Copper for the Goats

Goats can be tough to manage.  Around this time of the year, you can notice their coat becomes dull instead of its normal shiny appearance.  It also has a coarse feel to it.  Then they get a "bottle jaw" look to them and diarrhea which indicates the presence of parasites.  They are quite prevalent in our locale.  In addition to treating with Ivermectin, Safeguard and Valbazen, we give them copper boluses.

When I say copper, I mean copper.  The heavy metal comes in the container and you make up capsules by measuring out prescribed amounts.  They feel heavy in your hands.

The trick is to get the goats to take the copper boluses.  I use a device that's normally used to worm cattle and horses.  I first coat the capsules of copper with peanut butter and put in in the wormer gun followed by a generous helping of peanut butter as the chaser.

We straddle the goat, pulling their heads back.  Then I gently insert the worming gun as far down her throat as I can get it and push in on the plunger.  This pushes the two copper capsules down their throats.  We hold their heads back until they've swallowed it all.  We did have cases in which two of the goats recognized something was up and spit it out.  We just do it again until they swallow it.

Copper has a life of 4 - 6 months.  Perhaps this will do the trick and will say farewell to the parasites.  We'll keep monitoring the goats daily.

Waiting on Fall to Get Here

As I was out walking yesterday evening, I was doing some thinking.  I don't know if it's like it where you live, but this summer has been long, hot, and dry.  Summer is always like that, you might say, but this one seems worse.  Is it that I'm getting older?  I don't know.  I like to have lots of projects to work on, but the hot humid weather just saps all the strength out of me.  

I am looking forward to Fall!  I can't wait until we're not sitting at 80 degrees at 8 in the morning, with temperatures in the mid-90's and the doggone heat index saying "feels like 105."  When that first cool front comes in, we will be so very happy!  Perhaps the cooler temps will give me some energy to get some things done.

1. Get the tomatoes transplanted into the garden.

2. Plant all the cole crops (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels Sprouts, etc.)

3. Our fall crop of meat bird chicks (50 of them) get mailed to us on Sept 16th.  I need to get the chicken tractor checked out and brooder ready to go.

4. Betsy is getting bigger.  Time to put a breaking halter on her so she'll walk with a rope.

5. Insulation in the attic.  The old fiberglass batt insulation is 26 years old.  It's fallen down and there is no remaining insulation upstairs.  Need to install new batts.  This is DEFINITELY a job for cooler weather!

6. Cooler weather will get LuLu out of heat stress and enable us to begin milking her again.

Hopefully, a reprieve from the heat is on its way.  So tired of the dog days of summer!  

Soil Cover - An Important Consideration in Soil Health

Covering the soil is one of the most basic things you can do in soil conservation.  If you walk in the woods, you always see the ground covered with decomposing logs, leaves and understory.  Small trees thrive under the canopy followed by grasses.  Bugs and worms thrive beneath the rotting organic matter as rich moist topsoil is being formed.

The photo below just west of our barn was taken five years ago.  There is one tiny patch of grass seen on the bottom right.  What Happened?!  This entire area was once covered with bahia grass and bermuda grass and now this...  It's all dirt.  In the summer, the sun heats up the dirt and dries it out.  When rains come, the soil is washed away.  When winds blow, the dust (our topsoil) is blown away.

In trying to figure the genesis of this problem out, I think it all started with bonfires.  When winds would blow limbs out of the trees, I would stack up a big burn pile.  The pile would continue to grow, and when it got HUGE, especially in the winter, I would light it up and we'd sit around it and enjoy its warmth.  The fires were so big, one time the neighbors called the fire department thinking that our barn was on fire!

I love sitting around a fire, staring into the coals, but the fires killed the grass, exposing the dirt.  The chickens scratched holes in the exposed dirt to take their dust baths.  When tiny grasses started to grow, they dried up quickly in the heat and chickens plucked out the grasses to eat.  The situation went from bad to worse.  I had to change this!

A barren wasteland

We have cows, goats and chickens all grazing on 3 acres.  Soil health aside, this barren wasteland needs to have grass growing on it to feed all the hungry barnyard critters.  I stopped burning the big bonfires and then planted sprigs of bermuda grass in the dirt taken from cuttings.  Our chicken population, due to the minks, was cut in half, taking pressure off of the barren area and allowing the grass to take root and grow.  Moreover, and I can't quite explain it, but for some reason the spring after a very hard freeze, the grass started coming back - first gradually and then quickly.

I took a photo of the same area yesterday.  Although there is still work to be done in bringing this area back to its former glory, a good start has been made.  Grass almost completely covers the old desert-like area.  The animals and the humans are happy with the progress.  Imagine how it would look if we hadn't been in a drought!

