MetalSmitten! - my truant journal

[freemotion]

Mine are in dirt and are dying back....I've stolen 10 lbs from two plants.....twice. So 20 lbs so far and I haven't dug up the rows yet. I've thrown finished compost on top occasionally, though, because the smaller pullets have discovered that they can fit through the holes in the goat fencing and access this garden and their scratching uncovers the potatoes. I run through there every evening and cover any 'taters that are exposed. Maybe all that activity is scaring the plants into producing more!

I dug up some sprouting ones that I am going to replant today and see if there is time for another crop of new potatoes. Sometimes we have a long, warm fall.

 

[VickiLynn]

Some varieties of potato will continue to produce tubers up the stem as long as you keep hilling up around it. I think they are mainly the long-season varieties (like Yukon Gold). Others only produce at the bottom and quit no matter how much you bury the plant.

 

[MetalSmitten]

sorry i tend to update this so sporadically. i get busy with real life and forget about things like keeping forum journals updated hehe

i see it's been kinda tense recently around here, and i don't want to say any more about that, but i thought maybe some pictures of cute goats might be in order. we kinda failed at trying to get photos of them posing (we don't show them so we never bothered training them to stretch or pose) but we discovered that the make-kissy-faces-at-them method seemed to work reasonably well at getting them to hold still at least.

delphi

lyric

these are our two young does, and we have been super pleased with them! we mainly wanted small goats for milk so we got nigerian dwarfs (dwarves?) and we are very very excited to have finally bred them. delphi should hopefully be due in march and lyric in april, and then we'll have babygoats and milk! this is our first time ever with breeding goats, so i'm nervous and excited all at the same time.

cast, the dad-to-be. he is making his sexy face.

and this is squire, our wether. his "purpose" is to keep cast company since we don't run him with the girls, but he's such a ham, i couldn't resist posting his kissy face picture.

 

[Marianne]

Love the pics!

 

[Wannabefree]

Beautiful goaties!

 

[bambi]

love the pics

 

[snapshot]

I love your goaties!!!!!!

 

[MetalSmitten]

thank you! these goaties are our BABIES, hah, they're such sweethearts. we still need to build a stanchion for the girls as well for when it's finally time for milking. i think we're going to try hand milking at first, but i have my eye on a little manual pump as well just in case i fail at doing it by hand. i wish i knew someone local to us to help show us how to do things, but as it is, this'll definitely be a learning experience for sure.

 

[MetalSmitten]

we're harvesting our last batch of chickens today (or some of them, anyway, i don't think we'll get all of 'em done today). this was our first try with actual cornish x meaties, which i wasn't planning on having this fall but we found a deal on craigslist that was too good to pass up: 24 month-old chicks for $10 total. so we jumped. and now they're about 10 weeks and definitely ready to go to camp kenmore.

i'm torn about whether or not we'll ever do cornish x's again - they're definitely nice meat birds, but i feel so sorry for them... they're so much more fragile than our regular birds, we had a few injuries with them just from stupid normal chicken things like pecking and the little tiffs that the roos get into with each other. and they're not overcrowded. we had at least five that ended up tearing their skin, and had to cull one early because he somehow broke a wing overnight. and we just discovered one with sores on the soles of his feet that we didn't know he had i'm guessing it's because it's been so rainy for the past week, they really have nowhere dry that they can go (well, they do, but then they poop so much in the dry space that it's no longer dry after the first five minutes), and combined with their weight i think it was just too much. we also had two birds that were definitely exhibiting signs of early heart trouble. so i feel bad for them, they're just not designed to be healthy.

we're going to attempt to hold back 4-5 of the cornish x pullets, i'm going to comb over the whole group and look for the healthiest ones to try to get a few to egg-laying age. we'll be watching them carefully and culling at the first signs of health problems, so, there's definitely no guarantee that this will work, but i have heard stories of people being able to keep them well past their "sell-by" dates by restricting diet etc. i've got a heritage dark cornish rooster that i'd like to breed them with if possible, hoping for a better compromise between health and growth in the chicks. my eventual goal is a sustainable meat flock. we'll see what happens.