Buck Fever?

With very high expectations we arrived home after dark with "Rancid" (our name for the breeding buck from Curtis and Linda Prime.) Rancid is named after a fictional Patrick McManus's character, Rancid Crabtree who got his nickname from his philosophy on personal hygiene. (If you haven't read Patrick McManus stop reading this and go to Amazon.com and order a book. McManus creates the best characters since Mark Twain dreamt up Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.)

Billy goats have a well deserved reputation for cantankerous behavior. Goats can be lightening quick with an explosive short charge and Boer Goats have their horns intact. So I wasn't sure what to expect from Rancid when I stepped into the horse trailer to slip a rope on him. Kris shut the door behind me to "keep the goat from escaping."(She is very helpful at times.)
"Good luck" she called perkily from outside the trailer.

Rancid was not too thrilled with having a lead rope looped around his neck by a stranger and avoided my attempts. I was wondering if I was going to tick him off or make him feel cornered and desperate. I was pretty sure those were two things that might not work out well.
Still perky and now curious about the ruckus Rancid and I were making, Kris inquired "How's it going?"
"I think he needs to rest a minute," I wheezed. I gave him a minute or two to calm down and then, surprisingly, he stood quietly and I looped the rope around him and led him easily out of the trailer and into the pen. Kris's excitement seemed to wane a little and she looked mildly disappointed. I was now feeling perkier however.


The girls were shut in the barn and were blatting and making goat noises so Rancid calmly strode up to the outside feeder and started eating, obviously less excited than we were. We were sort of expecting him to start butting the barn door to get at the does inside. It appeared more likely that he was going to have a nice dinner and get some shut eye before anything more strenuous. Maybe this wouldn't be as bad as we had imagined.

We had other chores to do and it was getting late so we decided to put Rancid in one of the stalls and introduce him to his harem in the morning when they would have the run of the goat pen to avoid injury. If goat courtship is anything like chicken courtship, he might just pound them senseless and have his way with them.

I am sure Kris didn't sleep much that night and got up early. "Lets go down and let Dick out."
"Who is Dick?"
"I think Dick is a much better name for the Billy Goat," she laughed.
"Absolutely not, and you are going to lose your grandmother status if you keep this up."
"Yup, that's it, Dick."
"No, we are going to call him Rancid."
"Okay, we'll call him Rancid D-"
"NOoo! Just Rancid! You keep this up and I will call the grandmother review board myself."

Kris was up and down to the goat pen in record time. I ran water and brought it down a little later. Anything going on?
"Not yet. Dick is sniffing and chasing, and the girls are playing hard to get."

Rancid is much bigger than our does. They weigh 125 to 150lbs and Rancid goes at least 250lbs. Before breeding season starts, he probably weighs 300lbs. The girls were apparently aghast at the size of him and his well... "package". He a is very, very impressive buck. I didn't blame them for running scared. Rancid seemed undeterred and yet gentle and let the girls escape his advances without much fuss. As the day wore on not much progress seemed to be made except the girls allowed Rancid to eat at the same feeders where they were eating. Rancid kept sniffing and testing but never chased. He evidently had his pride or having bred thousands of does in his life time, was patiently philosophical about rejection. He could wait.

As it turns out, Rancid is a pretty nice buck and is accepting of an occasional pat or head scratch. He moves out of your way when you need to get through and has good barn manners. Thats a relief since his horns make a full curl and stick out a foot on either side of his head. If he were mean, he would be dangerous.

Kris spent the day finding excuses to be down at the barn. I checked on her occasionally to make sure that she was Okay. Mostly she was offering Rancid pointers. "Stay with her Dick. She's just playing hard to get. Look at this one big fella." "I should bring the camera down and..."

"No cameras Grandma." It is best to quash some of her ideas early on. After making sure it wasn't likely Rancid would hurt the does, I spent the day doing other things. Goat breeding was a lot less exciting than I thought it would be.