A return of our grass pasture

The grassland now gives additional grazing capacity to our animals.  The roots hold the soil together, reducing erosion.  The grass keeps the soil cooler, and gives bugs and worms a place to hide and do their work.  As organic matter decomposes, the soil and its microorganisms thrive, doing their job.  We'll continue to do our part to rehabilitate the area that I negatively affected by unwise choices.  More work to do, but I like before/after photos that show evidence of good stewardship of the land.

Bottling the Summer 2026 Honey Harvest

It was high time we get the honey out of the five gallon buckets and into jars as we're out of the 2025 summer and fall crop of honey.  The summer 2026 crop yielded 17.8 gallons of honey that we've stored in 5 gallon buckets.  We dehumidified it down to 18.5% moisture and now its ready to bottle.  We sterilized all the jars and arranged the empty jars on the island along with lids and began pouring.  You can click the arrow below to watch the video of the smooth, sweet honey coming out of the honey gate and into the jars.

We bottled the honey in 3 separate batches.  I liked the red tinge of the honey in this photo as the morning sun is shining in through the kitchen window.

As we are bottling and going from jar to jar, sometimes honey gets on the side of the jars so they must be wiped down with a dishrag with warm, soapy water on it.  No one likes getting a sticky jar of honey.  We found an online label service called VistaPrint a couple of years ago and designed some labels that we affix to all the jar lids.

Here is an up close photo of the labels that we put on each jar of honey.

In all we got 152 jars of honey ready to sell.  Last year our bees yielded 170 jars.  We attribute the lower production to a big rain event we got right smack dab in the middle of the "flow" when the Chinese Tallow trees were flowering.  This really messed things up, but we're not complaining.  In fact, if we sell all of our honey, this year (our third year as beekeepers) will be the year we get out of the red and into the black.  Beekeeping is an expensive hobby!

Last year's crop crystallized during the winter months.  This year we hope to mitigate that by storing all of our honey in our new "hot box" that was given to us by someone going out of the honey-selling business.  It's an old refrigerator fitted with a couple of light bulbs and a thermostat that helps keep the honey at a temperature high enough that it never crystallizes and low enough that the beneficial enzymes in the raw honey are not damaged.

We've already sold 36 jars and have a stockpile of honey inventory for our customers.  We're mostly on the honor-system where our loyal customers come and get jars of honey out of the garage and leave money in the box to pay for it.  We'll likely harvest honey again this fall.  The fall crop is a fraction of the summer crop.  We like to leave some honey for the bees to eat over the winter though.  It is the bees' honey, after-all.  We erected our Honey for Sale sign by the road.  We'll leave it up until we run out.

The summer 2026 honey crop is all done!

The Masked Bandit

A couple of month's ago, I re-read "Where the Red Fern Grows," a great novel about 10 year old Billy Colman and his two coon dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann.  I tell you, if you don't get choked up reading that book, you have ice water running in your veins.  Billy loves his dogs and his dogs love him.  They all love treeing coons, too.

I have a lot of bad experiences with raccoons.  They are a very smart, formidable foe.  Back when I was crawfishing for a living, they cost me lots of money.  At night they would forage through my ponds, eating crawfish out of my traps - crawfish that I could have otherwise sold.  To add insult to injury, they would turn over traps.  Being unable to see the traps, I would then run over with my boat, flattening them out at a cost of $8.50 per trap.  In the early mornings, I would walk through a patch of woods that bordered my crawfish ponds.  The coons, with bellies full of crawfish, would sleep in the crooks of trees.  I would see them and shoot them out of the treetops and they would plummet to the ground with a loud thud.  They gave me fits.

They also, I've learned, will kill your chickens.  This afternoon late, I walked to the henhouse to collect eggs.  The girls' laying has diminished.  Many are broody and the rest are just hot and tired.  I picked up 8 eggs today.  When I came out of the henhouse with my basket, I heard a rustling noise in the grass in the woods adjacent to our property.  It was a juvenile raccoon trying to get in through the fence.  I scared the rascal.

I'm unlike Billy Colman in that I don't have two redbone coonhounds.  I opened up the back gate running after the coon.  The coon did what coons do - he scampered up a tree and watched me.  Can you see him in the 'V' in the tree right in the very center of the photo below?

I ran as quick as I could to get my 12 gauge shotgun and ran back.  Without dogs like Old Dan and Little Ann at the bottom of the tree, I was worried the masked bandit might have climbed down and escaped.  But no - he was still up in the crook of the tree looking down at me.  Waiting, I'm sure, for me to leave so that he could have a nice chicken dinner.

