This week: More kids!

Proud mom with her twins just minutes old.

The very last kid was born right after I returned home from the market today and went out to check on the goats. Blondie had two little twins to bring the total number of healthy babies to 21! Huge thanks to one of our 4-H friends for volunteering to take the one goat which would need bottle fed. After those triplets, the rest of the newborns were either singles or twins.

Great day to laze around in the sun.

We ended up with 14 girls and 6 boys, which is great. This brings our heard up to 38 goats, 32 who are females. We have set a goal of 30 steady breeding does for the time being, so we have exceeded that goal and have successfully built our heard to a comfortable level. All of the kids are beautiful and healthy and will be a great addition to the herd. Our next goal for the goats is to have an electrician come to get our electric fencing in working order so we can start a decent rotational grazing system. They had plenty of forage room for the first full year they were here, but consistently rotating them onto new land helps prevent disease and minimizes (hopefully eliminates) the need to medicate them. We will keep them contained to a few acres and hay them while the babies are growing, but as Spring moves in we want to make sure they have more than enough room to roam free and graze as they wish while taking them off of the pastures they grazed last year.

The walk-behind tractor we use for soil work.

Everything else is well and moving forward on Two Bridges Farm. We finished putting up a high tunnel for seedlings this week, and started some cabbage seed. This week begins the first round of real seed starting. The working of the land to be cultivated is on schedule and set to be done with irrigation laid and ready to plant in two weeks. This process is more tedious and strenuous for us because we do not have a conventional tractor to work the land. For now we only use a walking tractor with a rotary plow implement for deep tillage (important to break up soil compaction and for aeration) and rotary tiller for shallow tillage (to thoroughly mix in manure, compost, and amendments in the soil while smoothing out the surface). The slope of our land makes using this machine even more difficult, but if divide the work into manageable bits and stay on schedule, it works great for our needs. We are lucky a machine like this exists as a conventional tractor is outside of our budget and there are no friendly farmers or rental places near us to borrow from.

Western Wake Farmers' Market today was bustling and the weather was beautiful. I'm inspired every week by the loyalty of customers and the sense of community. It makes a week of hard work worth it.