Category: Uncategorized

This morning it sure was coming down, and was it ever wet! I got out soon and started up my tractor and put it to work clearing the dog run. It’s good to be able to walk the dogs without having to fight the snow as well as the dogs. I went out a little later and cleared the front end for the mail carrier to deliver to us. I did not do the drive at the Hay Gate, but I did do Witch Gate. I helped neighbor pile up some snow that was too close to his drive and cleared a path through a pile of it so he will be able to drain water into the borrow pit. I also helped someone get their child to school on time by giving the father and child a ride. It has been a good day so far. The weather is meant to relax, and the snow that fell this morning is already melting.

If I had to guess, I would say we had about three inches of snowfall. But! But that came down with the wind going 15 to 20 miles an hour for quite some time. Result? Drifts and negated work. I have been keeping a clear path through the orchard so we can walk the dogs. Last night I cleared it, then we walked the dogs an hour later, and we could not see where the snow had been cleared. There is tall grass at the base of that fence that is impossible to get at with the strimmer in the summer without killing the string, and that grass has caused enough of a block to drift the snow in behind it something fierce. The borrow pit going east from our house appears to be gone now, too. It is flat across it as if it were not even there.

I have gotten up to some mischief lately. I ordered a workbench for proper woodworking, and I ordered a little camera that should be pretty decent for uploading to YouTube. I’d like to get some videos up and see if I can get to the point of monetization, and even get enough to pay back the camera. Maybe it will go somewhere from there, too. But if not, I will at least have a good tool for capturing our kids on video with from time to time, so we have memories. At this age, I already can see I’ll need the help when I am older!

I need to watch our white female llama going forward. I noticed while out feeding her yesterday that as she approached the place I put the food in, she did so with an awkward walk. It reminded me of Mystique, our oldest currant llama, with arthritis in her hips. I hope she is not going to have it too. And if she is, then she definitely needs to be avoided at breeding time.

There is a fire in the fireplace, and the whole family is in two rooms that are open to each other, so we are all together. The theme for today is to rest and relax. That quite suits me before we get back to the homeschooling schedule tomorrow.

This afternoon I turned and made a noisy whistle. Some people won’t be thanking me at Christmas.

One of the young does is having a rough start of it in the pen with the others. I noticed a couple of days ago that she was more mellow than the others. Then she started to walk with her hind legs tucked in further under herself. That was a curious sign, but the final straw was seeing her mother rejecting her on the teat. My suspicion is that the baby has been selected by mother to be left off because of math. She has three babies and two teats. I think the little one has been trying to eat too much hay from the mother’s feed to supplement for the milk she is not getting, and has caused her bowels to tighten up, or plug altogether. We are treating her for that.

This is also an opportunity to bottle feed a baby goat! We have done that before, and that particular goat has always been far more content to be close to humans than the others, so I am looking forward to the adjustment to this baby’s disposition. Obviously, we have to get her to survive her childhood first. I have taken her from the pen, then put her back, and her mother has come to the point of not just actively walking away from her, but also charging at her and hitting her with her horns, which is completely unacceptable, of course.

When we bought our first goat, and had to bottle feed her, we were also sold goat’s ‘milk replacer,’ which she was not taking well to. We were advised by someone more knowledgeable that milk replacer is a good way to kill a goat, and to just use the whole milk we buy for our family. We did that, and signs of scours quickly vanished, and she grew up to be just fine. So that is what we are doing here. We are feeding cow’s milk to a baby goat in a human baby’s bottle. I’ll probably look into some grains to supplement the lack of fat in the milk, especially as baby is so young still.

So far, so good! Little one is eating herself to tired, and then resting at feed times. She has a nice bed in a crate we have temporarily in the house, where she can be observed and kept from the others. I suspect that I will be trying her in another pen where some older kids are, and see if they won’t treat her nicely, and like just another goat rather than abusing her.

