We finally have babies

When we first purchased Pebbles we thought she was pregnant but we were 100%. She is the one in the Green collar.

After a few weeks it became pretty clear she was. We built a bigger pen and tried to improve her environment but honestly had no idea what we were doing. It took a while just to figure out what to feed her. I never knew it would be so complicated. I started doing some reading about how to care for a pregnant goat and how to help deliver kids. It was all so overwhelming that it made me not want to read it anymore so I didn't. Then after some of the signs I was seeing this weekend yesterday I decide I better read up. I found a great post of a forum call Backyardherds.com that explained the process very clearly and did scare me to death like everything else I had read. I have been telling my buddy Eric all along that I just wanted to come home from work one day and they just be there. I really didn't want to have to deal with any vet bills or complications. Well I rushed home yesterday from work cause I had a feeling something might be happening and sure enough......

I didn't have to do a thing. I took my hut and wrapped it in a tarp and added some pine shavings and a heat lamp and they were all set. When I checked on them this morning mom and both babies were inside sleeping. Everybody seems to be doing good so hopefully there will not be any problems and we can train these two to be friendly and maybe one day we can get some milk from them for our own use.

Farm Update 11/25/2012

 Here are Bristol and Drake on a lazy after noon laying in the sun....

We put our tree up and took a couple pictures of our fat baby!

 She is starting to sit up pretty good and is rolling over.

I am down to 9 guineas from the 17 I started with. I think this Bald Eagle might be part of the reason. I found a couple piles of feathers in a clearing by the road the other day. It looks like they are getting attacked when they go out in the open. As I have read in other places the dumbest guineas die first and the remaining "smart" ones that can survive that first year can teach the future generation how to stay alive. So hopefully we will get babies in the spring and we will have guineas that know the how to stay alive.

Our Turkeys have gotten bigger and have become my favorite addition. They are having a hard time learning to return to their house at night but I think that's my fault because I have moved them a couple time to new homes. They are now in the old Dog/Goat/guinea pen. I have given up getting the guineas to go back inside their pen at night. Instead the guineas sleep on top of it. Back to the Turkeys....They have started to Strut and Gobble which is a lot of fun to hear. They never leave the yard and they have gotten along with the dogs and other animals great. I did loose 1 Turkey but it died in it's pen so I'm not sure what happened to it. It looks like I ended up with 3 Toms and 1 Hen.

The day before Hurricane Sandy arrived My dad and I built this goat pen in the front woods. It is 45x35 ft and they really seem to like it.

 Who's they? I just realized I never posted about Lavern and Shirley. After BAMBAM died Pebbles was very lonely and was depressed. So we found a lady with Nigerian Dwarf babies and we got 2 does about 3 months old. They are about 5 months now. We were hoping since pebbles and BAMBAM weren't the most friendly goats that these would be better since they are younger but it hasn't been going to good. They aren't too bad and will come up to the fence and aren't scared of you but if you try to pet them they run off. So we will just keep trying to make them like us through food....

The new pen has a bunch of logs and hills in it that the goats love to play on. I also built this little hut out of some pallets and scrap lumber form our wood milling.

As you can see here Pebbles is VERY pregnant!

This past weekend we finally split and stacked a few oak and poplar trees that have been laying around for a while.