Jenny
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Jenny is the same mean old goat as ever. She still holds her place as herd queen, leading everyone on expeditions through the woods and making sure they all stay in their places.

Jenny kidded with triplets in February. It was her third kidding. The other two times, she only had two kids. She was able to meet each individual need much better with those kiddings. With triplets, it was always just a big fight for the udder, three kids fighting for two teats. That wasn't much to her liking. She couldn't always make sure the runt had enough. 

Jenny has been a great milker this year. The other two have almost dried up, but this gal is still going strong. Because of too many single kids favoring one side of her udder, it has became almost hopelessly lopsided and uneven. We are still working to fix that (we have been for the past three milking seasons) but I think we are finally making headway. 

Honey

Honey, Jenny's daughter, has become a very sweet little doe. She has gotten very friendly since kidding. Surprisingly enough, Honey is our best behaved doe on the stand. Before she kidded, she would do anything she could to get away from you if you tried to touch her legs or belly, not to mention her teats. Now she is the only doe we have that doesn't have to have her back legs tied to prevent her from kicking over the pail. 

Honey kidded three weeks after Jenny with two pitch black little kids. She loved them dearly. She didn't like to let them nurse, whenever they nursed she would hunch up her back. However, she felt guilty about this and would always push them to the teats to make them nurse. She is our only doe that almost never kicks her kids to make them stop nursing or tells them they can't nurse. If she must, she very gently steps over them. 

Honey's production was outstanding, but she's dried off quickly. For a while she was giving six to seven cups a day.

Honey is partially the herd queen - she has all the benefits of being herd queen: eating the best food, sleeping in the best spots, etc, while Jenny does the dirty work: ensuring that rank. 

Binky

​Binky is just as sweet a little marshmallow as he has always been. When a goat is wethered, it pretty much means they are permanently turned into babies. Binky is sweet, cute, friendly, small, fluffy, adorable, and pretty much any other desirable characteristics in baby goats. He is the only wether on the farm that is going to stay here forever, so Jane and I have named him the Herd Baby. He will always be a baby, he won't grow up like other kids, and he will always stay here. Other babies will come and go, but not the Binks. 

Binky is Pinky's sister, and acts like her baby. After we had taken such special care to make sure Binky was at Pinky's birth, he decided the little minions were not to his liking. Binky jealously guards his place as Pinky's baby, and did not want other goats to take his place. Pinky in turn jealously guarded her babies and was rather inconsiderate of the poor Binks. After Pinky's kids got a little bigger, she didn't care for them any more and Binky and the kids became chums, so it turned out pretty well. 

When Ebony is in rut, Binky turns yellow. (That's all the explaining I'm going to do, I will leave it to your imagination how this phenomenon comes about.) When Ebony comes out of rut, in January, Binky gets all white and fluffy again. I have to learn again every January how cute Bink is. Right now, Binky is about as cute as it gets. 

Ebony

Ebony is doing well. We retained a buckling, now a wether, as a companion for him because he really needs a full-sized companion.

Quite a while ago, we had a temporary fence extending the buck pen. It had three lines, and was really rather short. Eb jumped over it a couple times, so we added another line on top. The problem was solved, or at least we thought. Just recently, we have found Ebony wandering around outside his pen quite a lot. He's gone to eat the blueberry bushes, visited the does, and gone to investigate the woods behind his pen. I finally caught him jumping over the fence, he cleared it like it was nothing. Sigh. 

Eb has been getting bigger lately. The time before last when I trimmed his hooves, his withers (the highest point on his topline above his shoulders) were higher than the top part of the stand where his head goes in. This morning when I trimmed his hooves, he just barely squeezed his head in. He has a bulky, tough neck and his scur wasn't helping matters. When I finally got him all the way into the stand, he had to kneel on his front front knees with his rump way up high in the air, and even so his neck was quite close to the top of the stand. His rump, in addition to his withers, are now much too high to fit. I have no idea how I am going to trim his hooves the next time it needs doing. 
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Eb has a hilarious face. In addition to his beard, he has a rather large cowlick type of thing on top of his crown and now he has sideburns. 

