Hunting Dachshund

This morning I got Katie on the school bus as usual, then proceeded with my farm chores. Fed the goats and their LGD, filled horses trough, threw out some chicken scratch. I kept hearing this noise from the back yard. Lucy the Dachshund had dug out again under the gate on Saturday, and I thought it was her scratching at the gate showing her displeasure at the concrete cinder block I had propped over her hole. Upon peeking around the house, I saw no Lucy. I went into the back yard a few minutes later and narrowed down the source of the sound to behind the storage shed. Was Lucy scratching at the fence? I rounded the corner and found her adamently digging at a black flexible drainage pipe that was lying by the hay shed. She would occasionally stick her head in the end of the pipe hoping to reach her prey. I'm standing there trying to decide if I should pick up the tube and try to empty out the culprit when Lucy gets her head stuck in the end. She freaks out, jumping around, running backwards, hits the hay shed, knocks over a propped up pallet on herself. I finally caught her and extracted her head. While she was shaking it off, I lifted the pipe and shook out a chipmunk who scurried to safety unnoticed. One of the lucky few that got away...

OK, time for an update...

Yesterday morning I let the dogs out into the backyard as usual. When I called them in for breakfast, Lucy the dachshund didn't come. It's not like her to miss a meal, but I just went ahead and fed Alex. I heard Lucy's hunting bark (ridiculous excited high-pitched yip) and figured she'd treed something and that's why she didn't come in. I took the trash out to the garbage can, and there was Lucy in the front yard. Ugh, she got out somewhere. I caught her, toweled off the mud, chastised her, put her in the house, and continued on with my morning farm chores. I went to the backyard to see where Lucy had escaped, but the two gates looked fine. Must be a hole on the fence. I walked along the fencline with Alex following along until I came to the lowest part of the yard where the fence was laying completely flat covered in mud! The rain over the previous two days had washed so much silt down from the goat pen and the backyard that it had built up against the 2x4 welded wire fence and pushed it right down! (Thanks to the previous owners who had built the fence using landscape timbers as fence posts...the people who had our last farm did the same thing...FYI, you can't do this...)

So now I get to walk the dogs on a leash until this weekend when we have time to fix the fence...

Then we get home last night and Maggie and Sandy (two horses) were in the backyard. It had crossed my mind to check the fence after the storm, and I did check on the other pasture fence, but not theirs. We caught them and put them in the other pasture with the other four horses. Then I went to see how they ended up in the back yard. Turns out, when the backyard fence fell, it shifted the corner post which is shared with the pasture. There is a gate latched on to that post, and the latch had pulled loose. The horses figured this out, went out the gate, down a small hill through the woods, across the backyard fence lying in the mud, and right into the grassy backyard.

It's always something, isn't it?

Next? a llama!

Katie and I brought the goats home yesterday. We had to drive past the Mall of Georgia and we literally had people snapping picture of the goats at traffic lights. I guess those city folks don't see many goats. It was pretty funny, three goats in two dog crates in the back of a pick up truck. We stopped at a McDonalds to use the potty and get a drink and on our way back to the truck, a girl jumped out of a car in the drive through line and came running over to talk to us about the goats and pet them. I guess we created quite the distraction.

I sent off an application to adopt a llama from the Southeast Llama Rescue this week and I got a phone call from the area adoption coordinator yesterday. She has several llamas that might work out for us, and I'm really excited! I decided to go with a llama as a livestock guardian for the goats instead of a dog because there's less training involved, they eat what the goats eat, they'll stay in the fence, and I can learn to spin the fiber for my knitting. Can't wait!

GOATS!

I finally did it. I finally bought fainting goats. After weeks and months of research, I went shopping all weekend, looking at Nigerian Dwarf goats and myotonic goats. I bought three myotonics, a mom and two of her daughters. I'm going to pick them up next weekend. Phat Horse Farm Fainters?

We finally got an egg!

Rosie then and now

Here is Rosie at about 3 and a half months old.













And here is Rosie this morning about one year later.

Wonder what she'll look like next year?

First day of school

Katie had her first day of first grade today! How grown up is that big girl...