Goat kid up-date

The goat kids will be four weeks old this weekend. It doesn’t feel like it has been that long since they were born, but in another way it feels like they have lived here as long as any of the other goats.

Bella having a bottle - 21st March 2010

They are all now disbudded, Briony was done last week and Bella was done this week. Bella has had an infection in one of her knees, it responded well to the first course of antibiotics but swelled up again when the course finished. She has been back into the vets and had the knee ‘flushed out’, which is why she wasn’t disbudded until this week. Her knee is much better now but the infection has damaged the cartilage which is going to take a long time to heal.

The Tog kids have been named, Betsy and Bramble. They are both now far to heavy for our 5kg feed scales, so have not been weighed since I last posted their weight. Last week Briony weighed 4.75kg and Bella weighed 4.3kg, the infection has had an impact on her growing as fast as the others and since she had her knee flushed she has been living in the kitchen as it has to be kept dry and clean.

What a week

Well, I finished my job on Thursday.  I’ve spent each day from last Saturday counting down the days. My last day was nice though, with a lot of eating including a very yummy chocolate cake. I’m really going to miss working there, with all my friends but I will be going back so it isn’t like I won’t see any of them again. I even got a membership as a leaving present. It’s just not going to be the same ever again. I have my new job to start on now, and I’m really looking forward to it, I can finally start to get on with things now instead of just waiting t get started.

I spent this weekend at Tewkesbury Food Festival helping run a ‘play tent’, we made vegetable creatures and fruit cocktails and on Sunday masks too. The vegetable creature making was good and very popular but playing with perfectly good food, although I strongly believe that food isn’t played with enough these days, and then putting it in a bin goes completely against the gain. I did think very seriously about bring it home for the goats but it would have taken hours to pick out all the cocktail sticks and wash the paint, glue and glitter off and then I would have only spent hours worrying that I had missed something. Or, more likely, it would have sat in it’s sack here waiting for me to get round to picking out the cocktails sticks and washing off the glue and gone rotten. It was a good weekend though, bright and sunny and I could have spent a kings ransom on all kinds of lovely food and still not had anythig to put a meal together with. Very enjoyable.

 On Thursday one of mothers Golden Guernsey started to kid, she seemed to be fine in herself but she just wasn’t doing anything, so at about 6 o’clockish we decided to see what was going on. It is normally mine and middle-sisters job as we both have little hands but she wasn’t at all ‘open’ so off to the vets to get some tables to help with this, by 11 o’clockish and 12 – 14 tables later (they should start working in about 30 minutes from the first dose and they are like magic when they do work, I’ve seen a sheep go from nowhere near ‘open’ enough to deliver to delivering without a problem in 20minutes) she still wasn’t open enough to kid even though the water bag had bust hours before. After an hour of trying to deliver the kid ourselves we took her to the vets, who also wasn’t able to deliver it and so her kid was finally delivered at well after midnight, more like 1am really, by Cesarean. I’ve never seen a Cesarean before, on of our first goat kids was delivered by Cesarean but I would have been 8 or 9 years old and didn’t go to the vets. It took almost an hour to close her up afterwards and the kid got very cold and took most of the rest of the night to revive him and then it took him until Saturday to lean to stand, Sunday to learn to walk and we think he’s possibly blind or very short sighted. At the moment he is in the living room but we’re going to try to give him back to his mother to look after as he’ll be best off with her and she did bund with him well but I don’t think she realises we bought him back from the vets with us as she had to it in the back and I had him on my lap in the front so as I could keep him going by rubbing him with a towel and have the car heater on him.

On Friday I was very tired, I had to get up for a docotors appointment so didn’t have a chance of staying in bed, and once I got home again I was too awake to go back to bed. My docotors appointment was for the results of some blood test I had after my ‘funny turn’ at work, which happened a second time as well I ca’t remember if I wrote about that now. It would seem I might have Perniciuos Anemia which is where the body can’t absorb Vit B12 and so can’t absorb iron very well. My B12 levels are very low and so are my iron levels, I’m not quite anemic but very close to it. I’m being put on a course of B12 injections, I’ve always loved needles or not, then a three month courses of iron tables and something else, then I will have my blood tested again a month after to see if my B12 and iron levels sort themselves out or if I have to spend the rest of my life having B12 injections every three months. In the mean time I’m going to eat loads more leafy greens and extra eggs, etc. to see if that helps. Perniciuos amemia does run in the family, my mothers cousin has it and so did her mum.

The allotment today

I have been up to the allotment three times during last week to take photo’s and each time the camera either hasn’t worked or the batteries have been flat or something. I did spend an hour or so up there with middle-sister on Friday, she planted out a load of raspberries and I dugging over a couple of the beds and sowed some sugar snap peas. Everything is coming through well, the first lot of pea seeds have been got at by birds. They will be fine, a lot have just been pulled up. Both the carrots and beets are through, and even biger today than they were on Friday.

