Do You Think the Bill Collector Would Believe Me...

...if I said...

...the goat ate it?

In the midst of doing chores the other day, I went to the mail box and got the mail, laid it on the wagon, and left to do some other chores. When I came back to the barn, I found Monkey (whom you can't seem to keep in any kind of pen, and has now become pretty much a "free-range" goat) tasting the mail. :)

Goat, Pig, or Cat?

Thought I'd show you this picture of Geronimo, the barn cat. He's begun taking his meals on a shelf in the barn.
The reason? Monkey the Pig, er, I mean Goat, has developed a taste for cat food. If Geronimo is eating anywhere she can reach, the next thing you know, she's stealing his food.Don't worry, this particular sack she's diving into is cracked corn. I try to keep her out of the cat food if possible. It surely can't be good for her, can it? If I don't close the lid on the barrel where the cat food is when I leave the barn for a minute, upon my return I find her trying to get into that sack, too. One night when the wheel barrow was parked beside the feed barrel, she managed to climb high enough to reach Geronimo's "out-of-reach" shelf anyway.

Don't be surprised one of these days if I post a video of the world's first meowing goat. :)

Cafeteria Style?

Monkey the Goat during evening chores:

"Hey, don't they keep cattle food in here? I wonder what it tastes like?"

"Maybe I'll just go up to the barn and see what they've got up there."

"What? The sack isn't open?!"

"Um, excuse me, a little help here..."

"There, that's better. Thanks!"

"Mmmmmm. Corn. Delicious!"

Friends or Foes?

They haven't decided yet. :)

Monkey See, Monkey Do

One of the goats born on the farm this year has earned the nickname "Monkey."

Let me show you why.

If she sees anything she can climb, up she goes. Here she is on one of her perches. (A half-moon shed made from an old hog feeder.)


After nibbling at some leaves, she's ready to jump down...see how she has her front foot up? Ready, set, go!



And then down and off to the pasture.

New Kids in the Barn

Another of the goats had twins earlier this week. These are her first. She hadn't gotten very big, and I supposed she'd probably just have one. Instead, she had two very small ones. Here's a picture:

Here I'm holding them next to a large coffee can so you can get a better idea of how big (or should I say small) they are.

Still not a lot of fibery activity. Though I did start on a pair of socks the night before last. One of my sock yarns that didn't sell I decided to knit up and see how it looks. It's one I called "Fruit Smoothie" with pinks, purples, and blues. I'll try to get a picture of them after I've made a little more progress.

The house organization project is coming along. At least you can tell now that I've made progress. There's more hay to rake. They had a little down, but we had a couple of showers today, so that will put it off now for a day or two.

I've been putting up a little sweet corn this afternoon. I bought a couple dozen ears from the Amish yesterday and fixed half of it to freeze. Have to leave some to eat fresh, don't you know.

It looks really good...I think I should have bought more than two dozen. We like the homegrown corn even frozen so much better than the frozen corn from the store. I guess if I had more ambition, I'd plant some myself, huh?

Look What I Found...

...after I got home one day last week from getting groceries.



Baby goats! Remember the other day we put Emmy into the little shed thinking she was getting close...well, here they are! Twins, both boys.

They're not quite a week old now. They're starting to want to run and hop around. Thought maybe this would add a little cuteness to your day! In the next week or two, baby lambs should start arriving, too! :)

Never Try to Sneak Past a Ram

I had kind of a fright yesterday evening. One of our young goats, Emerald (also known as Emmy), looks like she might be close to...I guess it's called "kidding"? When sheep have lambs, it's called "lambing," and a baby goat is called a "kid"... Anyway, you get the idea. She's not very big, and I wanted to get her separated from the other goats and sheep in case she did have one. And also we're having a cold spell here, around 10 degrees or below this morning and maybe colder tomorrow morning. Goats have a tendency to go wherever they want to, especially if they can find any kind of hole or space in the fence. Remember Max, our Rambouillet ram? Kind of a tall fellow, weighing maybe 250 pounds?

Well, somehow Emmy had gotten in the little lot with him, along with another of the older goats. They did pretty well together most of the time, but most sheep and goats, when you put out the food, will ram into (no pun intended) each other trying to get to it. Most of them seem to have no manners at all. So I thought that with the difference in their size, I should get Emmy away from Max. I poured some of their evening corn over the fence, and still having some in the bucket, thought I would lure Emmy with it into the little enclosed pen inside the sheep barn. "Max will be all involved with eating and won't pay any attention to us," I thought. "We'll go around behind him and be inside before he's any the wiser." It started out just fine. Emmy stuck her head in the bucket and followed as I began backing toward the pen. We were getting close when Max noticed my bucket. Of course to a sheep, anything other than what you're eating must certainly be better than what you have in front of you, so here came Max. Emmy was used to dodging him and left. So here I am, backing into this little bitty space with nowhere to go. I tried to pull the wire panel in between us, but it had so much hay down on the bottom of it that I couldn't move it. I can't say that he was really charging at me, but I didn't want to stay there and ponder about it. Trying to sound fierce I shouted, "Get back!", but for some reason he didn't seem too intimidated. He was close enough that I gave him a whack with my too-small, light-weight plastic bucket. He backed up just a little, but came toward me again, so this time I yelled, "Get back!", threw the bucket at him, and jumped up on the fence. The bucket somehow landed right-side up and still had corn in it, so having gotten what he wanted all along, Max stuck his head in and began eating. As I perched there on the fence, I could feel my heart pounding. Needless to say, I climbed on out over the fence and didn't go back the way I came in.

My husband had just gotten home from work about the time I came up with this nutty idea, but had gone in the house for something before coming back out to do his chores. So, yes, it was a pretty dumb stunt on my part. After he came out, he helped get everybody sorted out. I tried to keep Max's attention (from outside the fence) while he got Emmy safely into her pen.

After I fed some hay this morning, Max's water was frozen in his pan, so I got some and poured through the fence. He had his back to me at the time, and I did take some fiendish pleasure in the fact that when I poured the water in, it startled him enough that he jumped. :)

Anyway, the moral of the story is: Never try to sneak past a ram.