Chris and Keri’s Blog

Tonight I decided now that the kids were a full 24 hours old, that we should probably milk Nilla to both relieve a little pressure on her udder and to make sure that her milk supply is coming in for the kids to ensure they are having enough to drink.

I wasn’t really sure how easy it was going to be since I’ve never milked anything in my life, but surprisingly it went quite smoothly, thank goodness!

We weighed the milk and got 1lb of fresh milk. I’m going to freeze the milk that we get from her for the first week or two to have on hand for the next sets of kiddings, just in case it’s needed we’ll be able to thaw it out and use it.

First goats milk from Nilla 24hrs post kidding.

Well Nilla our Saanen doe kidded on 6-16-2010 with two kids. I got to use my what seems like hundreds of hours of research that I had done to help Nilla birth her kids. I like to call myself now the certified goat midwife!

Nilla’s first born was a 8lb doeling and second was a 8.4lb buckling. Mom and kids are doing great! Her motherly instincts have definitely kicked in and she is doing a great job with them. I named the doeling Hazelnut but we’ll call her Hazel. The buckling is named Marzipan, but we’ll call him Marz. Got to stick with food names for sure!!!

The below picture is Nilla and her kids only a few hours after they were born.

Hazel (8lb doeling, first born).

Marzipan, AKA Marz (8.4lb buckling, second born).

Two of our does have kids due any day now, and we wanted a better way to keep an eye on them from the house. I had previously set up a video camera that we could monitor on our TV, but we wanted Keri’s mom to also be able to watch during the day when we’re at work.

Being a major computer geek, I rigged up a system using an old computer in the barn running Linux and a free software package called Zoneminder to monitor the video cameras. Since we run a wireless internet company, I installed a wireless connection to the goat barn (which is only a few hundred feet from our tower) so that the video feed could be viewed from home and from Keri’s mom’s house which is also connected to our wireless internet service.

Here’s a shot of how the video feed looks on the computer screen:

Screen shot of our video cam system for the goats. That's Nilla taking a drink in the barn. The rest of the goats are outside somewhere.

Sorry we know that we haven’t posted anything on here since February, crazy huh! Well this is just going to be a quick post to update everyone about the goings on here at the farm.

Our 10 baby chicks are about 8 weeks old now, haven’t posted any pics of them yet, but hopefully will.

We have 3 pregnant goats! Nilla is due June 17, Peanut is due July 12 and Cocoa is due July 24. All of these dates are probably within a week or so of when they will actually have the ‘kids.’ The way Nilla is looking I would guess at least twins for her, her belly is getting quite big with babies, just can’t wait till they get here, then the real work starts with milking her daily and twice daily bottle feedings for the kids.

When we moved into our house our backyard area that we had fenced in didn’t really have a lot of grass planted in it because the previous owner had put a lot of fill dirt in it because of drainage issues. So a few weeks ago we decided to go ahead and get the leaves picked up, we used a dethatcher and then we used a spreader to put out grass seed and fertilizer. Our backyard is starting to look more like a usable backyard by the minute.

We also planted about 50 new pine trees in the front yard area, as well as out by the road. We found a good deal a few weeks back at Home Depot. The trees were in gallon pots and were probably a few years old and had about half inch diameter stalks. Eventually they will provide the privacy that we would like to have.

If all that wasn’t enough, in the mean time we decided to go ahead and start up a company. Since we live out in the sticks the one thing that we did when we moved here was put up a ham radio tower so that we could get high speed internet. The only problem was that the company we could get it from, proved to be quite unreliable with service and the speeds that we were getting from them were not to our liking. So Chris being the big geek that he is decided he could start up his own wireless internet service provider company.  Back at the first part of March we upgraded our tower and added more height to it so that it’s now 120 feet tall. I’m sure later Chris will put up a post with more specifics on this but I’m not the one with technical skills great enough to explain the workings of the wireless internet aspect so I will leave that up to him. Last week we started to install our first customer, as of right now we have 3 customers with several more lined up to install in the next few days. I take care of the billing aspect of the company while Chris takes care of the installing part.  We named the company LakeNet, LLC. The slogan I came up with for the business is: “Locally grown high-speed Internet.” We do have a website although it’s not complete yet, but feel free to check it out at www.LakeNetMI.com.

Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll have a chance to get some pictures up here. Definitely by the time goat babies get here there will be pics of those up!

It’s been about 2 weeks now since we added another animal to the farm. We picked up Moon Pie from Indian River, MI to be a friend for our buck Bryers. Moon Pie is just over 2 years old. He is a Mini-Nubian goat, black with white “moon spots.” He is a whether so no baby goats in his future! He loves attention though and makes sure that you know he can see you when you are outside. But overall him and Bryers get along good. The noise level has considerably quieted down.

