We've been cleaning the barn. This is a good thing, a very good thing, but in the meantime the goats are all locked out until their indoor pens get reassembled. (See, we take EVERYTHING out, scrape it clean with a tractor, then put it all back in again.) The end result is something like this:
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| Look at all that SPACE! That's one of the bucks peeking in the first door. |
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| I realize this is hard to see, but this pile - which is only from the last week and a half of cleaning - is easily fifty feet long. And it's grown considerably since I took this photo. Holy crap! |
In addition, less than 24 hours after the goats were locked out we had one of those freak summer rainstorms. In retrospect, I wonder why I was so surprised - why should it rain when they're all safely under cover? Pssht.
On an unrelated note, I have bred 14 does in the past 12 days. I'm really hoping they all settle. Often a doe's first heat of breeding season is a "pseudo heat" - basically, all her hormones are running and she acts interested in the buck, but instead of getting pregnant, or coming back into heat in 21 days, she says "just kidding" and is in heat (for real) six days later. This can be slightly frustrating, especially when you have enough goats to have more than one in heat at a time. With 45 does (yes, I finally counted!) coming into heat every 21 days, on average I should have two in heat every day. Of course, what really happens is that not so much as an ear twitches all weekend, and six goats come into heat the day you have jury duty. About half of the does aren't supposed to get bred right now - there are a few who have dates arranged with boys living elsewhere, some young does who are still a bit too young to breed, and a few retirees and charity cases who won't get bred at all - but I am still getting stinky way too quickly. And nine times out of ten, the ones that ARE in definite, easy-to-see heat are of the not-to-be-bred-yet persuasion. At least the boys are happy. It's also a bit frustrating right now because the goats wag their tails to get rid of flies, and with the barn freshly cleaned the fly population is bothering the heck out of the goats. Every day the fly numbers go down, but in the meantime I keep getting "false alarms" from goats who just happened to be flicking flies by the buck pen and aren't actually in heat. Gah.
The goats are still locked out of the barn because we're working on building new feeders for them (!). Dad and I designed them from the ground up, and the first one is almost done and looking pretty freaking awesome. I haven't taken photos yet, but I will. (cough*teaser*cough...!)
