Pumpkin Feast for the Goats & Pigs, Crop Cover Beans for the Cattle and Crab Compost for the Chickens

Whaddya know? Once again the goats get top billing and the most photos in our farm roundup!

With this many cute kids running around, how could they not? The goats are still right next to our house, so I spend more time with them than the animals that are further away, too.

The storms last Monday night into Tuesday morning were a little stressful, but everyone made out okay and have had a glorious week since then. For the first week or so, the kids are really sleepy, but by now they are running around, practicing their balance jumping on logs and generally hopping and skipping all over the place.

I also was able to reunite Little Tiny, her brother and her mom with the rest of the herd on Wednesday morning. We had them in a stall of the farrowing barn for extended bonding since mom wasn’t very interested in taking care of the tiny doe at first.

It was pretty chaotic at first as both kids hadn’t been around any other goats in their 10-day lives, so initially they tried to nurse off of every doe that walked by them. And they got flung by those does and learned their lesson pretty fast.

The mom also seemed a little stressed at first, trying to eat and settle back into the herd and keep track of her kids. But now they are doing fine, as if they were never gone at all!

As always, we’ve been really grateful for all the pumpkin donations at the shop, especially for the goats.

I have had other goat keepers tell me that their goats don’t eat pumpkins. I do remember that initially ours didn’t and that’s why we slice them open — to expose the seeds, which tend to entice them more.

And then they at some point remember or discover for the first time that they like the flesh, too. It’s always interesting to watch how individual does attack a pumpkin and what they eat first and what varieties they gravitate towards first.

The cattle are living the dream continuing to rotate through our fields seeded with cover crop beans. They’re eating the early growth, so it’s almost like eating fresh bean sprouts — pretty much like candy to cattle!

We’re grateful that the weather and rainfall has cooperated to get as many beans spread in the last month as we have.

Next up is rye grass seeding!

The hens are plugging away as usual. Flocks 2 and 3 got their normal pasture paddock shift this week, but Flock 1 lucked out and gets to scratch through crab shell compost. They eat some of the remaining shell — love those minerals in it — and of course there’s ton of beetles and other bugs to find in it, too.

We let our three sows that farrowed in May and June recondition a little longer than is necessary, in part because we have plenty of pork in the pipeline currently.

But that means they go into heat every three weeks and their temperament changes big time. And even though the three boars we have are all quite a distance away from them, it seems as though they can hear the sows grunting and/or smell their hormones in the air even from that distance because they all got extra frisky this week!

Pigs gestate for about 115 days, so we are now finally ready to breed the sows for March/April piglets. We are going to move our Duroc boar in with them sometime this week. Their cycle is about 3 weeks, but sometimes faster if they’re put with a boar. So that would put us at late March to early April for the next round of piglets!

Meanwhile, the feeder group is living life in their woods grid. This morning I found them all cozily snuggled under logs and brush, sleeping in.

They made quite a dent in the brush, the hay bales and all the pumpkins we gave them and of course they’ve done a great job spreading out and working in the coffee grounds compost we put in their grid, too!