Moon Pie happily eating his new hay with new friend Bryers.

A few weeks ago, our plans for getting our goats bred fell through. We decided rather than try to find another breeder to take our girls to, we would look to see if we could just find a buck to purchase. We got in touch with 4 or 5 people selling bucks until we found one that we liked. We went to pick him up this weekend. Here are some photos. He is a purebred Nubian registered with the American Dairy Goat Association. His official name is “Bryrpatch Speak E-Z.” The naming convention for registered animals is that the first word represents the herd or breeder name, the second name is their given name. Of course, goats don’t know their name, so you can call them whatever you want informally. We decided to call him “Breyer.”

Breyer was bottle fed and trained to walk on a lead. He actually does walk very nicely, much better than even our dogs. Here Keri is walking him from the truck to the pen.

The seller told us that she couldn't get him to eat hay and he would only eat alfalfa pellets. Maybe she had some nasty hay, because he sure started munching away on ours as soon as we put him in his pen.

After he ate for a while we let the does out of the barn to meet him. They seemed interested in each other but also somewhat cautious. We just kept them in adjoining pens for today, tomorrow we will let them run together.

Breyer seemed very agitated when we left the pen, he was pacing around and bleating very loud. We thought it would be best to keep an eye on him so I put up a surveillance camera on him and now we have a new TV channel - GoatVision!

When we were visiting over the holidays I decided to finally bring some of my home theater equipment back from my mom’s house. In the theater I had set up in the basement at my moms, I had my front speakers setting on some concrete blocks wrapped in fabric. Since this is now in our living room, I decided to go slightly more upscale and built some speaker stands out of pine that matched our decor a little better.

I built the stands out of 1x6 pine "better" grade lumber and finished it with a one stage stain & polyurethane (2 coats). I designed the stands to have shelves that were sized to hold DVDs upright, but could be used for displaying decorations as well. I tried to match the style & finish to the wood on our TV stand, but as you can see the stain color wasn't quite right.... oh well, close enough.

Here's a picture of them all set up. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. Keri and I even put the DVDs in alphabetical order while we were waiting for Mythbusters to record enough so we could skip over the commercials.

First off, Happy New Year everyone!

Today Keri and I decided to teach ourselves to draw blood from the goats. We’ve had the necessary supplies on hand for a couple months, but have been procrastinating since the task seemed a little daunting. But, we’re making arrangements to have the goats bred in January, and we need to send some blood samples off for testing before breeding them, so the time has come.

The task sounds pretty simple when you read tutorials online. We even read one web page with pictures of a 7-year-old girl drawing blood. The basic procedure is to have one person hold the goat still, and the other puncture the jugular vein with a needle & syringe and draw a few CCs of blood, and then deposit the blood into a vacuum sample tube to be sent away.

Yet as we found ourselves in the barn with a stubborn goat and a syringe at the ready, it didn’t seem quite so simple. Eventually we found a position that worked to hold the goat still, me holding the goat and Keri drawing the blood. On the first two goats, Peanut and Cocoa, Keri was successful on the first poke. The last goat, Nilla, proved (as usual) to be more difficult. Her vein was huge and easy to see, but must have been very slippery or something; it took about 10 tries to get the blood. We gave the poor girl an extra treat of grain afterward.

As you can imagine we couldn’t really get any photos of the process. But since I know everyone likes to see photos, I took a picture of the samples for you. Here is the result of all our efforts, I hope it doesn’t gross anyone out. Tomorrow morning we’ll be sending them overnight to the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory and Washington State University. Hopefully the results will come back clean. If not, we’ll just have to take extra precautions to avoid the goat’s kids getting infected.

We finished up the goat barn last weekend, here are a few photos of it.

Here I'm just getting started priming the building. I used an airless sprayer but also went over it with a roller to push the paint into the heavily textured siding. It was much more tedious than painting normal house siding, but still faster than painting by hand.

I did the rest of the painting on a day Keri had to to work so no more progress photos, but here's the finished result. We did a chocolate brown color for the body and a tan for the trim. It ended up using almost twice the paint we expected it would. We're really happy with how it turned out though.

Here's the other side. The two windows on this side are double casement windows (from the ReStore, of course) so in the summer they can be opened for ventiliation. They'll eventually be painted tan to match. The section with the bare OSB will be a 6 foot sliding door when I get around to building and hanging the door. We just closed it off temporarilly so we could get the goats in for now. In the background you can see their temporary shelter I made using the cement forms from the radio tower foundation.

Here's a picture of the inside. On the left you can see the hay feeder and the opening that gives them access to the pen. On the right you can see the three blue plastic feed bins we put their food in and the white PVC thing is feeder for their mineral supplement.

The three ladies were watching us intently through the goat door as we got the barn ready. Always curious to see what's going on.