Ah, to be in NW Pennsylvania, in the Springtime...with goats!

Hello!

It’s spring, and everything is bursting with life, kind of. It’s actually been very cold and wet and here we are a few weeks before when the gardens are supposed to go in, and I haven’t planted most of the stuff that says “plant in spring, as soon as you can work the soil”. The soil has been constantly wet, and with the high content of clay we have in the soil, it’s better not to touch it. I did rent a rototiller for a day and got the main gardens turned over. I wanted to break up some sod to add a wildflower patch, but it rained the second day I had the tiller and that was that.

I like having the truck, because I never would have been able to just on a whim decide to throw a tiller in the back of the car. Also, we bought a load of bulk mulch which was so cheap it was practically free, but again with the car, you need prebagged and they won’t just dump a yard of topsoil in the back of the car with a front loader.


A properly concealed garden border

We had just enough nice weather to complete a new garden project. When we moved in, there was this decorative rail fence right next to the driveway. There were some rose bushes and a few flowers there, but mostly it had been overrun with some angelica that had been used as some kind of ground cover. I’ve been fighting with that darn stuff, but also the garden was too close to the drive, and gravel was wandering in and and topsoil was wandering out. I’m fairly shy of garden edging, because I’ve seen too many gardens where the edging was not place into the ground deeply enough and was there, just flopping around on the surface. I gave in, though and we placed some garden edging around what we now call the “hitching post” to keep it straight from the snake rail fence that we put in on the other side of the yard. A lot of the plants, like tulips and daffodils were kept in place. Last year, I reduced the among of angelica and pulled up a lot of roots, but I need to get going on that. So, right now, we have a mix of mostly bulbs and the garden is probably going to keeps it’s role as an overflow for any annuals that don’t fit in with the strictly annual garden at the side of the house.

My plants are doing quite terribly. The cold weather kept them indoors much longer than usual, and when I finally got the greenhouse pitched, we of course had a patch of the only warm weather we’ve had since last September. We had 80 and 90 degree temperatures and high winds which caused the plants to tip over because they were all spindly and weak from not enough light inside, and then the sun baked them. The biggest loss was some red onion plants which ha been damping off and the polygonum which luckily had enough seeds in the pan that had not sprouted that have sprouted since then that I will have plenty to dress up the rail fence garden with this year.

Since then, the weather has been quite awful. Cold and windy. Last Saturday my greenhouse actually blew down with a lot of plants inside. Only a few things were a total loss, but some of the peppers were scrambled and the cabbages that I replanted after the hot weather killed them were also smashed. Ah well, maybe this fall. I need a permanent green house, but I’ll have to get it someone impractical, possibly in the same area we are clearing for the orchard, mostly because I don’t want to block the view from the upper yard.

We’ve had an ongoing battle with some kind of upper respiratory infection with our cats this year. The poor things are so inbred they don’t have good immune systems and the four new kittens are all suffering. One of last year’s cats died, but everyone else seems to be suffering from the snuffles and that’s it, except one of our house cats Boots who has been sick off and on. But the puppies are healthy and big and getting better behaved all the time. My sister swears little Spencer is my old dog Zora reincarnated, but think that Weimaraners have a distinctive personality, and even though he’s a mix he has that great prance and that not so great constant hypervigilant thing going on where every noise is something he needs to either chase after or stare at, poor little guy.




We also got the goats sheared, which is always a task. Here’s Matty with his new short coat. He's a little knicked up, but the spots on him are red kote and not blood, which is like industrial strength Bactine plus dye for livestock. The goats are usually pretty easy to take care of except for shearing. They weigh about 120 pounds apiece and they do not want to get sheared. My sister’s husband’s cousins just got some goats and asked if I would shear them, and I said I would loan them the shears and cheerlead. I talk to goat people all the time, and they make it seem like shearing angoras is not a big deal, but I’ve also discovered that my goats are a smidge bigger than average. I have runty cats and giant goats.