Those are all the goats in our permanent herd. The other four goats, or the temporary herd, are either for sale, or will be sold eventually. The goats above will probably never be sold. The temporary herd consists of Hickory, Dontcha, Lad and Scarum.
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Hickory

Hickory is still a silly, annoying little goat. We traded Jenny's second 2015 kid, Dahlia, for him in November. We hadn't yet sold Pecan, whom Hickory was replacing. Pecan had learned how to jump the fence and thus couldn't be kept as a herd sire. In the two weeks that they were together, Pecan taught Hickory how to jump the fence. We ended up wethering Hickory a few months after we got him. 

Hickory is almost always in with the does. He comes to milking and jumps in the stands, he tries to eat grain with the kids at night, and when it is best to be a buck it the buck pen, he is a buck in the buck pen, eating hay and grain and leaves, or whatever other goodies fall the bucks' way. 

Dontcha is Jenny's runt. He is past being the weakest and smallest, though. He is now bigger than his older brother. 

Dontcha will be staying here indefinitely as a companion for Ebony.

Lad

Lad is Jenny's middle trip. Calling him a cow is the perfect way to describe his temperament. He doesn't think he can do a lot, he's a big baby. He also has a tendency to look like a cow in pictures.

Scarum

Scarum is Honey's eldest. He is a sweet and annoying little kid. When his sister was still here, he hardly ever nursed, but as soon as she left Honey trained him to nurse often. To console herself for her lack of enthusiasm, I guess. 

Those are all the goats we have now. A few weeks ago, we also had Dwopple and Song, Pinky's kids, Wot, Jenny's doeling, and Triss, Honey's doeling, but they have all gone to their new homes. I hope to sell Hickory, Scarum, and Lad soon. After sudden change of plans, I will probably also be selling Dontcha, wethering Ebony, and getting a new Alpine buck. 

By Suzanne Tyler
​The Green T Goatherd

Every spring since the homestead's beginning, I, Jane, the chicken keeper, get a new batch of chicks, as the last year's batch has usually dwindled a little or a lot. (Ahem, Max. Really glad you seem to have gotten over your habit!) This year was no exception, this time the reason being that the Rhode Island Red population was down to one faithful old hen left over from the very first batch of chicks. That girl has been through a lot! Say hello to the month-old Rhode Island Red population replenishers. 

The chicks are currently at the stage of development that Suzanne calls the "Ugly Stage," which is when their feathers are growing out and they look a little ragged and patched. They will hopefully gain all of their feathers soon and then I can officially kick them out of the front porch box to the chicken coop and wash my hands of all the miserable work that comes with having chicks.

The pictures below are from when they were younger. The first one is from when they were itty bitty chicks and the second one was a little more recent. 

Sadly, for the first time, there is a cross beaked chick in our mix. This unfortunate deformity prevents the bird from eating and drinking properly, and it will be culled if it makes it to adulthood. The following [disturbing] pictures should effectively illustrate what I mean. 

I am really looking forward to when these babies grow up because, according to their breeder, they sit on eggs and hatch their own chicks. This desired [by me] trait is sadly rare among regular chickens from hatcheries. After all, if your hens have their own chicks, who needs hatcheries? The other reason broody hens are generally disliked is that they stop laying eggs while they are sitting and for a few weeks afterward, although this minor issue does not bother me.


​Written by Jane

We now have three bee hives: the yellow top bar hive, the white top bar hive, and Catywampus. We started the top bar hives this spring, and have had Catywampus for two and a half years.

Catywampus
Catywampus, formerly known as "the Langstroth," since that's the kind of hive it is, has turned into quite a fiasco. The workers running it decided to put brood in the honey supers and honey in the brood chamber. That means food where the babies go and babies where the food goes.

We replaced the comb in one of the empty brood chambers, with top bars, and the bees got busy, building comb and raising babies where babies are supposed to go. Everyone let out a sigh of relief. Problem solved. 

We added another super because they were running out of room for honey. It had regular foundation, not top bars. To our great annoyance and unhappiness, the ladies decided they no longer liked the foundation and would only build comb on the top bars. Well, whatever, maybe they would get desperate enough to use it.