I am glad to have recognized this situation before the goat’s health deteriorated, in hindsight, there are things I will watch for in the future that might indicate a problem to me much earlier. Those indicators include a goat isolating, and being less active. Then they turned to the leg tucking, and slower walking, and finally the mother stepping away from her when she tries to feed. I suspect it is the mother’s instinct to provide good health to the two she can manage feed for, rather than mediocre care for three. Of course it is not human to think that way, but then, goats are not humans, are they? Lucky for baby there is a human around to look after her.

It was a busy one today coming back from spring break and starting back into home school with our eight year old. I was in no mood for it, and I had a few things I still wanted done before getting at schooling in earnest, so it was a combo day.

I took little one with me to town after chores, and she helped me to get a new bar nut for the one missing on the chainsaw, and to get some nuts and bolts that were missing from some garden furniture we found stored in the barn from years past. She had to help me find the right thread, and size, and to count out the right number of bolts, washers, and nuts. Then when we went to the register I said to the cashier that it was a shame they didn’t charge by the pound rather than by the unit, and he said that he could if they were from the open top bins, which everthing was. I was expecting over ten dollars on the bill, but by the pound, it was only $2.12 for it all. When we got home, little one and I worked out our savings together! It was close to twelve dollars!

After the hardware store, and the chainsaw shop, we went to the farm store and bought a dozen of their older buff orpington hens to start us a new egg flock for the farm. When we got home, little one helped me set them up in their box with food and water, and we talked all bout the way we raise them and why we like to buy older chicks rather than downy chicks.

Little One also helped me to put together that garden furniture, and she was a part of getting the blades off the lawnmower, using a long cheater bar to help her turn the center nuts, and then we sharpened the blades with an angle grinder, and balanced them out best we could, then she helped to put them back on again. Finally she helped me to put the deck back on for the summer, and then clean up after ourselves.

We are ready for cold weather tomorrow with the possibility of snow. It’s just one more reason I like more mature hens better than starting the really young ones. Our weather is too unpredictable, and the box they live in is in the coop already.

We put the two white cochin hens from the egg coop where the peacocks live, to the pen the broody goats are in. That will allow us a much smoother transition for the chicks when they are ready to go on the floor of the coop.

I also put grass into the egg laying boxes to see if the peahens will pey eggs up there and then nest on them. Hopefully we will see chicks from them soon. It would be nice to get them out of the coop, but we don’t plan to till then so the peafowl are protected as they are a steep investment.

Little one also read her sight words in the car on the way back from town as practice. Home School on the homestead is nothing, if not pratical!

After a little thought and some consideration on how the site had been going before changing hosts, and before I personally reached a lifetime milestone specific to those people who live half a century, I decided to archive the site, and start all over again. Mostly this is because of how the site integrates with the host we chose, and how much more easily WordPress works now than it did on the old host, and certainly much easier than it did when I first started using it all those years ago, and had to install and configure it for myself using an ftp client on the back end of the host. It all seems especially funny when I consider that a WhoIs search of both the new and old hosts provided the same corporate address.

I want to arrange the site differently than before. I hope to keep the blog posts as a journal of the farm, but I also hope to keep useful information in static pages on the site. Such useful information was ending up in the blog before and was not useful there, at all.

Our little farmhouse is part of our homestead, a seven-ish acre plot in extreme southeast Idaho, in the Rocky Mountains, where the winters are often harsh, and the summers are short. We are small, and our farm is intended to help support a craft business run as a side hustle by my wife, hereafter known as Mrs. Bacon. We are in a home that has hosted families for more than a century now; originally part of the Cassandra Whittle Homestead, and built here by her son, William Whittle. The home is storied, and so are the families that have lived here. For some time, we are now a part of each other, the home and our family.

Our family formed in 2002, when Mrs. and I married and lived in the UK for eight years, where she is from. We came here to America in 2010 to help my grandmother with caring for her ailing husband, and we ended up with the house as a part of that. Both grandma and grandpa have passed on now, and we are forging ahead with our little farm. As of this writing, our family at home consists of me, Kelsey Bacon, my wife, Katrina, and our two daughters. We have older sons who are grown and moved out now, but who show up here from time to time.

We are happy to have you along on this journey with us, as we experience life in our chosen manner; more on that soon!