Bottle Feeding

I hope we don't have to bottle feed this year.  It's always so much better when the mothers can take care of everything on their own.  We have had to do it many times in the past, though.  Most often, it's when a set of triplets is born, and one of them is consistently left out.  The two bigger babes will rush together up to their mother and nurse greedily until she's tired of them and moves away.  The little one goes hungry.  Sometimes, the mother will refuse to accept a kid, though this hasn't happened to us much.  The most devastating is when the mother dies in birthing.  Thankfully, this is rare, but it's one of the things a farmer has to face, especially when living hours away from a vet.

Bottle feeding is fun, but terribly time-consuming.  Our first experience was with five kids (see my posts of January 19 and 23, 2011).  The next year, we had a different situation that modified our ideas considerably:

Sally had twins in 1993.  She gave birth easily and the kids were healthy and strong.  She had lots of milk, but her udder was so pendulous that the teats hung just inches from the ground.  The kids found the udder, but they kept standing under it, nuzzling upwards, trying to find teats above them where they expected them to be.  When they became frustrated and discouraged, we helped them by forcing them to kneel and putting the teats into their mouths.  The little doeling (Celeste), caught on fast.  After we'd helped her two or three times, she learned to nurse on her own.  The buckling, however, seemed a bit dim.  He just couldn't get the hang of it and could only nurse when we helped him.

Our books said that we should bottle feed five times a day, so five times a day, we'd go out and help our little dimwit find the teat.  Each time we went out, he would be looking hollow-sided and hungry, and we'd leave him happy and with a nice round tummy.  Celeste, however, always looked the same shape and always seemed satisfied.  By the end of a week, the difference in their growth was obvious.  Celeste was much bigger.  We increased the frequency of feedings for the buckling to six per day, but Celeste continued to gain on him.  This went on for two or three weeks, till he finally got it figured out and nursed on his own.  Then, his growth caught up with hers.

Since that time, whenever we need to bottle feed, we do it much more often.  (The total amount of milk per day doesn't change, we just divide it into more feedings.)  When I go out to spend a few hours with the herd, I take a clean bottle.  I catch a goat, milk her into the bottle, then tuck it inside my shirt, against my skin to keep it warm.  Whenever I see the other kids nursing, I'll let my bottle baby have a sip.  After the kids have begun to eat grain and grass, it becomes less important to give lots of feedings, and we thankfully switch back to three or four times a day.

I know that it's quite possible to raise healthy kids without going to so much trouble.  However, I like to do my best for them, to give them the closest approximation to a natural life that I can.  In the case of a dead mother, or one who has rejected them, I also give them as much cuddling as possible.  As my absolute favourite goat-keeping book states:

     "emotional deprivation in youth does not make for emotional stability in adult life in man or beast."  - Goat Husbandry, David Mackenzie

Hay, hay, hay

We bought and brought home a bale of hay yesterday, a round bale weighing 700 lb.  Our winter supply, which we got in October last year, is nearly finished.  This is the tail end of the feeding season here in the Cariboo.  Our animals will keep getting hay for a couple of months, depending on the weather, but we feed them a decreasing amount of it.  Already, they are down to three feeds a day instead of the four they were getting during the cold weather.  By late May, they'll be ignoring the dry stuff and nibbling on twigs and greens instead.

Goats (and sheep, too), like a hay with lots of variety.  We get something with plenty of alfalfa in it for the winter, but for the spring hay, we like more of a mix.  My herd really appreciates having weeds in their hay, as long as there are a variety of them.  Sometimes, we'll get cheap hay from a farmer who is trying to develop a new hayfield and has things like burdock, willow shoots, and thistle.  These are all delicious to my bunch.

We find hay to be pretty expensive here.  For the mix that's strong on alfalfa, we paid around $175/ton.  The mix we're going to buy to finish out the season is more like $125/ton, but the outside of it is weathered, so there will be more wastage.  I estimate that each of my adult goats eats half a ton over the winter.  Luckily, they can find all the forage they need on our walks for six months of the year.

Darn It!

Knitting has become cool.  Reduce, Re-use, Recycle is the latest mantra.   "Retro" is cool.  Obviously, then, darning should become the latest cool "retro" skill.

Once you've put many hours of time and care into knitting a pair of socks, it doesn't make a lot of sense to throw them away because of one little hole.  Here's how to darn it:

Thread a blunt needle with yarn that matches your sock yarn in colour and weight, if you want the patch to be inconspicuous.  If you want to show off your skill, thread it with a contrasting colour.  Put something round into your sock to hold it in shape while you darn: a lightbulb, or an orange, maybe.

Sew a series of parallel lines across the hole, making a few stitches in the good fabric adjacent, to "anchor" the yarn.

Now sew a series of lines perpendicular to the first set, weaving the yarn under and over in a basketweave pattern and again "anchoring" the yarn  in the good fabric.

Your patch is done.  Show it off.