Monday morning, when we let the goats out it was apparent that Rancid and Static were and item. She would flag her tail and he would follow protectively. Love comes to Missed Skeet Farm. It was plain they were both smitten. We take Ethan on Mondays and I was wondering how to keep him occupied somewhere else on the farm. I went to pick him up in town and Kris stayed to see if anything developed. If we know when a doe is bred, you can determine when she will kid within a day or two.

As it turns out, Rancid is gentle, patient and determined. Three qualities that will play well with our young does that are as full of nonsense as any teenage girls. Some play hard to get and some tease. We will keep Rancid for 45 days to make sure that the does go through two complete heat cycles. That should insure all the does are bred. I hope to get Kris out of the barn today. We need to do dishes and laundry and Rancid can take care of things down at the barn without so much advice.

The Buck Stops Here!

We have been waiting for November since we bought our young goats. November is the perfect month for our breeding program. A large portion of our crop of kids will be for our freezer and in order to grow them as economically as possible, we need them to be born in early spring and grow all summer on lush green browse. We will then harvest in the fall. Going with the natural order of almost all life on the planet will give us healthier animals and better growth. This is our thinking although we haven't read that anywhere. It just makes sense. Consequently, getting the buck to the farm at the right time is a big deal. So, today we will drive to Augusta with the stock trailer (formerly referred to as the horse trailer when we only had horses) and pick up the buck.

This is supposed to be a pretty good buck although he is going to appear to be a bag of bones we have been forewarned. He has spent the summer with a herd of a couple hundred Amish does and the fall with his owners large herd. Since breeding is more important than food to a buck, it is easy to imagine a pretty stringy looking animal. Well, it is hard for me to feel too sorry for him. Turns out if your lucky enough to be the biggest, best looking buck in the herd and you get chosen to be kept as breeding stock, life is pretty darn good if you can remember to eat once in awhile.

So, we're excited. Kris thought we should brush the does and make them look good before he arrives. It won't surprise me if I smell perfume in the goat barn today. I can tell you this is definitely their natural breeding season and they have been giving all the signs which I will spare you in the interest of keeping the G rating on my blog. We have to keep the buck for two complete heat cycles and that is at least 45 days. By that time, everything we own will smell like goat. The does give off little oder. Bucks on the other hand are a different story. They splash on the only cologne available by peeing on their faces for maximum olfactory attractiveness and standing in a doe's urine stream to assess the finer points of her readiness for courtship. All you have to do is walk through the herd and you too can have a pretty potent, hormonally charged scent. (You walk through the mall wearing that fragrance and you will turn a lot of heads from people who normally wouldn't give you a second glance.)

Not going anywhere is the easiest solution to the smell problem since it is a lingering contagious sort of scent. It should make Christmas interesting for gift recipients since many of the gifts will be made here on the farm and will act as air freshener as well as their original use. We are going to sequester clothes for Christmas before the buck arrives today and if that works, we may be invited inside to the various Christmas day activities. If not, we will just bundle up and stay outside on the deck and look through the windows. We are thinking by next summer, most of the smell will have dissapated and are looking forward to a fuller social calendar.

(That reminds me, we should call the daycare and point out a little advance notice for their visits, might prevent a lot uncomfortalbe explanations and years of trauma counselling.)

So, we are excited for the next phase of animal husbandry to begin and looking forward to seeing another goat farm today. Kris admitted she had butterflies from the excitement of it. I'm going to guess this may give way to another feeling when she gets a wiff of the buck.

Nor'easter

Well, the three to five inches of snow predicted turned into at least eight inches and has caught us flat footed here at the farm. The list of things that should be done before serious snow has not been touched. As it became apparent that the snow was not ending and the weatherman had overestimated the speed of the storm system which was in no particular hurry to move on, Kris and I dropped the rake off the back of the tractor, dug the snow blower out of the new snow drift and struggled to get it on and hooked up. The PTO (power take off)shaft is always stiff or frozen with cold sludge and nothing really wants to go together. So with snow blowing horizontally in a howling wind, we slowly beat the snow blower on to the tractor. There are certain things that have to be done without gloves and a lot things involving the snow blower fall into this category. You hurry as much as you can but the cold metal and the snow makes your fingers painful little clubs in short order.

