The Goat House

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16 degrees last night and tonight. With the cold wind, it feels like single digits. It never got above freezing today. But it was a record day for eggs, 6 from 11 hens. Which looking at small-scale chicken economics, this is a $2 profit in one day. Not bad for birds . . .

It's great they're increasing laying as the 15% lentil ration kicks in. We've got to fill a customer order for 2 dozen quick.

Fodder at the moment is a crisis. As we expanded production with the does going in to their 3rd trimester, we ran out of trays. We had to skip 2 days till we could get out to Walmart for more trays [fodder does best for us with a very specific tray]. And with fodder, it's like steering a huge ship. Subtle changes hit slowly and cumulatively over time till we started to get short. And once you get short, it can be a downward spiral from there, because the feed you're putting out is under-mature and of less weight so it takes more of it. A fully mature biscuit of fodder on one of our large trays weighs 10lbs. The stage we're feeding it at now it's 3.5lbs. Rachel's stressed, and feels like she's bleeding grain . . . but we keep soaking double batch after double batch and traying everything out till we get caught up. We've had to pull the birds off fodder temporarily, and put them on bucket-sprouted grains and lentils, till we get through the crisis.

Our seedlings are sprouting up, especially the lettuce and onions. The Brassicas are about half up. We'll direct sow the mache on the 1st of February.

I'm now working on framing out the 6th garden bed, bed #9. It's a long labor-intensive project using whatever scraps I can find . . . even some charred pieces from the old burned down double-wide.

So far I've whacked 3 voles with a shovel and fed them to the chickens. They're the only animals I've ever killed. We find them hiding in the garden in the morning under the blankets we're using to protect the last plants they've left us. Of course they've probably been pigging out all night. And whacking down with the shovel takes out a few plants. We've been doing a lot of garden cleanup and brush removal to cut down on vole habitat. I've mowed the area around the garden very short. Once we can find well-used pathways, we'll put out traps.

We've spent much of the long evenings working on the Holdout Farm website. The 'Classes' and 'History' pages are now done.

Rachel and I got a bad cold over the holidays, and mine turned into pink eye. We used fresh juice from our aloe vera plant and that cleared it up rapidly. Rachel and I wonder if there are some immunity benefits from our raw goat milk, because we didn't get sick all year drinking it and now that the does are dry we're out and not feeling as well as we did. Though giving up caffeine has helped.

I built the above addition on the old chicken coop over the summer, so the goats will have more space to run in out of the rain. We now call it the 'Goat House', though it resides in the pasture we still call the 'Coop Pasture'.

It's a 12'x12' addition, and modeled on photos of traditional goat houses on open ranges. It's got a gutter on the back, so we can harvest rain, and is deeply bedded with old tall grass mowed down in the pasture. Since the goats are either in their stalls or out in the wooded 'Marsh Pasture', they don't use it much. But all the does are about to kid soon, and this is where we'll raise the kids. It's a bit of a hassle walking all the way up there and back for bottle-feeding, but it's a nice warm secure shelter away from the older does. We'll probably sell all the kids from the Samancha triplets as they're first fresheners and not proven milkers. But the kids from our mature Lamanchas, who are all good milkers, may be candidates for raising up. We'll have to see how big the demand for our fodder-fed raw goat milk is. So far we've got our existing customer base, and a great deal of local attention from getting the word out on the internet. We may not be able to fill demand this year, and will have to purchase additional does.
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