With summer coming to an end, our biggest chores, pasture rotation and milking, are also going to be stopping soon. Fall is less than three weeks away, and we are already having the leaves changing color and enjoying cooler weather.
Goats
Rose had quadruplets 8-30-24, two girls and two boys, the result of Blaise (our buck) escaping in the beginning of April. So far, they seem to be doing okay, but we will be keeping an eye on them, since that is a lot of kids for a goat to feed.
The top two are the girls and the second two from the top are the boys.
We plan to go on a road trip to the east coast in early October, so we will be drying off all of our does except Rose (since she will still have her kids with her) in a couple of weeks. We will also put Blaise back with them sometime this month, so we have kids end of February - early March, just as the grass starts to grow.
We had a very dry August, and the grass is not growing very well, however, there is still plenty of brush to be eaten in the woods, so we have just been letting our does free range. It works pretty well since we have our orchard and garden fenced and the dogs keep them away from the house.
The perimeter of our property isn't completely fenced, and the fencing that is there wouldn't keep a goat in, but we are pretty far back from the road, and they mostly stay around the barn except for when they go out to graze. And when they do go out, they don't go very far.
We will see how this works over the winter, they might start to wander a bit further as everything starts turning brown, but hopefully in the spring it will still work and allow them to start grazing earlier than normal.
We would usually wait until there is enough grass growing to make it worthwhile to start pasturing them. But if they can graze from a much bigger area, they might be able to get enough to stop feeding them hay earlier.
We are also going to be stopping milk sales for the year, so thank you to our customers, hopefully we'll see you again next spring!
We recently rehomed our mini donkey since he would just not stop biting our goats. We traded him for two Nigerian/Pygmy crosses (at least that's what we think they are). We aren't going to keep them, but it is a lot easier to sell goats than it is to sell donkeys.
Chickens
Our pullets from the spring are laying now, and they have all been enjoying scratching around in the compost pile from our barn cleaning since we put their pen around it.
Ducks
Two of the Khaki Campbell ducklings we got earlier this year have started laying. They were random ages, so we don't know when they will all start laying, except the two we hatched in June should start laying sometime in October or November.
Pigs
We recently processed the Kune boar that we had kept from one of our litters born last February. We had considered keeping him so we could sell breeding pairs of registered Kunes, but after seeing how slow they grow (he was about a year and a half old, and we only got 45.5 lbs. of meat) and how bad the market is for them, especially in OK, we decided there wasn't really any reason to have two boars.
Our bottle piglet is growing super fast, (and still free ranging) she is only about 4 1/2 months old and probably weighs over 70lbs! I think she was about 65lbs the last time we weighed her, now I don't think I could even pick her up, at least not for long enough to weigh her.
We put Horold and Millie together a while ago and should be having another litter of Idaho Pasture Pig Kune crosses (what our bottle piglet is) sometime in the beginning of December. Hopefully this time she is able to feed them all, otherwise we are seriously going to have our hands full, possibly bottle feeding 11 piglets.
Rabbits
We might be having a litter of bunnies the end of this month, but we have never been very successful having bunnies except in the late winter and into spring.
Pets
Our rescued kitten is doing well (except for we are still having a problem with fleas) and has gotten so much bigger. Apricot, our other cat, doesn't really like her, but she loves to play with the little dogs (those dogs have played with everything, roosters, bottle piglets, baby goats, kittens...).
Garden
Most of our summer crops are pretty much done, we still get some cucumbers and tomatoes, and TONS of basil, and the okra is producing pretty good, it actually kind of just started producing over the last month or so.
We have some kale, radishes, dill, and chard started for our fall garden, but I don't know how well they will do since we had some pretty hot weather after planting them.
General
We have been trying out growing fodder for our animals (pretty much just the goats and pigs right now) as a way to save money on feed and also for better nutrition for them. It has been pretty time consuming, and we have been having trouble getting a good rotation going so that we always have enough finished each day. Hopefully we can get a blog out soon on what we have learned!
Calf
Agnes has gotten a lot bigger and lost her "baby fuzz". We had to put her in electric netting since she was escaping from the single strand fence a little too often, and chasing a cow through the woods at 10 p.m. is not very fun.
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