Wednesday, March 8, 2017
I'm very excited about a new project I'm working on with Tom Clavette, the man who purchased Tinkerbell and Electra from us last year. He took my suggestion for a simple hand powered milker to make milking these girls easier and ran with it.
We are now working on perfecting his invention, thereby filling a huge gap in the home milking machine market; that between flimsy, temperamental hand powered systems and the still expensive scaled down versions of commercial electric systems. This is wh read more...
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Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Tinkerbell Perched on Doghouse
We’re tired, we’re unwashed, we have no babies, but we learned something new. Goats can have false labor. 18 hours worth of it.
Yesterday afternoon, Lisa was reinforcing the lower half of a fence so kids couldn’t walk through it when she noticed an inordinate amount of moaning and groaning going on around her. A quick stroll around the pasture revealed that the first two does starting to bag up, Tinkerbell and Grace, were having contractions. Tinker bell’s were clearly stronger and her liga read more...
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Sunday, January 31, 2016
I think I've just seen the goat equivalent of helicopter parenting. It was time to get Sara and Pinkie out of the kidding pen, but Sara refused to go into the intermediate nursery corral, even with Pinkie in it hollering her head off. Knowing how fiercely protective Sara is, I let them out with the other does (no dogs) in the small barn pasture. Once Pinkie was done initially exploring sun, grass, mud, snow, and wind she started bouncing around approaching all the other goats. And one by one Sar read more...
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Thursday, January 28, 2016
Our first kid arrived here at TreeStar Farm on January 20th.
We're beginning to think there might be something to this planned breeding of goats and keeping track of dates (as opposed to just running a buck with the girls and saying "yippee" whenever babies arrive). That afternoon Sara wouldn't join the rest of the herd when they moved away from the barn to a nice, tasty, new round bale of hay in the back pasture. Then she had something that looked suspiciously like a contraction. After some read more...
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Wednesday, December 16, 2015
This blog is named in honor of my parents, who moved from suburban Detroit to rural Howell, MI in 1977 when they were about the same age I was when I started my farm--mid-50s. They bought 5 acres of land with a huge barn and a 150 year old farmhouse on it, which they proceeded to gut and refurbish, all while putting four children though college. I learned about raising chickens and many other things from their experience.
I was jealous at the time because while I was slogging through colleg read more...
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