Kids are arriving

Four kids have arrived so far.  3 doelings and one buckling.  Belle had hers yesterday around 6pm.  Two girls, one of which I had to push back in and grab her back legs and straighten them out, then pull her out backwards.  Belle's water broke, the water bag came out, then nothing.  I stuck a couple of fingers in there and felt two little hocks folded up against a little belly.  There was no way she was coming out in that position.  So, in between contractions, I pushed the kid way back in and got her in a good exit position.
    The second one came out correctly. They are quite lively and very cute. I'll post a picture or two soon.  I named the first one BB, for Baby Belle, and the second one is Samantha.   Midnight throws some really nice kids!!  Lots of great fleece, good conformation, and a decent personality on each one so far. I'm really looking forward to seeing what all he throws this year!  He was the "main man" this last breeding season, so there will be mostly his kids out there pretty soon.
  Now I get a break until around the first of April, then that week will be a flurry of activity.  10 does are due in the span of 7 days. Hope the weather is good that week.  

  The snow is melting at a good rate.  The frost has gone out of the ground now, so the water is soaking in good.  The rhubarb is poking it's little red heads out, and things are starting to turn green.  Now that the snow is going away, it's spring clean up time.  The dogs have scattered all kinds of interesting things out there that are now being exposed.  Pretty soon I'll be able to get the hoses out and end the bucket brigade for the year.   I did hear on the weather report that we are supposed to get some snow again next week, so I guess I won't get in too big of a hurry for green.  Spring in Montana can be interesting.  I do think we might have a rather dry spring, which will get everyone in an uproar about the upcoming fire season, but then we will get a fairly rainy summer.  We're already 1.3 inches below normal for precip this year.  At least down in the valley.   We still have a fair amount of snow in the woods. and on the flat areas.  The hill behind the house is completely bare now.  
  The robins are back!  I heard one this morning when I was out doing the chores.  Pretty soon I hope the pair of bluebirds we had last year come back.  I saw some down in Kila today, so they should be up here pretty soon.  I'd better get the old nest cleaned out of their spot.  
  
  Well, that's it for now.  I'll post some baby pictures soon...  

A good Poster

This is my new motto for now. :-)  I still have 15 goats to go, and it's been snowing for the last couple of days, getting them all either wet or damp, so I can't do any combing.

  One of the members on Ravelry made this poster (Quinn).  Thanks Quinn!!  She raises cashmere goats, too.

Kids are arriving

The first kids of the year have arrived!  Miss Astrid had twins on the 10th.  The tan one is a doeling and the black one is a buckling.  Christie and Cupid.  Christie has her mother's personality, an escape artist extraordinaire.   She's only a week old and already going anywhere and everywhere, dragging her brother along for the ride.  Astrid has her hands full with her.  Now I'll have 2 goats that always check the gates to make sure they are latched and closed securely, or out they go, taking most of the rest of the herd with them.  I hope they have as good a fiber as their older siblings!  They all have the softest, best fiber around.
 
