Goats

We are happy to announce that our search for goats has ended. For months we have been trying to plan a trip to several goat dairies in either Salta or Mar del Plata to purchase goats, but have put it off due to the expense and inconvenience of such a trip. Dane looked locally, but did not find any desirable goats until this past week. The men at INSA, the ag extension office, in Obera told Dane about a man who sold meat goats in a nearby town. After some goose (or goat) chasing Dane found another gentleman on Tuesday and spent a nice day on his farm. The man, Mr. Coon, and his family have over 100 head of cattle, 70 some goats, sheep, bees, chickens, etc. Mr. Coon told Dane that he shouldn't pursue buying goats in other areas of Argentina because they are not sufficiently resistant to parasites, a big problem in this area. His goats were all very healthy looking and have good milking characteristics, so Dane bought three nannies from him: one with a young kid and two that are pregnant.

Sadly, we lost one of the pregnant nannies about ten minutes after Dane arrived home with her. These goats are a little wild and the two pregnant ones bolted right through the electric fence and into the jungle. The children and Dane found one of them quickly in the tea, but the other disappeared without a trace. Dane spent every day this past week searching for her, but to no avail. The way the terrain and vegetation is out there, the goat could be within a few feet and us not know it. We have learned a valuable lesson and will have to be very diligent when it comes to our animals and the forest in the future. Dane is now putting some chain link fencing around the goats' electric fence training corral to make it harder for them to escape while they are learning the fence.

Wednesday morning, we woke and milked the nanny with the kid. To our delight, we got a full quart of milk. Although each milking since hasn't proved as bountiful a catch, we are already dreaming of making cheese and eating fresh yogurt again. For now, we are enjoying every drop of milk she gives us and we anxiously await the birth of the other goat's kids so we can begin milking her as well.

Here are pictures of our three new goats who have yet to be named.....

Dane did a little research on manderins and it turns out that there are over 200 varieties of madarins, and only one of those is a tangerine (and only named this because they were first imported to Florida from Tangeir). So the manderins that we have here on our property that they call "mandarinas" are mandarins. It is unlikely that they are tangerines, but who knows? We certainly don't! We do know that they are all ripe now and very delicious. We each have consumed about a dozen a day and praise the Lord for this provision. We hope to begin preserving them once we find some canning supplies.

This is a picture of one of the mandarins.

We had a really warm and dry week and the children got to do some of their schoolwork outdoors. Here is a picture of Elisabeth doing her schoolwork this past week on the table the children made of scrap wood. She just turned five and is reading well now.

Dane bought a couple more bee boxes so that he could start some more colonies. We would eventually like to have up to fifteen boxes, but will start with five. He bought three used boxes with bees a few months ago that he needs to move to our property. He tried to move them last night, but found that the boxes have more holes than he had intended (they are homemade) and he ran out of grass to put in his smoker in the hole search, so he decided to wait to talk to the previous owner who knows the boxes better, in order to be better prepared next time.

Here is a picture of him in his beekeeper gear.

Lastly, Dane got his plow all fixed up and tested it last week. He welded a bunch of steel onto it to make it heavier and modified it some. It now plows great and moves rocks and roots too and doesn't bend in the process. He is anxious to start doing some real cleaning up around here.