The rascal will not be eating chicken dinner tonight, or any night in the future.  I took aim, pulled the trigger - BOOM!, and the raccoon fell to the forest floor with a resounding thud.

Tricia said he was cute and maybe she's right, but this cute fellow is a chicken eater, and I can't abide with that type of neighbor.  I have to think that Billy Colman, Old Dan and Little Ann would agree.

The Predator Becomes the Prey

A while back we lamented the fact that we lost 39 hens to mink.  Those critters savagely slaughtered our egg layers.  It was only after I killed some squirrels and baited the traps with their blood and guts that I was able to catch the male and female in the trap.  They were summarily executed by firing squad.  We haven't had an issue with mink since that day.  I still drive around and see mink that have been killed while crossing the road.  Perhaps I shouldn't, but every time I see a mink carcass on the road, I do a fist pump and break in to a grin.  Mink are vicious killers and they get no sympathy from me.

This morning Tricia hollered, "Kyle, there's a mink on our back porch."  I'm mostly deaf, so I had to confirm what I thought I heard.  Yes, I heard her correctly.  We do have wild creatures like possums and coons and armadillos that will venture near the house, but never mink.  I ran to the gun shelf, pulled down the 12 gauge and loaded it with shells.  I ran out to the back patio and sure enough, that rascal was between the french doors and the back of the fireplace.

I couldn't hardly shoot him there - I'd break the windows and splinter the wood.  That little devil looked at me and bared his teeth.  I bared mine back.  Ginger, our cat, was around and I didn't want her in the crossfire.  The mink made a break for it around the back side of the house, but I had a bead on that beady-eyed creature.  BOOM!  Or you might say, "Pop, goes the weasel."  

Look at the teeth on this varmint!  He can tear some chicken up.  I quickly ran back to the pasture and around the henhouse to see if he had killed any of our chickens, but I found no dead or injured birds.  I put my foot in the photo below for perspective, so that you can see the size of this animal.

What would cause him to come up to the house?  Was he sick?  Rabid?  Did he just have a death wish?  We'll never know, but I'm happy Tricia happened to see him and called me so that I could take care of business.  That's one less mink to kill our chickens.

The Indians, I read in history, helped the pilgrims by teaching them to bury a fish underneath corn seeds to provide slow release fertilizer.  I grabbed a shovel and buried the mink in the garden, sort of next to the goat.  We'll see if mink works as good as fish as a garden fertilizer.

Boot Hill

This morning walking out to the barn at 6 AM something caught my eye by the firewood stacked up.  I thought it was a dead chicken.  How could that have happened?  All our hens are locked up in the henhouse at night.  The sun hadn't risen yet, and it was still sort of dark, so I walked over to check out the situation.

There was a dead animal, alright, but it wasn't a chicken.  It was Spotty.  One of our little bucklings.  Spotty has been in poor health for a while.  The goats struggle mightily with parasites, and Spotty seemed the most susceptible.  For the last month, we've been doctoring on him.  We alternated treating him with Valbazen, Safeguard, and Ivermectin.  We gave him Vitamin C and copper boluses and other treatments.  Initially they seemed to work and then a day later, we'd find him regressing again.

Popcorn is our buck that handles all the ladies of the herd.  We had picked Spotty to be Popcorn's heir apparent, primarily because of his genetics.  This little dude was spotted from head to toe - a really remarkable looking little creature.  Well, our plans for Spotty aren't going to materialize.  Popcorn will have to keep on going.  There is another baby buckling, but he's almost solid black with a few random spots here and there.

Before the sun got overhead in the sky, I told Tricia that I was going to lay Spotty to rest.  I took Spotty's collar off of his neck and carried him into the garden.  It hasn't rained here in a month of Mondays, so the ground was hard as granite.  My shovel went down about six inches until it hit a clay hardpan.  I went back to the garage and got the mattock and used that to dig a deeper hole.

When I got it deep enough, I positioned poor Spotty in the bottom of the hole.  Since rigor mortis hadn't fully set in yet, it was easier to get him to fit in the hole.  Then I began back-filling the hole with all the dirt and then woodchips and mulch.

Boot Hill for Goats

When I was done, you could hardly tell where Spotty lies in his unmarked grave in the garden between the green onions and the sweet potatoes.  Can you spot the small rise in the center of the photo above?  Sad?  Yes, but if you raise animals, you've got to be prepared for this type thing and get used to loss.  We gave it our best shot.  It just wasn't meant to be.  And who's to say that Popcorn doesn't have a recessive "spotty" gene that will come out next kidding season.