The barn and soon to be the whole upper pasture is bouncing with baby goats. Guess how many…..6? Nope……8? Nope…..keep guessing……12? Nope

15 babies all cute and cuddly.

It began on Wednesday January 31. Michael was out of town and the boys and I  were all getting ready for school . Nicholas does the chores in the morning. He came back in and said Rose had babies. Guess how many……2? Nope….3? Nope….4? YES ! I had to get out there and try to get the babies nursing before I went to work. The boys walked to school and it took me about a half hour but they were nursing when I left.

That is the most babies any of our does have had. Yes, they can have up to six, but four is a record for our little farm. Now it means she will have to produce a lot of milk. She is naturally one of our better milkers, but we are giving her extra grain and chaffhaye alfalfa. If you are curious as to what that is click  http://chaffhaye.com/.

Our new style of breeding was shown in the post “August Happenings on the Farm”  http://www.onthebanksofsaltcreek.com/august-happenings-farm/. Well boy did it work. There was also a side benefit to that breeding. All babies were born within six days. In the past, when we would breed individually, It could be days or even weeks between kidding.

Our best goat Halle Berry, never did get pregnant. We are really disappointed about that because she is an amazing milker and a great goat all around. We kept two doelings  to add to our herd and it didn’t seem like either of them were pregnant.  After all the babies were born I thought why not put those three goats in with one of the bucks and see if we can get them pregnant. If we can, we may be able to have milk all year long this year.

I had friends  I’ve known since grade school here on Monday to hold baby goats. We had such fun. Then Blue Bayou (one of the doelings we kept) started screaming. I thought she was in heat. Nope she was in labor. She gave birth to a precious little girl.

So each morning and night we have extra chores to do but when we are done we get to cuddle baby goats.

All of these pictures are only of the first seven babies. Four are from Rose and three from Mouse.