Wonderful Weekend

After a very rainy week, a gorgeous weekend was upon us.

The weekend began with a new project. Actually the first part of a big project. Michael is fixing the garage. It will be a four part project.

Friday he began with the door….if you could call it a door. The door that Michael replaced was an old wooden door that was rotten. It had been patched together with wood glue and caulking, and was pretty much falling apart. The door frame/casing was “hand made”, there were many drafts and leaks, the doorknob was not positioned properly and our knuckles would get scraped when we shut or opened it. Whenever it rained water would be on the garage floor, inside the garage. It was long overdue.

He bought a new door and worked with Joshua to get it in.

The siding needed to be taken off in order to re-frame the door opening for the new pre-hung door. If you look at the first picture you can see the original door (opened). The bottom was so rotten it fell out.

Here it is finished (still need to paint the siding).

Another thing he did was to remove the shelving that was in  the garage. We listed it for free on Craigslist and a local family came and picked it up.

On a side note, here is Nicholas with Michael’s newly made tool box.

We are taking a week off of school. First vacation in eleven weeks. While Michael was fixing our garage door I was reading and taking pictures of our gorgeous maple tree.

Here is another picture of life in the barn. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings we give the goats herbs. Both mixtures that we give help to keep their worm count low. We use two different herbal mixes from Fir Meadow LLC. GI Soother which protects them from coccidia and Barber Pole worm. DWorm A helps prevent worms from making the goat’s digestive track a home. It also helps destroy the parasite when it is in the egg stage.

It takes a number of  feedings for the goats to get used to the herbs. They are actually quite spicy. Ginger, cayenne, cloves, cinnamon, etc. are in the mixtures. I probably don’t need to say, Halle Berry took to it on the first time.

All of our goats get doses based on their size. Meaning, a large pinch or a small pinch. For the does, we mix it into a little grain. The bucks get it mixed with seed.

The young stock are fed outside in the center aisle. We hook them to their feeding spot. If we didn’t do that, the faster eaters would end up eating the slower eaters grain. They love it and it sure seems like they know when they are supposed to get grain. Everyone is more excited when we enter the barn on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

I finally found an opportunity to get some pictures of the roosters that we allowed a hen to hatch. Out of the four eggs, two ended up being roosters. Here they are:

This first one has beautiful coloring. He looks like a mix between an Australorp and an Ameraucana.

This one looks like a pure Australorp.

Both have become quite good at vocalizing.

Our original rooster, otherwise known as “the jerk”, is pretty rough on the some of the hens when he mates with them. A couple of them had no feathers on their lower backs. Michael found some “aprons” for chickens. They protect their skin and allow the feathers to grow back.

Here is one hen with her apron on.

Not to long ago Nicholas and I planted garlic in one of the raised bed. Here it is.

It will winter over and next summer we should have some really big bulbs to pick.

Saturday, late afternoon, Nicholas mowed the “lawn”. In the process he mowed up all the fallen leaves. That night our temperatures fell below freezing for the first time. In the morning this tree had dropped a bunch of leaves and was continuing to drop about a dozen every five seconds.

The first picture is at about 7:00 a.m. The second picture is around 1:00 p.m. Notice how few leaves are remaining after just a few hours.

Last, but not least, Michael built a cross for Luke’s grave.

I’ll share some more of our weekend on Wednesday.

Have a great Monday,
Karen