Goat-lets!

DISCLAIMER: This isn't the new and improved blog system... life has a way of messing with my awesome plans. Oh well.

In case you didn't know, baby goats are called Kids, just like people. My dad has a friend who came over one day to see the goats we had at the time and was a little confused.

"Whatcha call 'em, Hoss?" he asked. "Goatlets?"

So, it stuck and we've said Goatlets ever since.

 (By the way, if you say something weird around my family there is a chance you will change the way we talk to each other forevermore. Don't say you weren't warned!)


Without further ado, look at what were born between 7AM Saturday and 5AM Monday! 

Make it Monday - Feed Trough

So I'm going to try something new in an effort to keep things more organized on here - Mondays will be Make it Mondays with DIYs. Wednesdays will be Wacky Wednesdays and that'll be for all the random stuff I want to post (plus there was a book of that title that I loved when I was a kid.) And Fridays will be Frugal Fridays with money saving tips and ideas. I might not do all three each week but we will see what I can do!

Today's Make it Monday post is about the little goat feed trough we made a couple weeks ago. You could modify it and use something similar for bigger goats, sheep, llamas, a pack of dogs if you're into feeding packs of dogs... basically any smaller animal. If you got a really huge piece of pipe you could make one big enough for cows. 

Since the goat population explosion we needed something bigger than one pan to feed them all in. We were using several plastic dog bowls as a temporary solution but the bowls were getting busted up and it wasn't at all convenient. 

We went to TSC and they had a little goat feeder that hung on a wall, but it was $14.95 and I knew there had to be a cheaper way to handle this! Plus I knew what kind of feeders my dad had built for their sheep, using angle iron and PVC pipe, I figured we could do something close with scrap wood and PVC. So off we went to Lowes.

Adventures with Milly-the-Goat Part 2

Posts like this probably seem a little silly. The chances that any one of you could find yourself in this exact situation are most likely slim to none. I'll write them, however, because A. It might inspire you to come up with some crazy creative solutions of your own and B. because I want to show off how crazy and creative I am. (Well, if we're being honest here...!)

So, anyway, after the whole bloat fiasco Milly has been doing better but she still seemed a little off. More cold than off, really, which was no wonder since it was suddenly 30 something degrees and snowing and sleeting. She's a skinny little thing anyway (been trying to get weight on her but its slow going) and I didn't want her to be more stressed and burning more calories and getting skinnier just to stay warm.

When my parents have tiny lambs in the winter and they look cold, my mom will actually get toddler sweatshirts from Goodwill and stick them on the lambs. It works, but I just didn't happen to have any goat-sized sweatshirts lying around. I did have a couple old tank tops, but a tank top isn't a lot of help in a snowstorm. So, I hoped she was getting out of the cold in the barn and didn't come up with anything.

Monday morning while I was at work I had a brainstorm and when I got home I grabbed the 2 pairs of wool socks I didn't want any more and went to work.

We got these socks cheap and then realized they were huge tube socks. Neither of us like huge tube socks and I was going to get rid of them when TA-DA! Slit them down the side, cut off the toes, sew them all together...

Look at Milly now! 

Yes, I have a goat that's wearing a sweater dress. That's made of socks. And yes, I spent some time yesterday sewing said sweater dress for a goat. Toldya I was crazy!

I don't know if its the dress or the extra dose of Probios I gave her yesterday but you should see her now! She's back to her normal perky self. 

So I guess the old-timers were right when they made up the old rhyme:

Use it up, wear it out,

Make it do, or go without!

How about you? What crazy thing have you repurposed into something else you needed?

Adventures With Milly-the-Goat

Lots of children's books promise adventures with farm animals, and fun and pleasant things normally happen in these stories. In real life, "adventures" with farm animals aren't quite like that. 

Like this past week with Milly-the-Goat. Milly is kinda the black sheep of our goats. She's kinda a loner, and the others beat up on her. But she is very sweet and friendly with people, so she is J's favorite. 

On Wednesday I decided to clean chicken pens, because the weather was nice and warm. So I grabbed my tools and a beer and went out and started working. I penned up all the goats in the outside pen, locked Milly in the barn, and got to work.

Well, Milly got out of the barn and came out to "help" me. She kept getting into the chicken feed and bedding, but I didn't really think much of it. I kept chasing her off and went back to work.

The next morning after I was at work, J called me to say Milly didn't look right and she had a dirty backside. 

Great.

I'm still pretty new to the goat thing and I don't know goat problems like I do chicken aliments. So I texted back and forth with my mom, who suggested a few different things and I planned to check on her when I got home.

When I got home Milly was standing out in the sun, and she didn't look too awful. But she did look fat (for her, she's a skinny little goat) and she had obviously scoured some. (Scours is what you call diarrhea in the farm world.) Hmm.

I called Mama again, and while we were talking I noticed Milly kept burping her cud up and swallowing right away, over and over again. She didn't seem to enjoy it. Heck, watching her do it like that was starting to make me feel a little queasy too!

Mama said to just leave her for a little bit and then check on her later. So that's what I did.

A couple hours later Milly had some obvious bloating and she was still doing the "weird burp thing". Ruminants, like cows, goats, and sheep, can't throw up but I'm pretty certain that's what Milly wanted to do at this point. And at this point I was starting to get worried. Maybe a little panicked. That "you don't know what the hell you're doing!" feeling was cropping up.

I wasn't even sick and I wanted my mommy.

Well, I guess I sounded like that on the phone, because she came on over, bearing a Downton Abbey totebag filled with sheep supplies, wearing mud covered blue jeans and workboots.

"I took so long because I had to stop at Food Lion. They looked at me a little weird," she explained.

That's my mom!

