"They're Alive!"

The keets arrived at the Surry Post Office yesterday morning. Kris ran from our house all the way to Virgil's driveway and made record time from there to the post office. Any one on the north bend road that saw a streak and heard a whoosh yesterday morning was probably just being passed by a very excited new guinea keet mother. Anyway, while Kris ran to the post office I filled the waterer and put some feed in the little feeders and was coming down the steps when Kris came back.

"Did you forget the keys?" I asked.
"No, I have the Keets! she replied breathlessly and brushed past me in a blur taking steps two at a time. I could hear the keets cheeping in the box and Kris was cheeping back to them. Mother hen was bonding with her chicks and the box wasn't open yet. I headed back up stairs and into the heated room with the brooder. Mother hen was already putting keets in their new home. She had one side of the screen that covers the brooder balanced on her head and was opening the shipping box and carefully lifting each one out of the box and dipping their beaks in the waterer before setting the birds down. She was teaching them where the water was and giving them their first drink. She cheeped to each chick during this process and they cheeped back at "mom" and then ran off to explore the brooder.

I suppose that this is better for the keets than just opening the box and dumping them in, kinda shaking them out a few at a time. I was impressed. I was even more impressed later when she told me she found a few with sticky butts and had gently taken warm water and rubbed their little bottoms to clean them and stimulate a proper bowel movement. Way to go mom. I favor letting them eat and creating enough internal pressure that anything blocking their tiny bums is pushed out of the way without my help. To be honest, I have never really looked at bird bottoms with more than a passing glance and certainly would have missed this "sticky situation." (I was going to say I had never really looked at chick bottoms with more than a passing glance-- but that statement would not be entirely true.)

Kris spent a large part of yesterday playing with the keets, socializing them, getting them used to her voice and using the call that will eventually bring them home to roost at night when they are finally turned loose. Training starts immediately at Missed Skeet Farm. I am wondering what will happen when "Mom" turns them loose and then tries to walk out the road and leave.

So the birds are here and safe. The US Postal Service has come through again and will no longer be getting calls from Kris trying to track her flock, and I need to get busy and finish the Keet Kondo. They may grow faster than I can build these days.

Oh, yeah. Kris moved a hundred bales of hay from one side of the barn to the other yesterday, while I went to town and did banking. This is to make room for the new goat babies that will be coming. It must have been the burst of energy expectant mothers get just before the babies arrive. I'm guessing this means the goat babies are going to be here soon.

I have to run , I got lots to do!

New Guinea Arrival

No, we aren't in New Guinea. We have just received a revised shipping date on our Guinea keets-- maybe today. Yes, it could as soon as a couple of hours. Kris has butterflies. I will be surprised to find any of them still cheeping. I think that sums up the difference in our personalities. Kris will be stricken if any of the chicks don't make it and I will be surprised if any do.

There are times when I wished I had been born in Maine and could go "Ayuh" without sounding like I'm from away. If we open the box and all the chicks have expired, it would be the perfect time to look at them and go "Ayuh". That would sum up my opinion that the uppity flat landers from Ohio should of known better than to try sending live chicks all the way to Maine by US Postal service. No other expression can say so much in less words or combination of letters, than this expressive grunt. It remains one of my great disappointments that I don't get to use it.

Well, in an act of faith in the postal service that I don't feel, we have framed up the keet condo. It is supposed to rain today, but if it doesn't, I will frame the front wall and put the purlins on the roof. Purlins run across the rafters and are what the metal roofing attaches to. (Us building types throw these terms in to humble the none building types. It allows us to feel smug while ending a sentence in a preposition.)

