Feed Bags to Shopping Bags

Hello! I thought other animal owners might be interested in seeing this great post. It tells how to recycle a chicken feed bag and make a reusable shopping bag. I haven't tried it yet, but I think that it would work great for old grain bags.

http://www.communitychickens.com/2012/06/diy-chicken-feed-sack-tote.html#.UsnhSPRDvT9

Let it Snow

It is snowing. Actually, it was snowing. But it is no longer snowing. It is cloudy and there are about four inches of snow outside. I am going to feed the animals. I wonder how they feel about the snow.

The chickens took one look out of the pop-hole and then went back to their cozy corners in the coop. The goats didn't care for the snow. Roxy didn't want to go outside at all. Phoebe and Maia ran around the goat yard once and then went right back into their warm, straw-filled barn. We closed the doors to the barn. The animals won't want to go outside today anyway. It's better if their heat stays in the barn and helps to keep it warm through the night. Everyone has extra straw.

It is snowing. Actually, it was snowing. But it is no longer snowing. It is cloudy and there are about four inches of snow outside. I went to feed the animals. They all preferred their warm shelters to the snow.

Milk, Lots of Milk

Roxy is now being milked once a day, and she's giving a half gallon or more of milk every time. Not bad at all for the winter. It is interesting the way that her udder collapses when I've milked her. First it looks like a ripe berry, then like an empty glove. It actually doesn't look like she has very much milk in her in the first picture, but she did. 3/4 gallons of it, actually.

Empty - back view

Full - back view

3/4 gallons of milk - all from one milking!

$2 Mineral Feeder

Carina's mineral feeder

A few days ago I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. Ever since Carina moved her goats (and her supplies) out, I've been looking for a mineral feeder to feed loose minerals in. Carina had a lovely mineral feeder with two separate compartments, one side was used for feeding free-choice baking soda, the other side for minerals. But I could not bring myself to pay $15 for one of those things.

So, why not make my own for a lot less? I could get a sturdy plastic container of some kind, make two holes in it, and attach it to the fence with metal clips. A few days later I stopped by at the Dollar Tree store and popped in to see what they had. They didn't have metal clips, and since I didn't want to go all the way to Lowe's hardware store to get some, I grabbed a pack of zip-ties instead. I also found a clear plastic container that would work.

Back at home, I made two small holes in the container and attached it with zip-ties to the (cattle-panel) partition in the goat barn. I attached it on the hay-storage side, for I had no wish for the goats to rest their front feet on it and crack it. This way, their heads can pop through the fence to eat the minerals, but they cannot use it as a playground.

The immediate results? I love the thing! The goats can get to the minerals, and it cost less then 2 bucks! But the next morning when I come into the barn, they have somehow unlatched the gate and got into the hay area. You've guessed it. They have stood up on the feeder and smashed it to bits.

I think that I will pay the $15.

Carol of the Goat Bells

A cute Christmas animation by GoatBiology.com. Enjoy!
http://www.goatbiology.com/animations/carol.html

Picture day! :D

Today I decided to take my goats' photographs, and look how well they turned out:

The Great Maia

A  badly focused close-up of her nose. Stop smelling the camera, girl!

 Yes, sometimes my goats are more curious than photogenic. After trying for a long time to get them to sit in one place long enough for me to take a picture, I bribed them with alfalfa. Behold the result:

Hey! Come back here!

They bring it under the sleeping shelf to eat it. :-\ I put some more on top of the shelf, thinking that this might work better:

Ain't Roxy purdy?

This will have to do for today. Maybe they will be more cooperative some other day.

Are mountain goats really goats?

The other day I saw a magazine in a gas station with a picture of a mountain goat on the front cover. I naturally wanted to know what they had to say about them, so I decided to take a peek. Just as I opened the magazine to the appropriate page, my mom called me to the car. Still, as I was closing the magazine, one sentence caught my eye: Mountain goats aren't really goats; they're a type of Antelope.

Now, that came as something of a surprise. It never had occurred to me that a mountain goat might be an antelope, not a goat! So I looked it up. Here's the information that I gathered:


Mountain goats are close relatives to goats, but they are more properly known as goat-antelopes (click here for a description of a goat-antelope.) The mountain goat belongs to the subfamily Caprinae along with 32 other species including goats, sheep, the chamois, and the musk ox. The mountain goat is not a member of Capra, the genus that includes the wild goat from which the domestic goat is derived, but he is the only species in the genus Oreamnos.