So we began doctoring Milly. First, we took her in the barn away from the dogs and tried to get her to burp some but that was making her uncomfortable. So we decided to try tubing her, by putting a little tube that's meant for tube-feeding lambs and kids down her throat and hopefully getting some gas out that way.

That helped, then while the tube was still in we poured in some peanut oil and some activated charcoal. The oil helps to release the gas bubbles in the gut and it also kinda lubes things up so they'll start moving right again. The activated charcoal does for animals what it also does for humans - it adsorbs toxins that she may have ingested.

She didn't approve of all this nonsense and so she bit the tube in half, and Mama had to stick her fingers down the goat's throat to catch the tube before Milly swallowed it!

Then Milly got a belly rub and she burped a lot, and we could see her sides go down. After a couple laps around the yard on a leash, she was looking much better. We put her in a little pen in the barn and Mama went home.

At choretime I gave her some Survive! lamb and goat drench, which has a lot of nutrition and vitamins in it, and some Probios, which is a paste that contain lots of probiotics, to help jumpstart her digestion. She was looking perkier, and I went to bed. 

In the morning, she was a little fat again, but a walk solved that. I also gave her some more oil and charcoal all by myself, and I didn't get it on my work pants! I felt very accomplished, especially because it was 6 AM!

In the afternoon, Milly jumped the fence and got out, and there hasn't been any bloat since. She still isn't acting quite right, but it went from being 70 degrees the day she got sick to snowing 3 days later, so I kinda think that isn't helping anything. Plus I forgot to give her mosr Probios until today, so maybe that's part of it. She's eating some and everything, she's just still not 100%. But she's also learned that if she looks pathetic she gets spoiled... more details in Adventures with Milly the Goat Part 2!

Milly not feeling good

The next day!

Fix-it Friday: Better than a Snowball

Somewhere along the line we knew someone who knew someone who said that any hay, no matter how rough or old or rained on, it was "Better'n a snowball." Meaning of course, if the cows or other animals in question were hungry enough come winter they'd eat it and be glad they had it.

Anyway, I'd been wanting to post something but the past week just didn't seem like homestead blog material. We did butcher quail and chickens over the weekend, but I didn't want to start this blog off with a bunch of "graphic" pictures about how to butcher chickens. Everything else had been rather bland and "normal" until yesterday I realized we needed a solution for the goats' hay.

We used to only have 2 goats, Oreo and Drama Queen. (Well, Drama's name is actually Sunny, but Drama Queen reflects her personality.) They are Nigerian Dwarf goats, which are essentially miniature dairy goats. The plan was that they could help eat the grass and weeds in the yard around the chicken pens and the garden, and eventually we'd breed and possibly milk them.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I was browsing Craigslist looking for a gate and came across a ridiculously good deal on 5 Nigerian does (females, for the uninitiated.) Well, I love a good deal, and I knew I could always resell some or all of them. I told J and he said I "should totally jump on it!"

The one really stupid thing around here is we dont have a truck. We have a SUV and a trailer, and that combination works for most of our hauling needs. But I wasn't sure that would work for this trip, and it seemed like having a companion to go with me on a Craiglist trip was a better idea. Since J was at work and this was the best time to go get them (and she has a truck) I got my mom to go with me.

She has a (much better) blog too... here is her post about the goats:

http://homesteadhillfarm.blogspot.com/2013/11/some-serious-shopping.html

So anyway, long story short, we have 7 goats for now. Since several of them are bred, it may be more before its fewer, and going into winter with its lack of sales and green grass is sorta stressing me out.

They've eaten most of the grass and fallen leaves in the yard, so hay is in order. But where to put it? If you just put hay on the ground, they throw it everywhere and trample it, making a huge mess and wasting your work and money. Last year with 2 goats, a little rack that was supposed to hold trashbags under the sink worked. But there was no way that would work with this many.

I contemplated building something, but nothing seemed right and it DID seem too complicated for a mid-week project. Then I got to looking at the "green pen."

The "green pen" is whats left of a really cool chicken pen my dad and I built. It did a great job for my chickens back in the day, but its had a long hard life. It used to look like this:

But almost 8 years of the elements and housing a lot of assorted animals had taken its toll, and when the goats kept jumping on the runs and busted all the lids, J and I cut the runs off and left the houses for possible future use for broody hens or something. (You always need an extra pen!) So now it looks like this:

Kinda sad, huh?

The roof lifts up to provide access inside, and it still stays dry. I started thinking if I just cut holes in the sides, we could put hay inside and the goats could pull it through the holes. So when I got home from work, I went and got one of the jigsaws and started cutting.

(I say one of the jigsaws because J inherited all of his grandfather's tools, and since his grandfather was a woodworker and a flea market junkie, we now have about 2 of everything. And about 800 drill bits.)

This is how you tell around here who did the work on a project. If J does it, its perfect, square, everything is measured 2 and 3 times to be sure its exact... if I did it, it involves lots of zip ties and electrical tape, probably some fence wire and possibly a feed bag, and "looks about right" is a measurement. I can do very nice work, but a lot of what I do is on the fly problem solving so if it works who gives a crap what it looks like. So, that being said, this is what the green pen looks like now!

Brenda, Drama, and Oreo testing the new hay feeder

The holes aren't perfect and they aren't spaced evenly and now the green pen looks like a chicken house and a coon dog box had a baby, but hey, it works! 

And Im thinking, come springtime, I'll figure out a way to tack up some hardware cloth inside and block the holes and it can be a pen again.

Now, we just need to go buy more hay... its always somethin'!

BY THE WAY... if you are interested in building a "green pen" of your own, I sell plans that show how to do just that! (And it doesn't have to be green. I had one customer paint theirs in University of Tennessee orange.) Check this out!

Buy Pen Plans Here!