In a totally unrelated event, yesterday we had a realtor and client move the saw horse and drive in the road. They didn't make it fifty yards. I consider this to be the poorest effort we have seen to date. We didn't even walk out to enjoy their discomfort at being so dumb. There were two vehicles involved and the new 4x4 truck got stuck behind the car. Usually, they make it to the hill where it is bottomless and all four wheels sink to the frame. Then the wrecker has a hard time getting a cable to them from ground that is firm enough for the wrecker to not get stuck. This can turn into a two wrecker event. Yesterday was no challenge at all for the wrecker. The realtor told the client that she had never seen the road be a problem. Huh. Well, I guess she should come out more often in April and early May. Jess and Alex walked by while they were stuck and observed the client was dressed nicely with lots of expensive jewelry. She might surprise us, but usually that indicates maybe she isn't going to be a serious candidate for living on Jellison Ridge Road.

Back to Keet watch 2011. If the keets are coming, we will get a call around 8:00 this morning. Wish us luck, I have a feeling both we and the keets are going to need some, "Ayuh."

Keets arrive today, maybe?

Well, for most of you, this is the day marked by mailing in your taxes. (If this is the first you have thought of it, you need to file an extension.) The BIG event of the day here is the arrival of our guinea keets by US Mail. I can't imagine this really works so if they are still cheeping when they arrive I will be amazed. They are coming from Mt. Healthy Hatchery in Ohio. I am a little uneasy with the name of the hatchery. It's like they are trying too hard to convince me the chicks were disease free when they left Ohio. Why would you need to do that unless they are usually sick when they arrive at their destinations.

Maybe expectant chick receivers all go through this anxious state just before their chicks arrive. The postal service just seems like the least likely delivery method to make this happen. I think it would be difficult to get the chicks here from Ohio if you personally picked up the chicks, boarded a plane with your cargo, had a direct flight with no lay overs, drove straight from the airport to Surry and put them in the brooder.

Well, we will see shortly. I am sure that the hatcheries usually get their chicks there alive or they would be trying something else. Kris is going to the post office to pick them up while I go to Bangor to pick up our taxes and mail them off. (If the chicks need mouth to beak recessitation, I want to be somewhere else.) Besides, I need to stop at Tractor supply and look at fencing. We need a cheap way to keep the goats and chickens out of the garden. They sell electric fencing for chickens and there is a dark corner of my mind that finds some humor in the vision of feathers flying and flapping after a chicken gets zapped. Having raised chickens, I doubt they have enough brain cells to put two and two together and figure out to "step away from the fence." You may end up slowly barbecuing hapless chickens too dim witted to just move, so, I am looking to go with the more traditional woven wire fence. It has to be sturdy enough to keep goats out and have weave small enough to keep chickens out.

Well anyway, it is a big day here at Missed Skeet Farm. Animals are bringing life and rhythm to help complete a pretty near idyllic existence here. Soon the road will firm back up and we will be driving in and out. We don't mind walking in and out but you can't ride the horses on the road when it's like this and that is making us antsy for the road to dry up. We had a dinner guest go in up to her knees with an errant step and it does make you feel bad when that happens. Still living at the end of the road is a pretty good way to live and it's going to get better today.

Countdown!

WE HAVE KEATS COMING IN SEVEN DAYS and still no sign of a coop for them to call home. The wood pile is gone and the ground has been flattened and filled. I even have some of the stringers cut, yet only in my imagination has the coop come together. I need good weather and am looking at rain for the next two days. I could build in the rain, but since we have shelter large enough to move around in, I have become a fair weather builder. Yes, I've said it! It is good to just get it out in the open and admit it.

When we lived in the camper and well house, we built everyday. Rain, snow, sleet or blazing sun-- we kept building. The thinking was that everything we did brought us closer to some goal. I see now that the goal was to get out of the rain, snow and blazing sun. Boy, am I glad we now have someplace to get out of the nasty weather.

Up until we chose homelessness, retirement and potential, over a house, mortgage, and job, I never really appreciated much of anything I had. Now, I appreciate just not being wet when it rains. Comparison is evidently the key to happiness. I can help you see this with a short experiment: Go get a pair of pliers and squeeze on one of your fingers really hard and keep it firmly clamped at the unbearable pain level. Now, stop. Isn't that a lot better! Your finger still hurts, but it's better- a lot better and you are much happier than you were. Before you squeezed your finger, you had not really noticed how nice it was not to be squeezing your finger, now you really appreciate not squeezing.