A lot of people get into goats kind of by accident. I know that we did. The idea was to get some to eat down the brush in our friend’s horse pasture. You’d need a lot of goats to eat down that much brush, though, and the goats like landscaping a lot better. They are little escape artists, too. Mostly you just have to feed them, but they also need to have their hooves trimmed, ideally about once a month. Unlike horses, goat hooves can be done without calling in a professional. you can even do them with a good pair of garden trimmers, though we also keep a set of hoof nippers.

if a goat’s toes get too long, the stress on their joints can give them arthritis You can also control foot problems by giving the goats some rocks to stand on an walk on in the pasture to grind down the hooves a little. Other than catching and holding the goats down, the hoof trimming is not that much more than trimming your own toenails.


Around here, it’s so wet the goats constantly battle hoof rot. In the case of hoof rot, trim away as much of the rotten and damaged hoof as possible, even to the point where the hoof may start to bleed. There are a lot of hoof rot products on the market, you just need something with a drying agent and a little antiseptic. The stuff we use comes in a bottle with a little spout you can shoot right up into the hoof. If possible keep the goat in a dry, clear area for a while after treating the foot, and do it daily until there’s improvement. After the foot is trimmed back, I usually give the goats sa snack on the driveway and just shoot hoof rot treatment on their feet while they’re standing around and don’t bother to try and throw them down.

Goats are nice little creatures with lots of personality. They can do some damage to your favorite trees and flowers and the plants in your garden and your house plants and your car. they also live a long time, about 10-15 years. I would much rather someone get a cat or dog on a whim than a goat because of the difficulty of getting hooved animal rescue, but I do like the goats, and they are a great pets because they are low maintenance in the main and getting an ill advised goat is loads better than getting an ill advised horse!

Wet Weather is For the Birds!

Hi!

It’s been a really cold and wet spring here in NW PA. In a way, that has been great, because I have not had to do much mowing and yard work. But my gardens are kind of hung up, too. All the leaves are on the trees about halfway out, and they’re just kind of hanging there, waiting for it to get warmer. My early plants like spinach and radishes are about the same. I read all these things about spinach being a cool weather crop and how you can’t grow it later in the spring, but I’m going to have to make a note in my garden book about this one, because I thinking I’d be having spinach salad and spinach quiche and all good things like that if we’d had a few days where the temperature got over fifty degrees.

I have my main vegetable garden turned over, but the lower one is at a standstill because it is too wet. Even if you have a tiller or a plow, you should not work muddy soil and you should not even think about working a garden patch with standing water. It destroys the soil structure and causes all sorts of problems. You can’t put seed in standing water anyway, it might as well just rest some more. Around here, direct seeding doesn’t happen until after Memorial Day. Tilling and plowing is a different matter, though, and tilling time, according to my grandmother, is when the dogwoods are blooming. Luckily, this year, the dogwood flowers are in refrigeration mode, the same as everything else. All blooming trees keep blooming and blooming, which is a good thing, because the cold, wet weather is keeping the pollinators from getting out and about. The bumblebees are plugging away, but the little sweat bees and other things like that are nowhere to be seen. A couple years ago, we lost a lot of songbirds because a late frost killed off all the bugs.

The birds don’t seem to be having a hard time this year, though. I keep reading stories about the different problems birds are having with pesticides and cats and disruptions in migratory routes, but I’m not seeing the results of that here. I would guess that bird populations really started to go up a lot about fifteen years ago. I’ve always spent time outside and one of my prized possessions is an old Roger Tory Peterson bird book I got at a yardsale when I was about ten. Roger Tory Peterson is a local person who actually got his artistic start painting pretty things on furniture in the factories in Jamestown, NY, and I’m partial to that book.