If you have bees, you probably know how fun it is to catch and hold drones. Drones are male bees. They do not have stingers. When you pick them up they get all mad and angry, but there is nothing they can do about it. It's hilarious. When we were checking the hives one day, Jane and I were each holding a drone. As we were looking at them we noticed that each had three or four little red things crawling on them. After a little research, we learned that these red things are varroa mites, an external parasite. We still have to figure out what to do about it. 

Next we decided to buckle down and find the Langstroth queen. (We had not renamed the hive yet.) We combed through the hive. We found zero queens, zero eggs, zero larvae, and a good bit of capped brood. That means the hive had been without a queen for the last eight or more days. We did see some queen cups (brood cells for queens) so we were hoping they were raising up a new queen. A week or so later we checked again, and nothing, no queen and no eggs. After about a month without anything happening, we decided to get them a queen. We brought the queen home and put her in. She was in a queen cage to protect her from the workers until they accepted her. We checked them multiple times in the next two weeks. She got out and we couldn't find her. There was a possibility that those blockheaded workers had balled her. ("Balled" means they formed a ball around her and heated her until she died.) That's exactly what we needed. At that point all of us thought that Catywampus was a goner. Thankfully, a few days after the previous bee hive visit we found our queen. We all breathed a sigh of relief. 

In the next few checks we saw that the queen had begun to lay. There were new eggs, larvae, and pupae. The bee population wasn't as low as it had been.
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The next thing to go wrong was that the ladies just stopped making comb. Where are they going to put honey and baby bees if they don't make comb? Sadly, there is, as yet, no new comb.

There are those among us who still think ol' Catywampus is a goner. We'll update the blog with what happens. 


The Top Bar Hives 
The two top bar hives are doing great. The yellow one has more bees and comb than the white one, but both are very strong colonies. The two queens are busily laying eggs, and the workers are busy making comb, caring for baby bees, and collecting and storing nectar and pollen. 

We have totally stopped feeding them sugar water as they have plentiful honey and pollen stores. They have made an extremely large amount of comb since we got them. They started out from nothing and we have already had to move the dividers over to give them more room. 

In all, the top bar hives are doing impressively well. 

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Here are some pictures.

The bee yard:

Queens in the top bar hives:

A drone on Jane's arm:

Dad holding a top bar:

A closer shot of a top bar with comb. The white in the center at the top is capped honey and the golden around it is uncapped nectar. In the middle there is capped worker brood and some larvae scattered around that. The comb on the edges are not yet built out completely. 

Capped honey and uncapped nectar in the Langstroth:

Top bars in regular frames:

By Suzanne Tyler
The Green T Goatherd

On February 4, 2016, Dontcha Know was birthed by his dam Jenny, along with his brother, Laddie Buck, and sister, Wot Wot. His sire is Pecan, who he never got to meet. His nickname is Dontcha and his coloring is called cou blanc (in French it means "white neck") consisting of white forequarters, black hindquarters and black trim. Dontcha has a loving, big-hearted personality.

​Being the youngest and smallest of triplets, he was naturally going to be the runt. He didn't get a whole lot to drink because he wasn't as strong and couldn't take the teats away from his siblings and he couldn't latch as quickly or suck as hard as they could. Poor runts, for the fight of life is rigged against them. They are born small and weak. In their weakened state they sometimes cannot fight for enough food to survive, they get weaker and are more susceptible to cold and rejection by their mothers, and without human intervention would probably die. Dontcha was a lesser case and without help from us he would most likely still have pulled through. 

​Whenever we were with the goats we made sure all the kids' bellies were full and helped them, especially Dontcha, nurse if they needed to, but we couldn't be there all the time. I offered him a bottle, but he didn't take it because he wasn't hungry enough. In retrospect, I should not have given up until he took the bottle. 

​At a few weeks old, Dontcha developed scours and anemia and I put him on all of my goat meds. He stayed with Jenny at night when the rest of the kids were locked up so he would get plenty of milk. After a few weeks of thinking he was getting better, and then him getting sicker than he was previously, having varied symptoms, lagging behind in growth, and so on, he finally seemed to be past all the sickness. Despite us pumping yucky medicine into him and pulling his eyelids down to check for anemia, Dontcha became very friendly. He didn't, and still doesn't, like to be cuddled or held. He likes being petted like a big goat, with no emotions whatsoever going in either direction. 

