Chickadee & Wren Our friend Louise knew that kidding season had started on our farm in February with a difficult birthing that required veterinary assistance. “Y’all deserved an easy birth,” she said, when she heard that our goat, Chickadee, had just had an uneventful kidding. An easy birth means the doe had a few hours [...]
Most goats are very considerate about having their babies during waking hours for their human companions. In fact, in five years of camping out near the barn on our motor home, with a baby monitor tuned in to the birthing stall, I had not once been awakened to the grunting sounds of a doe in [...]
If you have goats, you know the smell of a buck in rut. It is the odor that gave Billy Goat his stinky reputation. For the first time since we started raising goats four years ago, our neighbors adjacent to the barn sit on their deck and hope a breeze will blow Moores Pond Farm’s [...]
It is becoming a mantra. Every morning after five does have filed into the milking parlor and hopped up on the stand to be milked and fed, I mumble to myself, “Too many goats! We have too many goats!” Pouring the milk into gallon containers, I mutter, “Too much milk; we have too much milk.” [...]
“They need to give the weatherman a window in his office.” Ronnie, the guy who cuts and bales our hay, had arrived with his baling equipment just in time for the first sprinkling of rain on the field he had cut a few days before… when clear weather was predicted to prevail for most [...]
Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life? –from “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver I. Summer, 2010 It was August. I was weeding the asparagus patch, fully absorbed in extracting every unwelcome intruder— talking to myself about how weeds thrive in mulch, including the [...]
If you read my blog on “The Zen of Milking,” you met our first doe, Heidi. Her official name was McRingger BeBop, but we could tell right away that she was not a BeBop. If she was any kind of dance, it was the “Aloof.” Before I knew that people actually have goats they call [...]
Our local newspaper has a daily page of puzzles: a Crossword Puzzle, Sodoku, the Jumble, and the Cryptoquote. I do them all, but the Cryptoquote is my favorite. It might say something like CZBN OF N LEEP PEL. When you match up the letters to the ones in the quote, that translates as BELA [...]
“My idea of prayer is to milk my goat and just be there with every bit of myself engaged for fifteen to twenty minutes of squeezing her teats and listening to the sound of streams of raw milk squirted rhythmically into a stainless steel bucket; and then to give as much mindfulness to chilling [...]
”Goat Bells” The six bells were a casual purchase in a hardware store in Switzerland. “I want six goats,” said Chuck, who was charmed by herds of Alpine goats jingling across country roads, their bells echoing into the Alps as they stopped traffic. “That sounds nice,” I said, without much thought. I knew that the [...]