So, the point of the painful experiment is I am not going out in the rain to build and I really, really appreciate it. Still, the keats are coming and I intend to be ready. I am preparing by trying to do things that will speed the construction when the weather breaks. I may actually draw up a plan and make a cutting list. On something this small I usually design roughly and cut as I go. The result is sometimes quite interesting.

More likely though, I will just do dishes and try to get ready for the company coming tomorrow. Company is a powerful motivator around here. It makes me stand back and look at all the things I have left dangling and piles of tools and materials laying around. Kris and I will try to make our place less messy. It is after all a barn and there are limits. Gravel and hay track in constantly. In the end, we will be satisfied that things look pretty good. This is by comparison to what it looks like now of course. (Repeat the above experiment here if you have forgotten how powerful comparison is.)

We are going to feed them and you never know how new company will take to cooking and eating in a barn. I think some people are unnerved by the bacteria, fungus, molds etc. that are a part of barn life. These people are farmers and have there own barn and animals. I suspect that they will probably do just fine even if they don't go home and move from their house into their barn after seeing how much fun it is here.

Pile Logistics

Every project around here seems to start by doing something else to get ready for the new project. If we had a plan for the farm that didn't change almost daily, it would be a lot easier. It seems that farming by whim has a few drawbacks. Most of the problems are caused by a pesky law of physics that says two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. By itself this wouldn't be much of a problem. You would just build things where nothing else was located. But-- several other things have to be considered. Rather than keep you in suspense, I'll just list them:

1. Southern exposure (helps warm things in the winter)
2. Topography and it's close associate drainage
3. Aesthetics (this is used if the other constraints aren't bad enough)

So, after imagining the goat barn, chicken coop and guinea hen coop in all the available spots, it became apparent that I was going to have to move a large pile of firewood to even begin the first building.

When I located the fire wood piles I imagined every conceivable construction possibility I could and determined all of the fire wood piles were way, way out of the area that would be used for anything. I was blinded by the idea that I would be building a house before all these other more interesting possibilities occurred to us. Further, since I knew where the house was going to be, I believed the wood pile was in a great spot for easy access to the house.

Yesterday I got to pay for this bit of cleverness by once again moving a pretty good size wood pile. Now, I can start ground work for the guinea house. After that, then I can start the actual construction. We have keats (guinea hen chicks) coming in 9 days so, I will just make it if the weather holds and nothing else comes up.

My wood pile location seems to be like dowsing for future building sites. Both the goat barn and the hen house will need wood piles moved also. A less experienced farm planner would expect that with forty acres and just a few wood piles that eventually a building might get put up without moving a wood pile first. It hasn't happened yet, although I am guessing the woodshed location will be chosen so we have to move wood quite ways to get it into the shed.

Out of the yesterday's effort, we now have firewood all stacked up on pallets and ready to be burned next winter--some consolation I guess, so I am still upbeat about the guinea house and coop beating the arrival of the keats. Also, I did get some clean up done around the yard, but there is a lot of cleanup left to do. Well, before I overwhelm myself with the immediate grim details of spring cleanup, I better eat and get out there and get busy.

Where's the Beef?

OK, OK, I know you are dying to find out what goat meat tastes like. Well, BOER goat meat tastes like beef. It has less choelesterol and fat than Chicken. Calorie-wise, it is the same as chicken. That makes it half of the calories of beef and a third the calories of pork. It looks like deer meat, very little fat and a nice red color.

So, I could eat the same amount of goat as beef, take in half the calories, and get less fat and cholesterol than I would from chicken. I wouldn't be eating any artifical hormones or medicines fed to the beef critters. That certainly sounds like it's healthier. I'm big on quantity and to be able to reduce my calories and keep my plate filled is very appealing.
In addition to being healthy, goats would clear my land and provide a new hobby.

