Still Learning

Well we had a good week here. The weather was colder, so it was hard to get up in the mornings. I think it was in the lower thirties most nights and mornings, but warmed up to the sixties in the day. We slept very cosily in our tent under lots of blankets and in the morning we all crowded around the wood stove while I made breakfast and the children did their schoolwork. A couple of mornings we woke up to lots of frost.

The frost looked kinda like snow.

It was on the clothes on the laundry line too.

Early in the week, Dane finished putting cyclone fence around the goats' corral, so that they would be more secure as they learned the electric fence.

We have gained the confidence of the pregnant goat. She comes running up to us now when we take her something to eat. The other goats, the momma and her kid, are still pretty skiddish, despite us milking the mother every day. And for this reason, we lost her and her kid yesterday just as we lost the first goat when Dane brought them home. We turned the goats out into the other fenced area (the three acres of jungle that Dane fenced) in order to give them more grazing. Well, we discovered right away that finding not so friendly goats in the jungle was going to be a problem (this isn't Texas - no wide open spaces on this farm). We all manned a post as Dane searched through the brush looking for them. After a while, I spotted them and hollered to Dane which direction they were headed. He saw them just as they jumped through the fence and into the tea tree jungle.

This is a picture of the fenced in area from the outside looking in. It is all jungle in there. Coming from west Texas, we thought it would be great to give our goats such a nice place to eat weeds without us having to buy and haul food to them all the time.

This is the tea tree jungle.

We have decided that the tea tree jungle is some sort of black hole because goats disappear in there without a trace. We have about five acres of old black tea trees downhill from our camp that have grown to about twelve feet in height. In between the tea rows, there are pine tree tops that were chopped down and left to rot and intermingled with this are vines and other brush. Dane and the older children covered two treacherous miles of it, going up and down rows, a week ago in search of the first goat and never found a sign of her. Elijah said that in one of the rows he was walking up an incline covered with pine needles and he started to hear a bunch of crunching below him. He suddenly crashed through a pile of brush that had been hidden by the pine litter only to find Sarah, who had fallen into the same trap in the adjacent row, at the bottom of it. He said, "I fell through and Sarah was in there!" We are sure that the goats are in there, but we have not seen or heard them since they entered. They have plenty to eat and drink and are at little risk of being taken by predators, so I guess we will be searching for them from now on every time we go down there.

In the search for goats we found lots of berries. These berries are all over the place in clearings around the forest. They aren't very sweet, but we still enjoy snacking on them when we find them.

This is a picture of a giant spider web along the trail to the spring. It is hard to tell from the picture just how big it is, but it spans nearly a four foot by four foot area. I haven't seen the spider that lives there, but judging from the size of the web, it might be a big one.

Dane continued to work on the exterior walls of the house this week. It looks very nice.

Our chicks are growing and are doing very well. Our other chickens have started laying again too! We are very excited about that.

Dane just got back from moving the three bee boxes from the neighbors property to Jim's property. He said it all went well and he feels a lot more comfortable working with the bees now.

Also, I forgot to mention in the last post that we finished taking all of our corn off the cob and bagging it to feed the animals in the future. We ended up with about 150 pounds of corn from our small corn field. Not a lot, but it gives us an idea how much we need to plant the next time. We are also using the husks in our wood burning stove as a source of fuel. They burn very well.