Anyway, when we had our previous couple dogs, we were lucky enough to live right on the edge of town and had miles of farm fields and logging roads to walk with them. When they were a couple years old, I really started to lose them a lot walking in the field, and it was because the volume of bird noise had gone up so much just in the space of a few years that I couldn’t hear them moving through the long grass anymore. After that, I started to notice birds of prey in increasing numbers and I would say that I have not noticed a significant overall drop in bird numbers since then.

Right now, I’m playing around with submitting bird species counts and observations to ebird.org, which I am too lazy to make a link to. It’s called ebird.org. Cut and paste. Which is a project to track numbers of birds. It’s kind of fun, because you can have your data sent to you through email and keep and eye on everything you’ve seen. Scientific bird people use the counts submitted from all over to find trends in population and migratory patterns. It also just takes a little bit even on my slow, slow phone lines. I’m incredibly biased towards stuff that doesn’t require you to have broadband or even normal dial up. And I actively hate You Tube, because on all the news sites and entertainment sites that I usually browse for headlines, they used to have transcripts or descriptions of what went on in an interview on some cable TV show or other and now they just say: “Look at this Video!” So, like everything else, instead of an advance or innovation making people more creative or more informed, it has just made people lazier. Just what we needed.

Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed sitting by the window and making lists of the different kinds of birds I see. I’m still feeding birds, which I know I shouldn’t be, but I do like to watch. And I’m extra lucky because of the pond, so I get water birds as visitors really often. I saw a female common merganser last week. A pair of solitary sandpipers hung around for a week or so, though I figure they’re long gone now, as they generally breed up in Canada. A Great Blue Heron has made several pitstops in the shallow end of the pond over the last week or so. There are actually a pair of them which I see flying over every few days. They are big birds. When they fly in pairs, they go so close together that the legs of the one in front are overlapping the body of the one in back. When they take off they seem a little clumsy, but on the ground, they are really impressive. I know they are taller than I am when they have their heads up. When nothing spooks them, and they get a chance to fish, they are better than TV. They take a step about every five minutes or so and go down into the water very slowly. Then they hold their heads down, and after a while, they go so quick and grab out a fish. It’s amazing to have something like that going on right out the back window.

The cold weather has not stopped ay of the birds from breeding. There are egg shells everywhere, and every tree is full of peeping little chicks. I’ve already seen fledgeling mourning doves and robins and the cattails in the pond are full of redwing blackbird nests. The redwing blackbirds, I never thought of as watery kind of birds, but they also dive against the pond for bugs like sparrows and bats do. My favorite birds are bobolinks. They nest in the hayfields and have the best song. It sounds like a computer printout on a low budget TV show from the ‘60’s. It is definitely not tree cutting time or even time to limb the trees we cut in the smaller stand of pines over the winter. Last year around this time, I accidentally went over a nest of sparrows on the ground clearing a sunflower patch in the long grass, so it is actually too late to break any ground or clear any of the overgrown places too.

I did feel the other day like I was going to be the victim of a reenactment of “The Birds” when I got too close to what must be about ten robins’ nests in a patch of cedars and spruces at the edge of the yard. Lots and lots of very large very ornery birds came out of the trees and flew around in a not nice way. Birds get really strange and aggressive during the breeding and nesting seasons.

There is actually a theory that the true story of bird attacks which inspired the creepy Hitchcock movie was caused by birds eating toxic algae that washed up on the beaches of California. That story has given me lots of motivation to keep the goat water trough clean. I got a new stock tank for them last year, and it seems like to grows algae a lot faster than the washtub I watered them out of before. I keep emptying it and scrubbing it, though. I can just imagine “The Goats.”




On the goat front, things are finally moving along to replace their very pathetic shed. I went to the sawmill, very impressively reconstructed from the pile of boards and the field of mud which it was in January! and put in an order which was finished a day or two later. So, I have to borrow my uncle’s truck and it is time for another adventure in hauling very soon. This weekend, the weather is supposed to be nice, so I went shopping and bought some chicken legs which I will use to lure my family over on Saturday or Sunday to help with the “goat shed raising.”