Well, it looks like another impulsive decision is going to work out way better than I thought. It is enough to make reasoned decision making obsolete. By any yardstick our decisions have been impulsive and questionable at best. Still, they have led to incredible happiness and an impressive run of lucky breaks.

We have decided to have goats for less than a week and it has already changed the way I look at the back pasture. We were going to start clearing the brush, hard work in anybody's book. (George Bush is the only one I know that did it for recreation.) We walked around the area we are going to turn into pasture last evening and the blackberry and raspberry briar patches were as satisfying to find as a field of timothy and clover. Goats love them and they are loaded with stuff a goat needs. How lucky we are to have acres of almost impenetrable, thorny, scrubby, brush and small hard woods. To think I was about to start clearing away a cornucopia of nutritious tangle almost makes me apoplectic.

When the good lord gives you lemons, make margaritas is the only thing I can think of that even comes close to the brilliance of getting goats. We were concerned about the goats getting out and eating the garden etc. As it turns out, because of the increased size of these sturdy little goats, they aren't much on fence jumping. Looking at their conformation you can see that they are built for football not high jumping. Their nature is to be quiet and friendly.

Boer goats are used as pack animals for hikers. (I swear I am not making this up.) You get a young goat, bottle feed it and it follows you any where you want to go. They have small back packs that fit on them. They graze and nibble along behind you and carry your gear. It almost makes you want to be a hiker. Kris and I can use this ablility during mud season when we walk in and out instead of carring things ourselves or using the wheel barrow. We could make a goat cart and increase the load they could haul. Goat carts used to be common in days gone by.

This is extreme farming and therefore appeals to us greatly. The less conventional it is, the better we like it. I am sure it says something about us, but I can't quite figure out what. So, after the chicken coop and the guinea hen house, I will be remodeling the first barn to hold the new goats, until I can get a proper goat barn up and functional.

Not Goats Too?

Thursday was quite busy around here. That was the day we discovered our solar electric system would run our well pump and we had an unusual amount of visitors for this time of year. Walking in and out a half mile on a muddy road limits visitors so we were happy to see several intrepid souls. Two came to see the horses and I think they would have walked ten miles they were so excited. Morgan and Heather are trying to learn enough about horses to be able to ride. On an excitement scale from one to ten, they come in around twelve. They can't hide their happiness and excitement and that makes them great fun to help. After years of having horses, Kris and I still have the same excitement about horses and it is good to see other people as crazy as we are.

Anyway, after we worked with the horses a couple of hours, we took them into see videos of horses doing various gaits so they could start to learn what is possible. While we were watching the videos, we glanced out the window and Walter Kane was looking in. I went out and brought him in to the barn. I gather Water was not expecting to see two very good looking young ladies in our kitchen. Wide eyed surprise changed to a smile, and after introductions, he sat down and watched horse videos with us. Finally, the girls had to leave and Walter remembered why he had walked half a mile in to see us.

"Brought back your pickle jars."
"I'll get you another jar Walter" and off Kris went to grab some more bread and butter pickles.

Since Walter really is a farmer and grew up on farm, he is a wealth of useful information and we ply him with pickles and pick his brain for ideas that are useful. Our farming has nothing to do with modern farming techniques and Walter's knowledge is from a time when all farms had a subsistence component to it, so it is a perfect fit. Walters stories give him a chance to reminisce and we can ask questions and get more useful knowledge than a month of research would give us.

Walter raised cows most of his life and I mentioned that if we ever get enough pasture we were considering getting one to fatten up and butcher. Walter said our land was suited to goats and would be for awhile. He said he would be tempted to get Boer goats, a variety specifically for meat production.