  Well, I've put myself out there again.  Rather scary, but I'm to the point of either folding or expanding.  So I started a fund raising campaign on Indiegogo to raise the funds to expand.  The link is at the bottom of this page.  I really want to start a fiber arts retreat center up here,  also a farm stay vacation experience, plus expand the dehairing ability so I can dehair more cashmere for producers than I do now.  There is also my own cashmere to work with, combing, dehairing, spinning, crocheting, all that good stuff.
  Starting with new batteries for the solar power system, so I can power all of this!  Then a guest cabin to start the farmstay with.  A strawbale dehairing room with a washing and drying area, and room for the machine, too.  I plan on having the farmstay and dehairing provide the income to get the retreat center started.  Big plans I know, but this is really what I want to do, and I think we live in the perfect spot to do it.
   Remote, close to Nature, a great place to come and de-stress from the real world, relax and do some spinning, or knitting, weaving crocheting, dyeing, whatever fiber related activity suits you.  Take a break from the fibery stuff and go for a little hike through the forest, or visit with the goats, or take a nap in a hammock hung between two trees.  I want to bring in talented instructors to teach new techniques, and also have unstructured week-end get-aways for a few to just get together with friends and visit and do your fibery thing.
  There is such a great need for a good cashmere dehairing facility or three that I want to be able to do more than I do now so I can help more producers get their fiber processed in a timely manner.  I am not set up right now to do any more than I do, especially with the worn out batteries we are working with.  The machine takes quite a bit of power, so new batteries are the most important aspect of the whole operation right now.
  Obviously this all won't happen overnight, but I want to get the farmstay thing going by the end of this summer.  Fall is the prettiest time up here, so that would be a good time to start that end of things.  Next Spring will be the new dehairing facility.  I'd like to have that up and going by May.  Then by the Spring of 2015, I'll be ready to get the retreat center building started, and have that going, at least in a small way, by July.  Since my husband really loves to garden, he will be in charge of growing all the food to feed everyone.   We have lots of garden space to expand to, always a work in progress around here.
  I have a good network of friends and helpers willing and ready to chip in where needed.  It's going to be a fun, very busy couple of years getting this all up and running!   If you would like to donate some money to this adventure, that would be wonderful, or if you could please spread the word to people you think would be interested in this, I would really appreciate it! www.indiegogo.com/projects/338509/x/937189 
   Back to the goats; the next kids are due around March 10th, then the first week in April is going to be really busy, that's when the majority of the rest of them are due.  Christie and Cupid will be the "boss" kids this year.  They will be older than all the rest of them.  Glad Astrid had twins!

Well, that's it for now. Thank-you for your support!  

Chicken Feed

Today I put out some new feed for the chickens and they attacked that with gusto!  I had their regular feed out too, just to see which one they went for.  The new feed won hands down!  It's a non GMO, corn and soy free layer feed, with real grains instead of cooked pellets or crumbles.  It's more expensive than the other feed, but since "you are what you eat" I figure it will be worth it to have healthy chickens, eggs with nice orange yolks, and no questionable feed going into them.  They are getting real food now.

   I'm starting in on the cashmere harvest for this year.  So far it's looking really good!  I'm looking forward to getting it all dehaired before June.  This week I had some help around here and got a wall built along the alley way in the cashmere barn.  I've been wanting to do that since I built the barn a few years ago, and now it's finally done.  Thanks you guys!!  Now the girls have more shelter and there is more room in the alley way.  They had bent the fence panels enough that they were sticking out into the path I take the wheelbarrow on when full of hay to feed them, making it a challenge to get through there.  Not anymore, it's nice and wide and straight. ☺  Next up is the mid-winter clean up of the floor in there.  It's nice and dry, so the composted poo isn't frozen, making it much easier to clean out.  I made little sides for my plastic toboggan today so we can pile more in there at a time to haul over to the compost mountain.

  Well, I'd better get back to crocheting.  I'm making two cashmere hats for people.  I just have three more ounces of cashmere left to spin, and it will all be gone.  Yay!

  It's snowing a bit outside.  Hope we only get an inch this time!  A fresh dinner plate for the goats to eat off of.

     

A Year in Review

2012 has been quite a year!  Lots of changes, new faces, opportunities, good things, not-so-good things, all have been learning experiences.  

Starting in January with finishing up the dehairing of other people's cashmere, which took all of January, February and part of March to do.  Then came the cashmere harvest time.  I had help this year for the first time.  H and C were here, and they both got to bury their hands in the soft fiber of the goats.   Here they are combing Wilbur, who wasn't exactly sure he was going to survive this experience, since it was his first combing ever.  H&C did a good job with the combing.
  

 

Then came kidding season, with all it's trials and tribulations this year.  This was the most difficult kidding season I've ever had.  Starting with Ariel aborting her twins 21 days early, then going blind for two weeks! She's fine now, and pregnant again, so hopefully all will go smoothly this time around.  

