View from the kitchen window, Fri April 24

Weather today – mild and slightly misty, 64 degrees. 

Tasks for the day – Town day today! Farmer’s market for a net of carrots, buy a new milking bucket for Rich (the last one I bought was too big) a new milking strainer, mixed corn feed for our new arrivals, the doves!

Our new arrivals, the doves...

My helper for the day – Benjamin, who only attends his new school four mornings a week, and stays home on Fridays.

Benji helps with the haying

Day before yesterday, we desperately needed some straw for bedding all our new goats, and Rich didn’t want to buy a big bale until we have mucked out the lambing shed, so that we could get to the small baler, so that we could re-bale the big bale straw into small bales, which would be easier to handle…

It’s always like this on the farm, before you do one task, you have to do another, and another, and before you know it, the whole week is gone! 

Anyway, in this case, we worked it out. Rich had gone out to run a brilliant machine that he borrowed from his friend Andrew, through the fields, to dig out all the old dead grass. We’re still dealing with the legacy of last year’s horrendous summer – the fields were too wet to mow and bale, so all the dead grass is still there, choking out the new growth. 

Rich dug out the dead grass, leaving it in rows. We all went out to rake it up and put it into the little trailer. I rode the quad bike forward one pile at a time, and Rich pitched-forked it into the trailer, and Benji sat on it to squash it down – not many motions older, I reckon, than the one of pitching hay with a pitchfork. Your genetic muscles just remember how…

And at the end of the process, we pitched it up into the little loft over the goat shed, and had loads of nice dry bedding for them! So, problem solved for the moment…

Speaking of goats, we had Lola de-horned on Wednesday, and a more horrific, medieval thing I hope never to see. I thought that we would just drop her off at the vet’s and come back to pick up our neatly de-horned goat kid. 

To my alarm, as we walked in, Angus the vet told us to put her down on the table, and it became obvious that we were going to be present for the operation. Angus is a down-to-earth, ruddy practical guy wearing a ripped jumper and sagging jeans. He handed Rich a gas-and-air mask which he put over Lola’s muzzle, which was fine until the tube fell out onto the floor! We stuffed the tube back in again and prayed that it wasn’t a bad sign of things to come…

Angus injected Lola just beside each horn, left the room again and came back with a length of serrated wire, with which he proceeded to saw off the now sleepy Lola’s horns, right there and then! Lola moaned and objected in her sleep, and the sawing sound seemed incredibly loud. I was holding Lola tight, along with an assistant, and couldn’t do anything but just close my eyes…

Rich was crouching down on the floor heating up something with a butane torch, and when the sawing and bleeding was done, he handed it to Angus – a white-hot metal tool. Angus put it down on the horn buds and the smell of burning bone filled the room.

When it was all over, we gathered up our kid, who was looking around a bit bewildered, and the assistant asked if we wanted to keep the horn. For some reason, I said yes, and brought it back with me…perhaps I’ll have it set in a necklace, like a lion’s tooth. 

Lola is absolutely fine – seemed improved by the operation, if anything! She was skipping around and even head-butting the other goats later that day, much to our astonishment. I think Rich and I felt more wobbly than she did…

Lola, newly de-horned...