In the months of January and February, we had some really cold days/night
s. Too cold for new borns to be out in the weather. We ended up with 6 bottle babies, after having so many losses. We just didn't want to go through all of the losses again. It was a great learning experience for us. Since we live 20 minutes away from where we keep the herd, it was really nice to be able to look out our back window and see the little goats. After about 6-7 weeks, we had decided to bring home one more male goat. He was 6 weeks old and doing well, but we wanted him tamed so that we could keep him to breed. Just look at him...isn't he a beauty??
s. Too cold for new borns to be out in the weather. We ended up with 6 bottle babies, after having so many losses. We just didn't want to go through all of the losses again. It was a great learning experience for us. Since we live 20 minutes away from where we keep the herd, it was really nice to be able to look out our back window and see the little goats. After about 6-7 weeks, we had decided to bring home one more male goat. He was 6 weeks old and doing well, but we wanted him tamed so that we could keep him to breed. Just look at him...isn't he a beauty??Anyway, fast-forward a few more weeks. It's time to take the babies back out into the field. We felt Choco (our beautiful buck pictured on the right) needed a little more time to get use to us. So we left him and 2 other males behind. We took the other 4, 2 bucks and 2 does out to the field. They were quite a bit smaller than most of the other babies we had out in the field. That mother's milk just makes them so much bigger! The herd didn't quite accept them and pushed them around a bit if they got in the way, which was to be expected. It was hard to leave them there, for a couple of reasons. One, we didn't want to leave them. We had grown used to having them at home with us. And two, because they tried to follow us out of the fence. Since they are so small, they slipped right through without being shocked.
By afternoon, when it was time to feed the goats, all 4 of the babies were accounted for, but still weren't really merging with the herd. When morning came and the goats were fed, we were missing one of the babies. To make matters worse, it was one of the does we had. Her name was Girlie. We had nursed her through pink eye and bottle fed her most of her life. She was super sweet and had really cute floppy ears. To say we were sad is an understatement.
We looked for her a few different times that day. At one point all 4 of us were out there searching the woods and calling for her. We found no trace of her anywhere. That night before my son came home, he was being followed by the remaining 3 babies. He watched 2 of them go through the fence, following him to his car. At that point we decided to just bring them back home.
So now, here we are with 6 goats in our yard again. Still missing Girlie, but not wanting to take a chance on loosing the others. We are in planning mode to try to figure out how to get these 6 out in the field and keep them safe.
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To say that homesteading with no home or land of our own is fun and easy would be quite the understatement. Don't get me wrong, we do enjoy parts of it and we do consider it quite the blessing. We have inherited a herd of goats (starting around 26 and now up close to 60), have borrowed land from friends to let them graze on, and so many other blessings along the way that are really too many to recall right now. However, it's been far from easy. If I'm being really honest, it's been a huge time commitment and a bit of a money pit. The struggle is real.
Now that I've said all of that, would we take this opportunity again, now that we know a little bit about what it involves, I think the answer is yes. What better way to learn than to jump in and just do it? Ok, so maybe having a truck and trailer first would have been beneficial, but still...yes, we'd do it again.
We would, however, change a few things along the way. For starters, we probably would have fenced in a smaller area and giving a few sections so that we could keep a better eye on things and segregate the goats as needed. We also would have been better equipped to handle cold weather and a few medical issues. But, again, we are doing this all backwards so all we can do is the best we know to do.
Since my last post, we have lost one of our bottle babies. She ended up quite bloated and we just didn't know in time what to do about it. We tried...even to the extent of taking her to Ace (where my husband works) and doing a little tubal "surgery" on her while there. We had called our vet and followed his suggestions. It was just too little, too late.
That was a super hard day for us. It happened to be another cold day, our co-op had been canceled. So my youngest and I thought we'd have time to catch up on things around the house and have a more easy-going day at home. Boy, was that ever wrong! Instead, when we went out to the pasture to feed the goats, we found one of our missing kids (she had been gone a day or 2 and we just couldn't seem to find her) along with a few other kids who didn't make it for one reason or another. One of them was barely alive and we did all we could to revive her. I even wrapped her up and cuddled her close in my coat. But, sadly, that same day, we took a 6 kids out to the pasture (aka livestock graveyard). This left us with 6 kids in the field and, well...honestly I can't remember the time frame anymore. I don't remember when we brought home our newest set of bottle-fed twins. But we currently have 6 bottle babies at home and 6 thriving babies out in the field.
We are having another, even worse, cold front today and the next couple of days. So hope and pray this all goes well.
On top of this, our goats have been getting out of the electric fence. We have tried for several days to fix it. We finally bought a new fence charger last night, only to realize that the electric box we were planning to use didn't work. So now my boys are out in the VERY cold weather trying to take care of it because, once again, the goats got out. But that's all a story for another post.
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