Of all the pets we have right now, the goats are a combination of the easiest and the hardest. For a farm pet, I totally recommend goats, even over chickens. You can buy a goat for next to nothing. You can feed them for next to nothing. They can’t bite. (Only have teeth on the bottom.) They are cute, and if you handle them a lot while young they are very friendly. I’ve been thumped by them before when they barged through somewhere I was standing, but they have never actually tried to butt me. I’ve heard a lot of things about how goats are stinky. I have neutered male goats, and they smell really sweet.

Drawbacks of goats are they are escape artists. They will get out of any fence. Ours just climb right over the top of the wire fence. the really naughty one will hang there for going on minutes until he can just make one more rung. A friend of ours hates goats for just that reason. She suggests as an escape-proof goat solution, use razor wire like at a prison and then a shotgun if any make it over. She is a funny lady.

When goats get out, they will go for your favorite flowers and trees. Lots of people get goats to keep down weeds and help clear fields. You would have to have dozens of goats for that, even in a small yard. They are not focused, and they will eat where you want for a few minutes before wandering away and destroying the asparagus patch or stripping the bark off that tree you got as a wedding present or just deciding they aren’t hungry anymore. My goats love to loiter on the porch, pull down windchimes and kick over flowerpots. They’re like bad kids! They are also fools for tomatoes. A white angora goat with a tomato smile is kind of funny/kind of scary.

They are pretty stupid. No matter how many times I’ve handled the goats, they still think you are going to kill them when it is time to trim hooves or shear. Wrestling them to the ground and doing any work on them has never gotten any easier. This year, I tricked my sister’s husband, who is in law enforcement, into helping with their hooves and with shearing, and we had a relatively easy time of it because he is trained in positional asphyxiation techniques. It is less mean than it sounds. He wasn’t choking the goats. They were choking themselves!

Other than hoof and hair time, though the goats need very little care, and they are funny, personable little creatures. And hopefully they will not butt their new shed into tiny pieces like they are with the old one!

Cold Weather Days

Hello!

We're almost done with January, which is good because, we've burned through about two thirds of our wood, which we figured to be out of by the end of February when we hope to get some more. We can always switch to propane, even though I don't like the central heat because of the noise of the blowers. I also don't care for getting a big burst of heat and then nothing. The wood heat is constant, which, is nice. All seems well with the wood furnace now that the chimney is cleaned. It's drawing very well, and is burning nice and hot, which is good, since it's been snowy and chilly for a while now.

It doesn't seem like there would be a lot to do in winter with the outside, which is kind of true. Right now, it's too cold to work outside for very long unless you really need to. We were hoping to build a new shed for the goats sometime over the winter, but my recent attempt to get some lumber was unsuccessful but still kind of a good story.

We usually scrape through the end of the year on a little bit of our regular wood and on slabwood that we get by the carload from an Amish mill a few miles away. When you deal with the Amish, it is a little weird, because, generally, men don't talk to women, women don't talk if a man is around, and no one says a thing if there is an elder around. They defer to the elders, and if you're doing business with someone, only the main person at the business deals with you. No one ignores me or anything when I go to the mill, but if I were to go there with my uncle or my dad for some reason, I would just expect the men to do business with them and not get all fussy about it. No one really thinks about that sort of thing, and it's not personal. That's just the way it is.

Anyway, for this planned goat shed, my mother has been reading shed books and carpentry books and drawing out plans for months now. She has built a few things like playhouses and a chicken coop, but she wants a nice goat shed. My one thing I've ever built is our current goat shed. It's an embarassment. It's not even close to square, and the roof leaks all the time, and I didn't even really do the whole thing. I got the sides and the roof framed and the floor laid, and my mom roofed it and my sister and her husband nailed up the sides. I've been slapping great stuff and tarpaper on the thing ever since. In my defense, I built it out of scraps from an old shed that was down in the woods, and now that junk is not in the woods anymore. I spent a long time down in the woods getting rid of the old shed, and I had to carry most of the wood out piece by piece, and it's about a quarter mile. Uphill both ways. You know it.