Sadly, the problems were not over yet. When he had gotten the CDT vaccine at disbudding, he either reacted to the enterotoxemia vaccine (CD) or his body created an abscess because of the hypodermic needle. I'm guessing he had a reaction to the vaccine, because he later got another abscess in the place where his follow-up shot was.

If you have ever had a goat with an abscess, you probably know how nasty they are to deal with. Some people lance them early on by cutting open the abscess, draining the pus and then flushing the abscess with iodine or another disinfectant. The main argument against that is you have to lance it at the perfect time, right when it is about to burst, else it is very hard to do; it could get infected; etc. I decided to wait until it burst, then pressed it until all the pus came out.

​In these pictures you can see his abscess on the left shoulder.   

I watched Dontcha's abscess closely. It took about two months from the time of his shot for the thing to burst. At first it just grew and grew, until about golfball size. Then the hair fell out and the abscess became bald. Next the skin became dry, started to crack, and he began to ooze nasty pus out of the cracks. At that point I pressed the abscess to get the rest of the pus out and applied some ointment.

Some more pictures of the abscess. I thought I had taken  one after it popped but I can't seem to find it.

After Dontcha's abscess had mostly healed, I noticed that the hair growing back was brown! Dontcha now has an odd brown patch in the middle of the white. What in the world could an abscess have done to cause hair color change? My imagination is at a loss. Actually, it's not, just the ideas it comes up with are too silly to even think about considering. 

​If you hadn't noticed from previous pictures, Dontcha is not the prettiest looking goat ever. Alpines (at least ours) have very precise face markings. It is really quite gorgeous and goes with the rest of their trim very well. Our Mini Alpine kids have the face markings, but they are rather skewed and uneven and, well, ugly. I think Lad and Wot have mostly grown out of it, their faces are now just extremely intricate, but for Dontcha I can't say the same. 

​Dontcha has long and shaggy hair that looks a bit disorderly. That is one of the problems he has never gotten over. His hair is still very shaggy and long.

​There is also a third aspect to Dontcha's not-so-great looks. His white hair, on his cou blanc (if you recall, that means "white neck" in French) has begun to fall out, revealing a rather unappealing grey color. Oh well, he was never that pretty to begin with. 

Originally, I had planned to keep Lad as a companion for Ebony, our Alpine buck. Why? Because Lad was the largest kid and he was gray, a color we didn't have. When Dontcha was a little over two months old, we decided to keep him instead. I had grown really attached to him. He has a very lovable personality, whereas Lad is just a big baby, always crying, getting stuck and left behind, needing help, and even letting Song, half his size, boss him around. Dontcha had the will to survive from early on, which now translates into eating food and drinking milk long past being full until he is totally exhausted. The will to survive also translates into him knowing how to fight. He will fight for food, toys, and just for fun. For Dontcha, fighting is a way of life, and that is exactly what Eb needs: a goat that can and will challenge his authority. 

​Jenny almost never lets her kids nurse. If she does, it means total turmoil and three goats fighting over two teats. We have started leaving her locked in the stanchion after milking and letting two kids at a time nurse. Usually, I let Jenny out after the kids have all had a good bit. One or two kids are still nursing at that point. Once, I decided to leave Jenny locked up until they were all totally finished. Dontcha was the last kid to stop. Boy, could the kid drink and he wouldn't stop. It must have been half an hour, an extremely long period of time for dam raised babies to nurse, when he finally let up. Then he just stood there swaying, with a foamy muzzle and eyes half closed. It was hilarious, he had nursed so long he was milk-drunk!

When Dontcha was sick, we left him with Jenny overnight while the other kids got locked up. In the mornings, when we went to milk the girls, Dontcha would watch the does leave the barn, cry for a moment, and stay with his siblings. Dontcha loves his siblings.

One last picture, my favorite:

By Suzanne Tyler
The Green T Goatherd