This is our new goat and her kid... with Maggie and Dora pregnant and therefore not milking my cheese making abilities are going to waste. The lady that sold me Maggie and Grace had just had a new 'batch' of kids so the farm kids and I went off to have a look this morning and look what we came home with. Conversation on the way home went like this:
Me: so kids, what do you think we should call the new goat
Felix: Rusty, or Dark Vader or Luke
Me: well, it is a girl goat so maybe we could have a girl name
Emily: lets call her What the Heck
Me: why would we call her that
Emily: so we can say What the Heck is her name! (very pleased with herself)
Me: (impressed that she has come up with that by herself but not sure if What the Heck is acceptable pre-school language and not sure if I will get in trouble from her teacher at some point this week) laugh .. NO
After much of this type of discussion on the way home we have settled on Chloe for the baby and Amanda for the mum. Being the bargain that she was (I got her for meat money) she hasn't actually been handled and attempted to climb the walls out of the pig trailer when we climbed in to lead her out. I am not sure whether this bodes well for milking... Maggie has slowly improved but have had time to work on her. Not sure if I have bitten off more than I can chew.
James has had a long weekend of fencing and has managed to catch a cold in the process - he is off tomorrow for a long 7 hour return trip to pick up our new boar... photos of Dennis to follow. I will stay and hold the fort here.
This week I also learned theoretically how to hatch out eggs. It goes a little something like this:
1. Collect up the eggs and leave them out of the fridge, pointy side down for up to 3 weeks until you have a decent clutch for the hen
our version: put them in the fridge and had a mad scramble to find suitable eggs - now have 'fruit salad' approach which means we have 4 duck eggs, 1 silkie and one unknown in the batch for the hen.
2. Make sure you have moveable nests in the main chicken pen so you can take the hen out at night and put her in a separate pen to hatch the eggs.
Our version: take the chicken out in the middle of the day because you keep forgetting to do it at any other time, make husband do it because the little hen keeps pecking you very scarily and then watch him tell you to stop being a whimp but use heavy leather gloves to pick up the hen and move her anyway. Watch her escape and run all over the hen house making so much racket that the rooster starts looking like he might have a go at you. Corner her and shove her into the new hen area and wonder whether she will ever sit on or even lay another egg as long as she lives.
3. Once the hen is sitting happily in new area, lift her gently and place the eggs underneath her.
Us: push the eggs underneath her whilst dodging her beak and hope that she will organise them herself later - telling yourself that they have sat on a bench for a week and being a little outside the nest for a night won't hurt them.
I wonder...will it work?