Well, unfortunately that got us to thinking and looking at Boer goats on the Internet. Research is dangerous. Farm research for us is very dangerous. We should probably have a block put on the computer to keep us from doing farm research. In less time than it would take to have a nap, we knew enough about Boer goats to know we can't live with out them anymore and it is amazing that we have somehow overlooked them for this long. We also had a list of farms in Maine that grew Boer Goats-with websites and phone numbers. Boer meat is available for sale and that will give us a chance to try it. I raised goats before and it tastes like lamb.
The Boer goats are supposed be milder and unlike milk goats, there is a good amount of meat. Boer Goats are gentle, friendly, are ready to eat in just a few months, lower in cholesterol and fat, and three litters are possible in two years. Two to three kids are average size litters and four is not unusual. They browse like a deer and eat things like blackberry bushes, poison Ivy, and what ever they can find in your garden.

So, while I'm building chicken houses, I had better start considering the new goat operation. Where to put shed's and pens is starting to be a problem. A first class goat operation needs little chutes and sorting pens. We could milk goats too. A Boer buck passes along the Boer traits to certain of the dairy goats. So, if we had a dairy goat doe, we could milk her after she kidded and use the milk. We use milk in my coffee and the sourdough bread and we could feed it to a pig. Hmmm, pigs.

I think we are going to look at goats today, you know just look, that's all. Maybe I should google pig varieties while I wait for Kris to get up.

Alright!

Some days are bigger than others around here. Some are milestones. Yesterday was one of those. The snow finally melted enough for me to pull the heavy duty extension cord up from its usual home linking the generator to the pump and set it up to hook the solar electric system directly to the pump. Looking at all the amperage's it seemed like it should work and we hoped it would work, but until you plug in and water starts rushing into the water barrels, you don't really KNOW it will work.

Well, it worked! This is huge for us. We have water without running the generator. By running wire under the paddock and into the barn from the well house, we can move water from the well to the supply barrels at the flip of a switch. The final piece of the puzzle is in place and it all works! Our water supply is gravity fed instead of pressurized. We have storage barrels upstairs and over sized supply lines from there down to the faucets.

This test with the heavy extension cord was critical. We didn't want to bury an expensive electrical line from the barn through the paddock and over to the well house and then discover that the solar electric system just shuts down under that kind of load. It is a 1500 watt system and has a very small serge component. When motors start they usually cause a surge of power that can be twice to three times their normal running wattage. A half horse pump runs at around 8 amps. (stick with me here, I am going to do some math. There is no test at end and I am going to give you the answer.) Watts= volts x amps. So the 110volts x 8 amps = 880 watts. So the motor should run on the system after the initial surge. Would the surge cause the system to overload? That was the question. The answer we now know, is NO.

We paid extra to get the "soft start pump" which is supposed to not have a large start up surge. We asked when we bought the pump, what the surge might actually be, and the salesman at the plumbing supply company, said it should not draw over ll amps under any conditions. Still, salesmen are not electrical engineers and they are not spending their money. If the system overloads, he will not be starting a generator for the rest of his life every time the water barrels need filling. Let's do some more math, 110 volts x 11 amps 1,210 watts. The system should start the pump and run it.

Well, the "test" worked, the math and the salesman were evidently correct, and the system works. We are ecstatic. Yes, ha ha ha the system works. It takes exactly 5 minutes of running the pump to supply three days of water at winter conditions. In the summer, the water needs will vary greatly and we will need to water the garden. Still, an hour of pump running will supply about 600 gallons of water. I am convinced that our system could do this. If the sun is out and it is clear, a third of the power would be coming from the sun directly. It is not unusual to get over three hundred watts from the panels.
The four batteries are rated at 100 amp hours each. You can use 25% of this or 100 amp hours before you need to recharge. In theory, we will use about 880 watts divided by the 24volts of the batteries = 37 amp hours roughly for every hour of water we pump. There is some system inefficiency, but on sunny days (when you would need more water), we will be able to supply most of it by solar electric system.

If you have read this far, bless you. The point of all this is, plugging in the pump to the solar electric system and having it work was a very, very big deal.