Early in the season, snow management is tricky. Small amounts of snow are best to ignore and drive over. This packs the road with snow, covering rocks and smoothing it out. Large storms require the snow blower and a lot shear pins since you will be blowing a lot of rocks too. I have changed as many as a dozen shear pins in a storm. Some times you only make it a few feet before breaking another pin. Fortunately, after the first storm or two, you usually don't break many. Yesterday was a rough go of it.

The worst development yesterday was I broke the hydraulic activator lever for the front bucket. Metal fatigue finally got the better of it. Part of the hydraulics still work. The bucket will go up and down, but it will not empty. Today is Thanksgiving and I will look at when it warms up. If I can get it apart, I may be able to get it fixed on Friday or at least get the part ordered. Living in here is dependent on the tractor working. Also, I have to get the lights mounted on the roof working. All summer long they take a pounding as the tractor goes through the woods. I need to chase all the wires, clean up the connections and replace bulbs. If that still doesn't work, I'll have to change the lights. They have taken some serious abuse and it always surprises me when one lights up. We bought those at Wal-mart years ago and expected them to pooch in short order, but they have been very durable.

Still, it was a beautiful day and breaks in by the fire were not only warming, but heart warming. The storm brought the cookbooks off the shelf and not just the Heart Healthy one but the Amish ones with lard in the biscuits and cookie recipes that make a 5 gallon tin. It's supposed to warm up this weekend if you can believe the same weather website that predicted 3 inches of snow. That should allow us to spend more time getting the farm ready for winter. Of course, it will take way more time than it would have taken if we had done it before the storm. Ah well, winter is our favorite season and we can focus on living and enjoying it since doing anything else is just a waste of effort. Besides, a five gallon tin of cookies improves almost any situation.

Free Range Eggs

"Free Range" is all the rage at trendy whole food stores these days. The Blue Hill Food Co-Op (food heaven for trust funders- males wear berets, women wear long dresses and high top work boots) is awash in free range everything. Not to be out done, we have free range chickens, goats and horses. We have a nice Chicken coop that houses the chickens at night, but during the day the chickens scratch out a living around the farm. I like to think of it as chickens without borders- a bucolic paradise in the middle of Surry... well if you're a hen, not a rooster. (The roosters have all become chickens without heads.)

Up until recently, free range was an easy and inexpensive way to raise our flock. The start of egg production is making "Free Range" a lot more challenging.
Chickens lay eggs during the day making free range eggs are a lot trickier to collect than coop eggs. I spent a day making nesting boxes in the chicken coop. The hens were unimpressed. They seem to think outside the box-- outside the coop and outside the pen for that matter. Well it is a small leap from Free Range to free thinking and free sex. Oh, yeah, the chickens and one remaining rooster are absolutely shameless. Now it looks like we have our own "Occupy" movement right here at Missed Skeet Farm. They already have free food, free housing, free range, free sex. I suppose once you spoil them, they whine over everything. Well, I am not sure what I expected when we started letting the chickens "Free Range" but certainly not that.

As a result of the Free Range movement, we now spend a lot of time lurking. Lurking is the best way to find a nest. There are eight hens and that requires a lot of lurking. Kris is better at than I am. I appear to be lurking and once a chicken detects lurking, it won't go near its nest. Kris can lurk and do other things and easily fools the unsuspecting birds. When I lurk, no matter how nonchalant I try to appear, the chickens see right through it. I might as well wear a trench coat and hang out at the bus station. Consequently, Kris finds all the eggs. I spend most of my egg finding efforts checking the stubbornly empty nesting boxes and dealing with disappointment.


With all the extra time it requires to locate truly Free Range eggs, it makes me wonder how many of the eggs at the larger whole foods stores are actually free range. I hate to think it, but some of the free range chickens may be a little less free than the image conjures up.


