these days, though, spring will come to stay.

Goats of Note: Pansy

Violet and Pansy are twin sisters (goats almost always deliver twins). Pansy is a little bigger than her sister, and nearly as pretty, but she has one trait that prevents her from being the queen: her temperament. Pansy is neurotic. Physically, a fine specimen, but she is kind of crazy. You can see it in her eyes.

Pansy at Two Years Old

When we went to pick up our first caprine additions to the farmstead, we decided to give our goats botanical names. Four years later, we may abandon this practice; it's getting a little confusing with a dozen does named after plants. The first two, we named according to personality: Violet (as in shrinking), and Pansy, because they were both so shy and skittish. 

Unlike Violet, Pansy did not see the advantage in being friends with the people. She wouldn't let anyone near her. She was like a deer. A deer with Houdini-like evasion skills. More than once, this large-framed girl managed to launch herself out of the big shed, over the four-foot-high gate, through a three-foot gap between the top of the gate and the ceiling.

Honestly, I was ready to give up on her, but where could she go? I feared for her fate if we sold her. I was frustrated, but Farmer Fin was astoundingly patient with her. At vaccination time, he would sit on the milking stand with a scoop of sweet grain for many minutes as she eyed him cautiously, approaching only to flee to the corner of the shed (or out the gate) again and again. Eventually, he would lure her up there, and she was surprisingly pliant once she was locked in and munching on grain.

Over and over Fin and Pansy repeated variations of this theme. Sometimes he'd just sit and wait for her curiosity to get the better of her. She'd come close warily, but eventually, she began to allow him to scratch her back or stroke her head. Slowly but surely, Pansy was becoming domesticated. In the fall of 2011 we were even able to get her into the truck to be bred, and she had her first kids the next spring.

Pansy and Baby Petunia

Pansy is still quite suspicious of humans. When we bring strangers into the goat yard, she shies away, but if it's just us, she always comes over for a little affection. So far, we have let the moms raise their kids (this year, since we are transitioning into being a business, we'll be bottle-feeding), and Pansy is a very protective mother. Both of her daughters, Petunia and Peony, inherited their mother's craziness, to some degree. Petunia, though, as a young adult, has absorbed the culture of the farm, and has become cooperative and fairly friendly; we expect little Peony will too.

Pansy has taught us a lot about patience and love. She is a connection to the wildness of these creatures with whom we live and work. Whenever I see a family of deer grazing in a field, I think of her, and how adaptable animals can be.

Goats of Note: Violet

Goats are good fun and great company. Each one of our goats has a very distinctive personality (goatality?), and I suddenly realize, dear readers, that you and the goats have never been properly introduced. This is a glaring oversight for which I apologize, and which I will try to correct in a series of profiles. 

We begin with Violet. Lovely, intelligent, friendly, and assertive, Violet is the herd queen, and one of the first two goats who came to live on our farm. Here she is with her sister Pansy (the subject of the next profile) soon after coming to live here in the spring of 2010.

The Early Days

When we adopted Violet and Pansy, they had not been socialized much. They were both really scared of people, but Violet had a natural curiosity that led her closer and closer to us. Soon, she discovered that she loved being petted, and approached us for a nice head rub whenever we came up to the pasture.

Closer and Closer

On the March

Even though I had to climb into my car through the hatchback because the doors were frozen shut, even though I've taken to wearing a hat and scarf indoors, even through the haze of seasonally affected dolor, I had to admit the effects of the ice storm were pretty.

 The goats admit nothing.

Spring, please come soon.