Belle had twins this year, with one of them being born a whole hour later than the first one.  She came out all crooked and almost dead, just barely breathing.  I left her out there with Belle for an hour, thinking Mother Nature would decide what happened.  I went back out there and she was still breathing and Belle was still cleaning her up and trying to get her moving.  I decided with a will to live that strong, that I would try and save her.  So into the house she came.  I spent the rest of the night getting her warm, stomach tubing her mom's colostrum into her, and getting her going.  She actually lived!  I named her Sweetpea.  She was still pretty crooked, and deformed, but amazingly enough, she thrived, getting a little straighter with every week.  This picture was taken the day before I took her to her new home down by Elmo.  She is now a very well loved pet of a really nice woman who is very happy she has her.  I cried when she left, she was my little baby, but she is in such a good home now, I'm glad I let her go.  She is now almost totally normal, no visible crookedness left!  

Spice had triplets, two of which are in the above picture.  The little brown one ended up having to be put down, one of the hardest, saddest things I've ever had to do.  He had such a distinctive "foghorn" voice!  I will always remember that.  I remember holding him one day giving him his supplemental bottle and just getting this "knowing" that he wasn't going to be around much longer, and sure enough a few days later, I had to put him down.  One of the other goats must have stepped on him or something, breaking his back.  He couldn't stand, just lay there on his side flailing his legs.  Very sad....

Then April had complications with a single kid that was too big to come out, entailing a trip to the vet, a dead kid, and then April herself dying 24 hours later from having constant contractions that wouldn't quit!   They wore her out and she died from them.  There wasn't anything I could do to stop them, even after calling the vet more than once.  She was my highest producing goat, giving me 6.2 ounces of dehaired cashmere!   Big vet bill and two dead goats to show for it.  Not a good time!

There were 18 healthy bouncing kids born, so all wasn't bad.  H&C got the full spectrum of goat raising 101, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  They still want to have them someday, so that is good!

 Then Spring came, everything turned green and the yard and garden work began.  H and C moved out in May on a rainy cold day.  Then I signed up with the Help X exchange site, and had some new helpers come and go.  They were all a great help and fun to have around.  The goats got well-fed out in the forest all summer and into fall.

  

 I did some more dehairing of outside cashmere, mostly from Canada, throughout the summer and into fall, then finished mine.  

  

  A deer or two ate 90% of the garden this summer.  I did get some great asparagus, salad greens, some peas, a meal or two of green beans and a decent strawberry harvest before the deer ate it all.  New fencing is in store this coming year!  I also got a great garlic harvest, a few carrots, and lots of apples, which I just finished up tonight with a cranberry-apple crisp I made.  Yum!

I've sold all the cashmere I wanted to sell as cloud this year.  Now I just have to spin up the few ounces I have left into yarn and make a couple of accessories to sell, and I'll have it all gone.  A good feeling!!

Now it's on to 2013 and all the good things that year is going to bring.  More adventures, lots of cashmere to harvest, new kids, new helpers, and a good garden with no deer invasions, just to name a few of the upcoming good things in store for Pine Needle Farm.

                                                      Happy 2013!!  

The Perfection of Silence

Tonight as I was doing the evening chores, I stopped for a couple of moments and just stood there, listening to the absolute silence.  The sun was setting through the clouds, the air was still, all the animals were quiet.   It was a magical moment in time.  Made me appreciate where I live even more.  No human sounds at all.
  Then the neighbors started their generator and that was the end of that. ☺  I should do that, too.
  Our batteries for the solar power system are worn out.  They gave 9 good years of service, but now they are just not holding a charge anymore.  I am having to run the generator twice a day most days.   I think I probably shortened their lifespan when I first got the dehairing machine by deep cycling them too many times running the machine after dark, trying to get everyone's cashmere dehaired in a timely manner.  The machine doesn't like to run off the generator power, there is a little too much fluctuation in rpms for it to run smoothly. It will do it, but it doesn't sound as good as when it's off the solar power.  So I would wait till I was done for the night, then turn on the generator to recharge the batteries.  There were a few times when my husband came running down yelling that the batteries were way too low and to turn off the machine.  Next set of batteries will be treated better. :-)
   Now we just need to somehow come up with that money, which is in the thousands for as many batteries as we need.  Iron Edison has a 25 year battery which would be a really good thing to get, as opposed to the regular ones that last on average, 6 to 10 years.  Of course, they are way expensive, too, but in the long run, cheaper than buying a set every few years.  Whatever we get will be the third set in 18 years, so that's not too bad.  The first ones didn't last very long, they were our "learning" batteries.  It's amazing how much hands on you have with your own off-grid power system.  One learns to really watch their electrical consumption!