Well, anyway, we used our first eggs making homemade egg noodles last night. I couldn't discern any difference in the flavor of the noodles, but I felt good about eating our own free range eggs so maybe it really is healthier.

Why is barn life so much fun? Take two:

I never get tired of hitting the return button instead of the tab button on this blog page. When you do that in the title line, it posts the blog you haven't written yet.

Let's see I was about to offer profound insight into why living in a barn is so much fun. Ah, yes.. It is all about improvement and moving foward. Any billionaire will tell you it is more fun to make the money than to have it. From our experience here, it is easy to see why. It is all about improvement in life and seeing ideas come to fruition.

Building the farm is tremendous fun because it takes so little effort to improve things. Most people take shelter, electricity, running water, being able to drive to your door step, central heat etc. for granted. We have had to create each of these. During the process we have led a pretty spartan existence here. In short, we have a low threshold for improvement.

Further, we are blessed with big equipment, lots of tools and plenty of raw materials, so things improve quickly around here. It is a very short time from conceptulization to realization. These two --izations are separated by very satisfying work. It is straight line gratifaction. As a result, we know exactly why we are working and the work is making a difference directly for us.


Most people have their basic needs satisfied completely. They are working for something of a lesser importance and it is often hard to associate their work with improvement in their lives. It makes it tough to stay motivated and easy to burn out.

Kris and I are fortunate enough to work on things that we dream up and will immediately improve our existence. We have the time to enjoy things as we are doing them. We are usually racing the weather, but if we lose the race it is not the end of the world. Our spartan exixtence turns out to be great fun.

So, it is Monday and I was feeling sorry for all of you who were heading off to work on projects that are important to someone but not necessarily to you. I admire your pluck. I am going to pick up the grandson and come back here and work on firewood. (Love the wood heat.)

Why is barn life so much fun?

Egg Production Begins at Missed Skeet Farm

We have been anxiously awaiting the hens to start laying eggs. They have been entertaining to watch and all, but eggs were reason we kept hens and ate roosters. A point that seemed to be lost on these hens as the took their sweet time at producing the first egg. Poopy Butt, named after an actual condition she had repeatedly as a young hatchling (the solution to this problem is to gently scrub away the poop blocking the chicks orifice which I never did) is a beautiful Speckled Sussex hen and the winner of the first egg prize. We have two Speckled Sussex hens and only Poopy Butt follows close on Kris's heels and babbles to her. Kris imitates the peeps and chuckles and I see the two wandering around the farm together several times a day. I imagine their was a bond created between the two and I am lucky that Poopy Butt doesn't live in the barn with us.

Anyway, we have EGGS. The first day we only had EGG. Every time Kris and I would pass each other for the rest of the day one of us would point out we have EGG and smile. I don't think we could have been prouder than if one of us laid the EGG. Perhaps isolation and farm living makes us easily entertained.

I do know that finding an egg in the morning changes your outlook for the rest of the day. When I was very little I used to love going out to collect the eggs, a chore Grandma Wasson entrusted to the three grand kids when we stayed over. We took a basket and went out to the hen house expectantly. Some times we might get four eggs and sometimes none and it was, of course, more fun to find eggs than not and you felt responsible for the count. You apologized if you didn't find any and celebrated when you did.

Once in awhile a hen would be setting on the eggs and that created a problem for three very young egg gatherers. Hens pecked, especially hens on a nest, and none of us wanted to be pecked. Volunteers were always solicited-none ever came forward. Then plans were made and finally a plot was hatched. We had seen Grandma shoo the chicken out of the nest with her hand like it was nothing. None of us were going to try that. We did try acting like we were going to shoo the hen out and stopped just before the danger zone. Evidently, Grandma grew a fairly stalwart type of hen because this never worked. In the end, we always resorted to a stick and took turns since there was still some risk involved as the hen flapped off the nest. There was also the problem of Grandma taking exception to idea of using a stick on her hens. None of us ever brought up the subject. Grown ups can be touchy about certain things. Still, it lent adventure to egg gathering and we never missed a chance to go.

