It's cold. It's dark. It's muddy. I leave for work in the dark, I come home and it's still dark. I don't like winter. But I DO like the free time I have to catch up on crochet projects.
Most of farm life is on hold in the winter. I dried up Mystique because milking a half gallon twice a day was just getting to be too time consuming. When she kids at the end of February I'm going to leave her babies on her so that I don't have to milk if I don't want to. While it is easier to sell bottle babies, it is SOOOOOOO nice to have the flexibility to milk whenever I want. And now the human kids are complaining about goat milk so we aren't going through all that milk she was giving us.
I learned something new this week - a doe who aborts her babies can go back into estrus a few weeks later and be rebred. I didn't have a clue that was possible until Daisy did just that. Basically what happened was that she had explosive diarrhea so I wormed her and treated her for coccidiosis and stuck her with a ton of needles, which she didn't appreciate. She lost a ton of weight and was lethargic and not her normal self. I then noticed bloody discharge, which is a pretty good sign that she aborted. I put the buck in with the does because he wasn't getting enough to eat in with the sheep who were bullying him, and darned if Daisy wasn't wagging her tail at him and following him around talking to him. So it looks like late May babies for Daisy. Speaking of May babies, Daisy's daughter got inadvertently bred. I thought breeding season was over - I hadn't seen her go into heat for quite a long time. Apparently I was wrong because Hef had his way with her again and again and again.....Now I just need her to grow a little bit in the 5 months between now and kidding so that she's big enough. I'd like her to have been another 10 lbs heavier before breeding, but oh well.....
I'll tell you about the chicken that P glued back together another time.....
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