My mom came up with a list of boards that I was supposed to take my substitute teaching check from before Christmas and go out to the mill and buy. I went to our regular mill and showed the list to one of the guys who works there. He said he didn't cut that kind of lumber there, but he told me a mill where they did cut hemlock framing lumber. He gave me really good directions there, and asked me: "Do you need it right away?" I was like, no, just whenever I can get it, and he sent me on my merry way.

This was during the January thaw. and there were amazing amounts of mud on the road where I was supposed to go to find this mill, I went and parked right on the road, because there was about one parking place there and it was about six inch deep mud. I walked up and just kind of generally asked who I could talk to about lumber. There were about five men sitting there and they all kind of point, point, point back to where the mill owner is. I showed him my list, and he had to go and add it up, but, again, he asked me: "Do you need it right away?" And I said again: No. Just whenever I can get it is fine. And he said: "Because I have my mill torn down."

When I looked around, the giant sea of mud was actually a construction site where all the people who were there were getting ready to frame a new building to house the mill. This is actually another very Amish thing, where someone will ask you a question and you answer, and then they might tell you why they asked that question, but they'll wait for your answer first. They also do not argue or haggle. At all. At my sister's yard sales in Erie, it's such a relief to deal with the Amish girls when they come to buy baby stuff. They just pay what's marked and that's it. Those darn Russians in Erie will argue with you for an hour and still not buy anything unless they can get it for nothing. My grandmother is Ukrainian, and the number of times I've had to look at her garage sale treasures and hear her howl: "I got that for a quarter!" you can't even count.

I was kind of amused, and he went to go and figure the costs of the lumber while I get very muddy petting a dirty little dog that hit me with its mud paws whenever I wasn't petting enough and watching the men lay out the foundation for the mill.

They were using "batter boards" which are like squared edges set up a little outside the planned dimentions of the building. You run string between the batter boards to find the corners of the foundation. There was one lonely "anglish" guy and about four other Amish people building the mill, and the Amish guy who was obviously in charge of construction has just had the anglish guy take all the string off the batter boards because it was pulled too tight, and the oldest of the Amish men was following around behind him telling him to make the lines nice and tight. I never found out how the poor anglish guy was going to resolve that one. Anyway, I got a price for my lumber, and when the snow melts and the mill gets running again, I'll head back down there again.

Luckily, the goat shed seems to be holding out for its second winter. We have a lot less heavy snow this year than last year, but it has been cold. I'm not that worried about the goats getting too cold. They have about six inches of hair on them right now, and when the snow lands on them, they are so well-insulated that it doesn't even melt.

The worst thing about cold weather is keeping unfrozen water out for the animals. When it was in the single digits for a few days in a row last week, I would check the water and carry a new bucket around one in the afternoon in addition to running them out water with their feed and hay in the morning and in the evening. The snow is soft, too, so that is nice. The ice when it is hard and sharp is hard on their feet, and the mud is even worse. Last year, the ground never froze, and we battled hoof rot with the goats from September through May, when of course then we had a long dry spell.

I've also been setting out water for the cats who are holed up in the garage. We have a rotating cast of characters out there, usually about three, but I've seen as many as five different cats out there. They sleep in the hay, and I hope they are at least scaring away mice and rats, though mice carried away a lot of the seeds I had saved over the summer.

I've really been doing a lot of bird feeding. I refill the feeder about every other day, and I made a batch of suet cakes recently. I discovered something really cool about the suet cakes. The first batch I made was a little crumbly. I mixed them up to about the consistancy of rice crispie treats. The last couple batches, I've let them stay a little soupier, and they set up better and last longer. I made them really thick, too, and I was getting ready to saw, saw, saw them apart when I discovered a little trick. I flipped the whole thing out of the cake pan and cut through the waxed paper on the bottom. If you score the cakes along the lines where you want them cut, maybe about an eighth of an inch deep, they just break right apart. No sawing required.

