Kids are growing

This week I noticed about 10 goats all on top of their largest shelter. Is it any wonder it's falling over on one corner? I snapped a couple of photos of this year's kids all playing on top of their house, being babysat by two year olds, Belt and Spot, lazing on the next nearest shelter. The babies are so cute when they're learning to jump and climb, but they're also getting a little too big for their britches. They are still small enough to fit through the gate and it drives mom crazy that her babies are on the other side of the electric fence. From an outsider's point of view it might be funny to see grown-ups running around waving their arms and shouting at the baby goats that are outside the fence, but for us, it's just every-day stuff.

Roof metal is finished

This side of the roof only took us 2 days to complete, compared to 3 1/2 days for the western side of the roof. Part of our improved speed was improved skill, but it was also a little cooler, and we were motivated by predictions of storms over the weekend. It was exhausting work, and hot as anything as soon as the sun came out. All we now have left to do on the roof is: trim work on the gable edges (that's the super-tall peak), ridge cap along the center of the roof from front to back, and touch up all the paint that I scratched during installation.

After we finished the roof on Thursday afternoon, we mowed a lot of grass. Charles did the most part with the ride-on mower and I did around the septic tank with the push mower. I love seeing my lawn freshly mowed.

But it did rain a lot this weekend, a little over 2 inches, and I can confidently report that the rain no longer stays mainly in my living room. A little rain blew in through the hole where the front door will be, but not much, and definitely no rain from the direction of the roof. Yipee! Despite the rain, we did manage to do some work in the vegetable garden, planting seeds for beans, cucumbers, squash, and pumpkins.

Half-way there

When you're roofing, you never use the phrase, "It's all downhill from here," but we completed the west half of our roof yesterday evening. Now with every sheet of metal we install we're closer to the end than the beginning. To say the least, the last 9 pieces that filled in the last 7-feet of width, were difficult. Before these, we could sit on the slightly slip-proof roof wrap and use our right hands to screw the metal down. For the last 9 sheets (2 at the full 3-foot width and one piece about 1-foot wide), we had to sit on the sheet metal and use left hands a lot more.
Now, the sheet metal is very slick - all the better to shed water, snow and ice. In addition, the metal is covered with dusty, yellow tree pollen. Thank goodness I teach a yoga class. My five sticky rubber yoga mats were pressed into service, with the added benefit of padding between our bums and the hot sheet metal covered in bolt-head screws. Sorry I don't have a picture of that - I was up on the roof and needed all my hands to hold on!

What I don't want to be when I grow up

The list is long, but the most recent addition is a roofer. Charles and I spent Saturday and Sunday putting metal on our roof and we are very proud to say that one-third is complete. That's 27 sheets of ribbed metal, 36-inches wide, 12 feet long, 30 screws in every sheet. The west side of the roof has about 4 hours of work to go until it's completed.
I'm sunburned, sore, chapped and exhausted, but it does look good.

Now on Facebook

Heather Kirton and Charles Kirton are now on Facebook. We resisted for a long time, but one of our favorite families is about to spend 2 years in Malaysia at a fabulous private school in Penang, and they're all on Facebook. So that will be the easiest way to keep up with them.
And it just goes to show that maybe I should have joined earlier. Everyone's there, so I'm hoping to make new connections with old Girl Guides, friends from England, and Girl Scouts who went to Poacher 2008 with us. Okay, so I'm texting now, I'm blogging and I'm on Facebook. I might have to go to MySpace, too, but I'm never going to Twitter.

Finally Maisie has her babies

We were getting worried that Maisie the goat was going to have a whole litter of baby goats. She looked huge, but yesterday afternoon, about 3:00, she gave birth to twin bucklings. We've named them Antonio and Sebastian. It's a complete coincidence that those are the names of friends in both The Tempest and Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, because Ashley named them and says she hasn't ever heard of either of the plays!

Flint goes into the field in the afternoons, when we can trick him into staying there. He's still small enough to fit in between the bars on the gate to the field, so I guess if we want him to stay there we need to do something about that. He trained himself on the electric fence, so that's not a problem, but he would just prefer not to be in the field with the big goats. Maybe these two new bucklings will give him some-goat to play with!

Also, I'm going to take older photos off the main blog page and put them onto Shutterfly. You can find them here: http://hartkirtonfarms.shutterfly.com/. All of the house photos and older photos are there, too.

Another ram lamb

Mabel is a yearling ewe (Cathy Gale's daughter from last year), and she had a ram lamb on Saturday, April 3. I generally only check on my sheep once a day, when I feed them in the morning. I can see them from the driveway, but from there, they are about 300 yards away. So on Easter morning I was surprised to see an extra lamb in the field. I wasn't expecting Mabel to have a baby so soon, because she didn't look very big. Just goes to show what I know!

We had a very nice Easter lunch with my stepmother, Brenda's family yesterday. Then we sat out on the back patio rolling hanks of yarn into balls for her mother, Marty. The weather was so pretty, warm with a pleasant breeze. We had to leave pretty early because I had to go home to feed my bottle babies, but it was nice catching up with everyone.

After feeding, Charles and I spent an hour or so in our vegetable garden, sowing seeds for spinach, lettuce, chard, and leafy herbs - dill, cilantro, parsley, par-cel, fennel and chives. Last year I missed lettuce season because it was too wet to till the garden. This year, we've already tilled twice, so I have high hopes. Seedlings are also coming along well, with okra, tomatoes and peppers already making leaves. Broccoli is slower than I expected, but I hope to get enough to put some in the freezer for the summer.

Just when it's all going smoothly

With animals, it's always hard to tell what they're thinking. One of our ewes, Cathy Gale, gave birth to twins on Tuesday (March 30), one ram lamb and one ewe lamb. At first she didn't want anything to do with either one of them, but eventually she allowed the ram lamb to eat. Cathy has completely, violently rejected her ewe lamb, so now I have two babies to bottle feed. Cathy and her ram lamb are living in the barn so I can milk her twice a day to feed the ewe lamb. Now that the lambs are four days old, I can start cutting the sheep milk with lamb milk replacement formula, but I will probably keep milking Cathy for another week to get a good supply. Then I will put Cathy and her ram lamb back out in the field with the rest of the sheep; the ewe lamb will be bottle fed for about 6 weeks, until I am sure she's eating grass and sweet feed.
Cathy had a dead lamb the first year we owned her - it weighed in at 14 lbs, and was too big to survive being born. Then last year she had a set of twins with no problems at all. So I don't know happened that this sweet little ewe lamb was abandoned by her mother. But we've had good success with our first bottle lamb, Emma Piel, who is still doing a terrific job raising triplets all on her own!