My plan was to come back from the allotment and have a nap to catch up on some of the sleep I’d lost the night before, no such luck. I came home to find that mother had fallen over while herding sheep and twisted her ankle. After a while of her sat down up it up while the pain got worst I took her to hospital to have it x-rayed. No brake this time, just a sprain but that was the day, and my nap, pretty much gone.

And I think that is everything up-to-date now.

A few seconds of calm

I’m both emotionally and physically wrung out, life at work is far from pleasant and I’m spending my time from waking up each morning counting down the time until I can leave and go… to another job. I’m working three different jobs at the moment, it’s interesting though. And I am enjoying two of them, if only I wasn’t so tired and drained from the third. Yesterday I had a ‘funny turn’ and just blacked out for a while, I’m not the only member of staff having a hard time which I think makes it easier. At least I have support and without that I know I would be having a much harder time.

Work isn’t the only thing dragging me at the moment, this years lambing is the worst lambing we’ve ever had, it all started off fine with Lily and then the next morning Mophead had a nice sized single without a problem on her own. Both ewes were kept in with their lambs, neither of them a proved of this, especially Lily after we bought Mophead in. The long and the short of it is they both got into a sack of chicken feed, ate more them half of it between the two of them, got very ill and died. It wasn’t a nice few days with trips to and from the vets with different jabs and drenches to try. Lily Lamb was one of our original flock, all of who were bottle feed, with their own story of how we got them and special place. Mophead was kept after her mother died, she was our first Cotswold ewe who had been hand reared by the local special needs school until it closed down, she was a people sheep and if she didn’t like something that was going on, like a lose dog or too many flies, she was be at the garden gate standing in the way and stamping her feet until something was done about.

We’ve also had problems with the lambs and goat kids, who are all living in the kitchen at the moment (much to the older goat kids disgust, who aren’t going to sleep on the floor with sheep, what do we think they are?), one of the goat kids went down with bloat and had to be rushed to the vets and kept over night and the next day one of the lambs went down with it too, another trip to the vets all of two hours after collecting the goat kid. Touch wood, everyone seems fine now.

Ivy and her lambs, the black one is there if you look closely!

Lambing hasn’t all gone badly though, Ivy has produced our very first black ewe lamb, most years we’ve had a couple of black ram lambs but never a little girl before. All three of them, she had a white female too, are doing fine. Since then it has been very slow on the lambing front, all of the ewes are looking big, a few of them even look massive but no more so far.

Keris and her kid

 

There has been other good news too, Keris kidded for the first time. A single boy, who is very cute and already has the Anglo Nubian voice. I started milking on Wednesday after taking him away on Tuesday night and Keris has been so good at standing for milking. Today mother took him to be disbudded while I was at work. I still haven’t decided on a name, even though he is now a week old. He says something “Hu” to me, and maybe Greek, or maybe… I don’t know. Last year Felix asked to be named Felix, I looked at him and that was his name but this kid isn’t giving me so many cues. He is a love silver-grey colour, and very greedy too.    

The Silver Dorking has started laying again, actually we’re getting a lot of eggs at the moment considering most of our hens are older. I think later on in the year we might well get some more ex-chicken farm ones. We only have two left from the last ones we got a couple of years ago, and they still lay, the others were got by a fox. Also my new quail have started laying, I’m getting about six eggs a day now. This year I’d like to get them a shed so as they don’t have to come back into the house during the inter to keep them laying, I just need to work out how to afford it. Sheds are a little bit like gold dust on freecycle, so I think I’m going to have to buy one. I’m also going to build up my laying birds so as I have enough eggs each day to start doing something meaningful with them.  

It’s so very almost still light enough to do things when I get home from work now, not long now and I will be able to come home and spend so time on the garden, at the moment the only day I’m getting off is Sunday and there is so much to do before I’m back to work the next morning. Last weekend I did get to spend so time on the garden, I’ve manured the bed that I’m planning on using for beans and put in some more garlic, I just have one last bulb to plant now which I didn’t get to as it tipped it down with rain before I managed to get it in. There is a lot of garlic planted now, I missed quite a lot last year so the bed that I used is now full of garlic again, and it seems a shame to dig it up now so it might as well stay in place, and I planted another bed of garlic before this bed started coming through. My moon peas have been harden off too so they are ready to plant when I get chance.

Each day just has to be taken as it comes at the moment, I’m trying to remember to tell myself “today will be a good day and whatever happens is for my greater good” each morning when I wake up and I think it is helping.

Good ship

Lambing started today, Lily had twins just like I told her to. 

The last couple of years she’s had massive single lambs and has had problems delivering them, last year I took her to the vet in the end, and for some reason he came out two weeks later and her lamb was so big and doing so well he mistook it for a three month old lamb. 

I’ve been telling her for months that I want “a nice set of twins, none of these silly big things” so she had a pair of big sized twins, one of each, who tried to be born at the same time so she still had a trip to the vets.

I got home too late to take any photos but there will be some soon.

* ‘ship’ is the Forest word for sheep