Making suet cakes made the house smell nice. Like peanut butter and things like that. Which was good, because when we get a good stretch of below freezing temperatures, there is an unfortunate phenomenon involving the pipe that sticks out the top of the house which is supposed to help make suction in the plumbing. That pipe should be about four to six inches in diameter, but our pipe is not, and in cold weather, it plugs up with frost and condensation. Now, everything still drains and flushes, but the smell from the septic seeps into the basement. the house gets very stinky and sour and smells like a combination of paper mill and farts. Not the most fun ever. One good day of sunshine takes care of it, though.

When it first happened, last year, I was a little worried until I found out about the frosty pipe thing. It's important not to overreact, though. Last year when I was out buying candles to ward off the stink, I popped into the hardware store for milk (don't ask, that's just the way it is) and there was a gentleman buying all new pipe fittings for his sinks. Now, I would bet he had the stinky pipe problem and did something bad to his plumbing or was overreacting and thinking he had a worse problem than he did. Which is my I'm spreading the news about the stinky pipe problem! It's the sort of thing no one mentions when you're getting a house with septic, and it's a really common thing to expect!

Back to the birds, we've been feeding a lot, and there are usually about fifteen to twenty birds at a time at the feeder. A few starlings have found our feeder, and some bluejays, but they aren't too disruptive. Yesterday, I saw either a kestrel or a falcon swoop through the cedars near the house where most of the little birds stay when they are not at the feeder, but I haven't seen many birds of prey lately.

Speaking of weather, our calendar from the feed mill with farmer's almanac forcasts is proving to be more accurate than the weather reports from television. According to the calendar, this weekend fair and cold but warming up with a little rain at the beginning of the week. This seems to match the forecast from the TV, but the TV forecast went from being warm and rainy over the weekend to matching what the almanac says. So there.

I have my own weather prediction methods. We have one of the those weather sticks on the porch that are supposed to point up when sunny weather is coming and down when rainy weather is coming, but it usually points up when it's actually sunny and down when it's actually rainy. For longer term weather, I usually pay attention to my dog who lays under the table when it's going to storm. Also, if the weather is changing with a low pressure front coming, about a day and a half before it changes, she gets very restless and one ear is hot and the other is cold. She's like a canine barometer. During the day, especially in summer, I use the goats as my own personal radar. Right before it rains, they rush out and eat as fast as they can and quit and go inside acouple of minutes before it even starts to sprinkle. They make a great warning system to get wash off the line before it gets rained on.

I did actually get to do some more "real" gardening a few days ago. I have pretty much picked out all my seeds, and that bit of fun is over, and I was able to get some bed composted and planted in cover crop, too. I mulched my lavender before the really cold weather set in. Hopefully, we wont get much colder, because we are approaching the temperatures which will kill off my lavender. Amazingly, I found a zone 4 lavender in one of my seed catalogs which I can't wait to try.

I have long been jealous of the big, beautiful tufts of rhubarb that the Amish ladies seem to have in their yards the second the ground unthaws. How do they do it? I read in a magazine just recently that you can force rhubarb by putting a bucket over the crown and then covering the bucket with manure and straw. I use straw for my compost pile, but I just let the goasts use waste hay for their bedding. I'm leery about using hay in my gardens. Straw is a much better insulator, and hay has hay seeds, and hay seeds are just weed seeds, and if you use hay in the garden as a mulch or as the "brown" material in a compost pile, you're setting yourself up for weed problems. Of course, in the raised bed where I have "inherited" some rhubarb from the previous owner, I can't imagine how the weed problem could be worse, so I just went ahead and buried the bucket in waste hay from the goat shed. We'll just see what comes up better. Weeds or rhubarb.