Kittengoat Update

In case you were wondering, little Mr. Kitten is hanging in there, thriving even. At two weeks old, he has probably doubled in size - he's at least three pounds now. Mr. Kitten loves milk! He has an overbite! And knobby knees! He mews! Go, Mr. Kitten, go.

Summer Kids

Monday marked the end of the 2014 kidding season at the Cotton Hill farmstead. It's unusually late for it, but the lovely Vervain just refused to be bred in a timely manner back in the fall. Better late than never, I suppose. 

Vervain

I was out for the evening, but Farmer Fin reported that when he went up to fill the goats' water after milking, there was Vervain with three tiny babies. The littlest one is no bigger than three pounds. We call him Mr. Kitten. I'm trying not to get too attached. One of the black ones is a girl, though.

For a sense of the tinyness, look how big my hand looks compared to their heads! 

It feels kind of peculiar to have tiny babies again. The bigger littles had to grow up fast so we could put the new ones in the nursery pen without getting squashed. They seem to be enjoying life with the herd, although they are not thrilled at having gone down to one bottle a day. 

Very Hungry Babies

Speaking of milk, Vervain is a chip off the old block: like her mother Violet, she makes a remarkable amount of milk. Welcome to the life of a working goat, Vervain!

Farmscape

A snapshot from the garden.

Spring is lovely here on Cotton Hill.

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.