   The goats are all doing well.  There are 14 pregnant does out there, at least I think they have all settled now.  Midnight got quite a workout this year!  I'm looking forward to seeing what his kids look like.  I've only got three that he's thrown from last year, and the year before.  They are all well covered in excellent cashmere, so I hope all these coming will be, too.  It's always fun to see what comes out each year.

   Today I discovered that the ATV will actually pull the drag plow!  I've always thought it was too big and heavy for the ATV to pull it through snow to plow.  Sometimes the truck has a hard time.  But, today I plowed the whole driveway with it with no problem.  I almost got stuck turning it around out on the forest service road, though.  I had to really gun it and hold on in a circle to get it turned around.  The drag plow sure saves a lot of time.  It cuts a 10 foot swath, while the ATV plow only does a four foot swath.  Much faster at 10 feet!  :-)

  Well, that's all for now.  I am sure enjoying the mostly mild winter we are having so far.  Only 5 or so inches of snow on the ground now.  It's been above freezing again, too, so the snow is settling down good.  Haven't had to have to the forest service road plowed yet, so this is good!

Spinning and dyeing

Here's my latest adventures in dyeing.  The second one in on the left is actually a nice dark red wine color, not black like it looks in this photo.
  Now that the days are so short, I have more time in the evenings to do the fun stuff like spinning.  I'm finally almost done with the dehairing, too.  Now that the batteries are worn out, I really have to wait for some sun before I can run the machine.  I'm going ahead and running the generator twice a day for the next few days so I can get the rest of the fleeces dehaired and then put the machine to bed for the winter.  Next year I will not accept any fleeces for dehairing after September 1st.  

  I've got all the does bred now, except one.  I keep missing her cycle!  I'm watching her very carefully this week so I can put her in with a buck the minute I see she's in heat.   After she's bred, that will make 13 does that should be pregnant and have a kid or two in the spring.  The first week in April is going to be a busy one!   Once again it doesn't look like there will be a kid born on my birthday.  One of these years it's going to happen!  That will be a very special present for me when it does. :-)

  I am enjoying the lack of snow so far this winter.  We got about a half an inch this morning which didn't melt off today, so the ground is white.  We've been getting quite a bit of rain this month.  A couple of snowflakes, but no big dump, which is nice.  The only problem now is the ground is starting to freeze pretty good, and with all the mud, it's freezing into a very lumpy, bumpy area out in the goat pens.  Rather hard to walk on when I'm pulling the wheelbarrow in to feed these days!  The goats have made their little trails everywhere, so they aren't having too much of a problem, but I'm having a grand time staying upright in there. :-)

   Hunting season is now over for this year.  The dang road hunters are really annoying!  Our fs road was like a major thoroughfare, with lots of vehicles going up and down it every day.  Silly people, as I was going down, I would meet four or five rigs just far enough apart that they couldn't see each other.  Too lazy to get out and actually hunt for a deer, they just drive slowly up and down hoping one will jump out in front of them.  Besides being illegal, it's not very sportsman like.  They wouldn't get out of the way very fast, either.  One of the joys of living out in the woods. :-)  At least the season only lasts for 5 weeks.  I was bummed, nobody got the garden eating doe around here.  I was so hoping someone would.  I'm not overly fond of venison, or I would've tried for her.  Plus we have enough goat meat to get us through.  I'll just have to outsmart her with better fencing I guess.  I have a new plan, we'll see if it works next year.

   This year's kids sure have some nice fleece on them!  I can hardly wait till harvest time in the Spring!  Lots of soft kid fleece to play with.  They all have nice coverage on them.  Midnight is turning out to be a really, really nice buck!  He's throwing his great yield and style in his kids.  Lots of crimp, and good length.
Well, that's it for now....