Just Another Day

It was a productive day, here on the farm. I managed an early coffee, got some laundry started, and fed the goats. Yes, I'm raising three buck kids. They will be the guests of honor at some feasts this summer, so I'm trying not to get too attached. Fortunately, they can be boogers, and make it easy to stay distant. Yes, that sounds cold. No apologies.

After feeding, I flipped the laundry and headed into the western treeline. We have ignored and neglected parts of our property over the years; this was one of the worst. Two trees even fell during storms maybe two summers ago, and we finally got around to cutting them up last month. There were still broken branches, twigs, bark, weeds, undergrowth, to be managed. We did some of that this weekend, and I finished the job today. 10 hours later, a lovely fire is still at the red-hot coal stage, and the treeline looks fabulous.

After showering off the burrs and woodsmoke (my favorite men's cologne, but not my favorite womens'!) I flipped the laundry, had some lunch and headed to that bastion of farmland; Farm and Fleet. I was looking for a windbreaker, and some kid replacer. "Kid replacer" is not what we use when we're tired of the ones we have; it is baby formula for goats. In our preparation for Easter Sunday, I had managed to ignore the replacer supply, and we ran out last night. We put together a suitable replacement (a replacement for replacer...wow) of the bit that was left, some cows' milk, and some goats' milk that we found at WalMart. Why not just use that, you say? They're eating 9 pints a day, and that stuff we bought last night was $4/quart. For the math challenged, that would be $18 PER DAY. Its important to get good nutrition into these little guys; but that's just too rich for my blood!

I took a nap, fed the goats, paid some bills, flipped the, well, you know. I talked to some folks about meat animals, including the family I'll be buying some lambs from next month. We'll have a cute little flock of lambs and goats for the summer. Then it was time to get dinner started. We had a sirloin from the steer we grew last year; yum! Dishes. John headed out to work the fire in the treeline. Now we're in and settling down for the night.

As I said, a productive day. Nothing that will make the nightly news, but I hope I did what was expected of me today. Night, all!

(Please leave comments below, and not on Facebook. I really appreciate each one.)