The hens we are raising seem a lot less fearsome than Grandma's. We are anxiously awaiting our third EGG. Perhaps finding EGGS will be less exciting after awhile---but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Loose Ends

For those of you who like to wrap up loose ends here's some good news, here at Missed Skeet Farm, we have been busy making sure there will plenty of loose ends to go around. We have been creating them in a flurry of activity trying to get as much done as we can this fall before winter brings things to a screeching halt.
We need to:
tighten up the goat barn (these goats are descendants of South African goats and don't like drafts or rain wah, wah, wah....)
get more firewood under cover
harvest a few more roosters who are making trouble. (Turns out there is no consensual sex in the chicken world and we have some roosters who just don't deal well with rejection and hens that are so busy running they couldn't possibly lay eggs.)
Get the gravel pad and stone wall built for the new goat barn (this will help settle and compact the earth before we start building next spring)
Clean up down at the sawmill and get ready for milling. (I am hoping for small storms and a mild winter to allow me to mill wood)

Of the projects, doing the earthwork is always the most challenging. It requires a very large dose of luck and some skill to get both the excavator and the dump truck running on the same day. Last week we were ready to move gravel and both started and ran beautifully. Unfortunately the tires were too bald to make it up the slight incline. Since new truck tires cost more than the truck and still might not give us enough traction to get up out of the pit, I opted for tire chains. This required a one week wait while we located some chains and got used to the idea of paying for them.

Soooo, we put the chains on the dump truck, fired her up and headed out to the pit. Halfway there, heading downhill, she stopped and refused to start. I jumped it- nothing. I took the gas line off to the carburetor and had Kris hit the starter. Gas squirted out so it was an ignition problem. There are three likely suspects on an old Dodge truck. One is five bucks and goes a lot. When it stops the engine just quits and won't start. Option two is the earliest evolution of an electronic brain. It costs $29. The third, is the ignition switch, which is worn badly and I have to play with to get to make contact. I took out all three options and headed to Napa. They had option one and two, but no ignition switch for a 1974 Dodge dump truck and none available on their website. I was surprised. I sure this was a big item for them. Well, I went home and tore apart the ignition switch thinking I might be able to clean up some contact points or spot something I could fix. When I opened it up, there were no glaring problems that popped out at me. There were however two (or maybe more) little tiny copper springs and small metal clip that did. Kris was out doing chores and it seemed imperative that I get the ignition back together before she returned and asked me what I was thinking when I took it apart. Women don't have the same urge to take things apart and it is best shield them from it, especially if your in the reassembly stage and some of the none essential small parts are probably still on the floor somewhere.

I finally got the ignition back together sort of and I was out the door just as Kris was coming in. "How's it going?" she asked as I went by. "Won't know for a minute," and I headed out for reassembly. All three parts are easy to get in and out so in less than an hour, I was ready to try starting it. I sat behind the wheel and turned the key to the on position. Gauges started moving. Huh. Well, I tuned the key a little further and the starter kicked in. This was going better than most of my mechanic adventures. The starter ground a bit and I remembered to pull the choke out. Amazingly, the truck started. All right! Super mechanic actually fixed something.

It was too late to move gravel that day so the next day I was anxious to see if I had made a real fix or the truck had just decided to run for a moment. We did chores and cleaned up a bit around the barn, ate lunch and headed out to see if we could move gravel. It was cool and the excavator likes it warm. After a long bit of grinding, the excavator sputtered and caught. I jumped in the dump truck and it started. Hummm. Kris loaded it up, I put in first gear and it crawled up out of the pit without spinning a tire. We got out seven loads before we shut down for the day to do chores. We need to have several more of these days when everything works.
Were headed into a warm sunny spell and if we are lucky and nothing breaks or stops, we may actually get our gravel moved. I am cautiously optimistic.