Barnyard cleaning the lazy way

A dirty barnyard is bad for the health of the animals that live in it.  Foot rot and parasites, for example, can be problems because of having the animals standing in manure.  So, I need to clean.  How can I do it as lazily as possible?

Timing is critical in doing things the lazy way.  Today is a gorgeous early-spring day.  The sky is a brilliant blue; the snow is dazzlingly white.  It's far to nice to stay inside, but the snow is too soft and sticky for winter play.  It's a perfect day to clean up outside.

Attitude is also important.  I look at work with the wheelbarrow and fork as being a free fitness workout.  It also leaves my mind free to wander at will, either thinking things over or, more often, simply being in a "Be Here Now" kind of meditative state.

Here are my tips for keeping the barnyard cleaning lazy:

• Keep few enough animals that one person can clean up after them all.  Getting in over your head is not the lazy way.
• Don't make your animals eat in the summer where they poop in the winter.  (Mine free range, mostly.)  That way, you won't feel pressured to pick up every single turd.
• Work at a nice, leisurely pace, taking time out often to admire the sky, visit with the animals, or listen to the birds.

New chickens

Signs of spring:  the first Canada geese are flying over, high.  They must be scouts; there's nothing for them to eat here yet.  Tobias listens attentively when they honk.

We acquired a dozen new young laying hens on Sunday afternoon.  They came from the flock of the same friend who started us off with our flock so many years ago.  These hens aren't related to our original ones, but they are very similar, as my friend and I have the same kind of ideas about breeding and raising chickens.  Hers are more docile than mine, however.  I think everyone's are.

It didn't take any special procedures to integrate the new hens with my flock.  We just put their cage in a pen in the barn with a pan of grain nearby, and opened the door.  The hens came out when they wanted to.  At dusk, we checked to make sure they had all made it into the barn before we closed the door.  Now, four days later, you can barely tell which are the newcomers.

We almost never have any social behaviour problems with our flock.  No bullying, fighting, or pecking.  I think it's because they have so much space.  I added up all the linear feet of roosting space, divided it by the number of chickens, and came up with three feet of roost per bird.  The square feet of foraging space is infinite.

With extra hens, and the lengthening days, we soon will be overwhelmed with eggs.  I can hardly wait!  Omelettes, custard, angelfood cake, devilled eggs...mmmmm...

Weather Records

,Signs of spring:  I heard the spring call of a saw-whet owl today.  The goats are showing their joy of life by dancing.

For 20 years, I've been keeping weather records in a garden/nature journal.  Since 1994, I've also recorded the early-morning temperature on a graph.  It's not at all scientific, just the temperature on my porch whenever I get up, but it's interesting.  Here are three different years: 1998/9, which was one of our warmer Cariboo winters (I also recorded the daily highs that year); 2008/9, which was fairly cold; and this year.

In my journal, I make note of significant dates, like when I first hear frogs peeping, or when the ice comes off a local lake.  It's amazing how similar the dates are from year to year.  The difference between an early spring and a late one is about a week.  In 1999, the first robins arrived at my place on Mar 12, the first geese of Mar 14, and the cranes on Apr 26.  Snow was off the garden on Apr 2.  In 2009, the robins arrived on Mar 20, the geese on Mar 19, the cranes Apr 22.  The snow was off the garden on Apr 13.

Introducing the Farm Cats

Without our cats, we'd be knee-deep in mice and voles.  We notice it right away when the cats get too old to hunt.  Usually, getting another cat is not hard.  One of the bad parts of rural life is the tendency of people to allow their barn cats to breed freely, or to move away and abandon their cats, or to drop off their unwanted cats near a farm.  Luckily for us, and unluckily for the poor cats, our Cariboo winters are too harsh and the predators too fierce to allow a feral cat population to develop here.

Still, we've adopted many cats over the years.  Right now, we have three.  The eldest is Anwyn, our barn cat.  She appeared in 1998, obviously living wild.  As soon as we could catch her, we had her spayed.  Since then, she's lived in our barn.  We feed her, and give her affection when she allows it, but she's never been really tame.  Now, as she ages, she's spending more time close to the house, and letting us bring her inside on the coldest nights.

Our other elderly cat is Churchill (or Church, for short).  He appeared, shivering on a -25 evening, outside the general store where I was working in early 2000.  He has been an incredible hunter over the years, but he's slowed down lately.  He's the kind of cat who's friends with everyone he meets.

Savanna is the baby of the bunch, though she must be 4 or 5 years old now.  We found her starving under a house that the human occupants had vacated.  Something must have killed her mother, and she was nearly dead.  She was just a scrap of fur draped over a skeleton.  She survived though, thanks to the fresh goat milk we gave her.  We call Savanna our "princess" because she is not only beautiful, she is also spoiled and demanding.

Sometime soon, we'll need another young, hunting cat.  Floyd will be happy -- he adores kittens -- but I'm not sure how Savanna will react.  It should be interesting.