A summer evening

Pretty much speaks for itself :)

Exploring the new woods

 In preparation for a horse I started to look around for places to walk and ride next to and near our property. Low and behold, from the town's tax maps I found a 10 acre lot right next to us that is landlocked (no road access) and has no house. I did track down, using google, in a rather roundabout way, that it belongs to the people on the other side. So one afternoon I put on my "courageous shoes", grabbed the kid for dimple equity and visited the nice lady to ask for permission. Which was no problem at all, she had't been or seen that part of her property in more than 20 years and her only request was that she could come and see it some day herself... Well, of course!

Unfortunately it's not really suited for horses, even ponies, as it really is a wetland (it's part of a New York State Protected Wetlands Area) and parts of it are too muddy. The dogs and the goat do fine, but eight hundred pounds on four little hooves were apparently too much - he sank to his knees, just about! My heart sank too, I envisioned having to get a crane in to suck him back out...

 

Especially in Spring Simon and I hiked the "Buurman Pad" almost weekly. Lately the weeds have been a little too much for Simon, they grew just about as tall as he is and now he wants his dad to mow it first. With the dry spring parts of it are pretty dried up tho and much easier to hike, when it is wet there are one or two area's with creek like tendencies - I might need to put some bits of boardwalk down here as well.

In de pic above Simon is checking out a hollow tree - a gnome house - while carrying his butterfly catching net and house. We did not catch anything that day but did enjoy all the yellow marsh flowers.

This is the beginning behind the shed - the easy part thru pretty dry woods with not too dense shrubbery. I did misread the tax map, turns out they do not show structures accurately (it's computer generated) and started the hike on our other neighbors land (our property is long and skinny so we have two neighbors on each side) but he did not mind and uses it to walk his dogs whenever he petsits our goats. It took about two weeks of daily afternoon exercise to make a path that takes maybe 15 minutes to walk...

A soap display for a vintage store...

It took some thinking and looking around the house and workshop to see what could be repurposed - about two weeks worth - and in the end came up with quite a nice display, I'd say!

The base is a small 4 foot wide desk (the display could not exceed 4 feet wide) friends of ours were throwing out and I picked up for my sunroom. It looked a lot nicer to store our fruits and veggies in the summer (we ripen peaches and brandywine tomatoes indoors) but now we're back to a regular plastic folding table... The little flat crates with slots are half and third apple crates. I pick them up at yard sales and use the table saw to cut them in slices, then add a solid plank bottom and hardwood slats from pallets (I save nice thin pieces especially with these bins in mind). The two slender boxes in back are from one old wine crate cut in two and set on their side as a shelf. I found a whole bunch of these on trash day a while back but was not the only one - after some arguing about who was first we realized there were so many we ended splitting them up :)

The vertical shelf is a large window with an added frame of really old barn wood, all weathered and full of holes (character I think it's called) I got with a dump load of scrap wood from the Ithaca Re-Use place. Tthey demolish old buildings in town for salvage and will deliver wood that's only good enough for burning around town instead of dumping it at our local landfill, yay! The three foot bin below the table is an old photo display bin my husband built years ago and that was sitting in storage.

All in all a nice display which fits right into the store's vintage look!

Stretching the wood pasture fence

 Finally, after two years a bit of work here and a bit of work there we put our hands together, asked the help of some friends (dutch friend Quirine and the parents of Simon's playmate - all wanted to learn how to install wire fencing anyway) and stretched the new fence! Last spring I had pounded all the posts, a few at a time, which worked ok as it was a wet spring and the ground fairly soft. I pulled a few crooked posts this spring, repounded them and it was a lot harder to get them in! But it was not bad at all to have postponed turns out, during a pretty severe windstorm our (one and only) black walnut uprooted and as it was designated as a corner post it would have taken the whole fence with it! Now I only had to reline a few posts after the tree was chopped down and out of the way...

 

Here hubby Rolf is stretching the woven wire fence. We had to do it in two stretches but could use a tree to hook the ratchet on to each time, which was nice. When we fenced the pasture we had to use the hitch on the Volvo a few times as there were no handy tree trunks around!

Behind the roll of wire is a gate between two close trees, that way we could walk all the way from the barn thru the pasture, thru the back gate, thru the woods pasture out the back door and connect to our swamp boardwalk for a nice stroll...

 

First part stretched, Quirine and Rolf enjoy a well deserved cup of coffee. Quirine plans to have goats at some point as well and liked seeing the process of properly installing a wire fence. Not all that difficult, and mostly all about the right equipment, as Simon (Sungiva's dad) demonstrated while securing the fence wire to the T posts "that's what you're supposed to use to twist the connectors?! no wonder it was so darn difficult when I did it..."

Testing out the goat harness

 

Fltr: Rolf with Knickers, Susan holding Murphy, Eileen, Sungiva & Simon in cart, Angelika with Konrad on back and Leila on leash.

A big hit with the two toddlers, and a nice change from "mama, I'm tired, can you carry me..." to "I wanna be in the cart, no, I wanna be!". I don't think either Sungiva or Simon walked very much that day so as a device to burn excess toddler energy it's not as useful, but to get Murphy the pony dog to slow down / stop pulling and use some of that strength usefully it worked fine!

The harness is from a design off the internet and assembled with expert sewing instruction from Eileen. I think it cost about $20 in webbing and buckles. It's sized to a full size goat (and a Murphy). After using it with a dog I know now why dog harnesses are different, as this one is not attached to the cart at the back / butt he can swivel his body around within the shafts and get twisted - goats are not that flexible. I have used it with boer/saanen cross goat Monica and she seemed fine with it - goats need (more) training as a following cart can trigger their flight response - but as she is either pregnant or nursing most of the year she's not ideal. Which is why we designated a buck goat from this year's "crop", wethered him and are training him to walk on a leash, with cart training starting next Spring...

After about halfway he got used to it - plus we were on the way back home - was wagging his tail, grinning his grin, and started to pull away again!

what the heck?!

While my hubbie was getting ready to mow he noticed a strange and muddy hole in the ground... with a large black and red turtle next to it! We have seen turtles on our land before but I never realized they live and  overwinter under our lawn - makes me feel a bit uneasy about driving over it with the volvo now, haha.

Our kid Simon was duly impressed and not getting any closer - you never know what kind of dragon head could come out of that shiny rock!

Spot and Oreo

 I just love this picture of first time mom Gazelle nursing her one week olds. It seemed like such an idyllic and perfect way to start life. And then Gazelle's character kicked in and about a week later she refused to nurse Oreo. It took me about three days or so to figure that one out, not until he started to get unkept and skinny looking and became really pushy for food did I realize she was not letting him nurse.

 

In the picture above Gazelle is getting away from her kids by jumping on the kids sleeping box. She'd hang out there a lot, so much that when she would come down the kids would jump on her to try and get milk making her want to hide from them some more... For a few weeks I would first pin Gazelle down against a wall so they could nurse, which gradually got better in me just restraining her and even later in her eating with her head thru the hay manger (I'd put her bowl in there) and letting them nurse while she ate. I think it took at least six weeks before I suddenly noticed both boys being able to nurse on their own again, and they've been fine since.

As a side note, here are the girls eating goat potato chips - as in crunchy dried leaves! When I pick up bagged leaves in town I put the real light weight ones (a.i dry) with nice leaves like maple separate for the girls to much late winter and early spring. When I feed leaves in leaf season they have no interest in them, but when I feed them when there is snow on the ground and nothing else to find, they are like fast food and get nibbled up fast!