Fall Breeding

It was September now and that is the time for breeding, (goats). We had our new does and wanted to start right away building our own herd. A friend from work had a buck goat that he was willing to let me use and brought him over to the house. He didn't have a name so we decided to call him Frankie. I was very impressed at this fellow when he first arrived. He probably weighed between 250-300 lbs and to me seemed massive. With a nice set of horns he could be pretty intimidating. We had no idea how to handle an animal like that and I would say we were both rather nervous around him. My wife attempted to make friends with him and give him a pet which he didn't seem to like all that much and soon pinned her up against the coral. She handled it quite well, she yelled at him and wacked him in the head. I think it frightened her a touch; it scared me too and it wasn't me getting pinned against the fence, or wacked in the head. I'll tell you she handled all this better than a friend of mine who was visiting. He is a large man 300+ lbs, tough, from New York and was walking across the pasture right by that buck. I hollered to him, "You better keep your eye on that boy, he may decide to start trouble. Well my friend wasn't gonna let his machismo get challenged in front of the wives. He laughed and said "I ain't afraid of no goat." Before the words left his mouth ol Frankie rammed him right in his knee. We all got a pretty good chuckle out of it, except my buddy who though he wouldn't admit it, probably had a pretty sore knee for awhile. Its funny to look back on now how we are not nervous around the big bucks anymore, respectful, but not nervous. The courting ritual that the buck goes through was also new to us. I won't describe it in detail here I'll just use how my wife described it when she first saw it; "Gross!" . Frankie performed his duties, Sweet Pie and Jar Jar Binx, our third doe from the purchase, were successfully bred within two weeks and Frankie went home.

Venture into goat ranching

After some time and basic clean up and repairs our place was livable and we were in our new place full time. It wasn't as "nice" as some people would like by societies standards for sure. We had all tile floors, and not the nice stuff, but the tile that is used in hospitals and cafeterias. The sink in the bathroom didn't work and we had to use the bath tub to wash our hands. The floors were cold, hard and seemed to grow dust bunnies faster than weeds in a garden. But even with all this, we were very happy and felt blessed to have our own land to start our farm. Our pastures were greening, chickens were growing, and now it was time to acquire our goats. We had researched for over a year anticipating getting a farm and now our dreams were about to become reality. To begin we had decided we wanted at least one dairy doe that we could milk for our own consumption and then fill out the herd with meat goats. We traveled to a goat ranch about an hour from our house to look at our first goats. We immediately fell in live with an older Alpine doe named Sweet Pie. She was friendly and of beautiful colors. We bought Sweet Pie and two other does on that day but we could not bring them home with us yet. One of the other does was Deluxe a pretty little spotted Boer Alpine cross, she has become one of our best meat does always throwing meaty fast growing kids. We eagerly anticipated going back to pick up our goats and add them to our Happy Lil Homestead. Sad news came the week we were to pick up our first does. My wife's grandfather passed away after a long battle with cancer. She immediately flew out to attend the funeral with the children. I was unable to attend as I had to work at my "real job". So while the family was away I traveled to get the goats on my own. They arrived and were waiting on the family when they returned. They were a nice welcome home present. I'm proud to say that at the time of this post Sweet Pie is still a productive member of our herd along with three of her daughters and one grand daughter. Deluxe has also remained and continues to bless our farm with fine meat goats.

Fixer Upper

The loan came through and we officially had our home. The new chickens were happy I'm sure as they were wondering what was to become of them. Now the real work was to begin. We had a lot of help from our friends at church, several of the kids from our youth group came over and spent a couple of days helping paint the inside and general clean up of the outside. The place was a bank repo and hadn't been lived in for about two years so the pastures were dead, brown and the ground was hard as concrete. After a couple of weeks of water is was very encouraging to see the place come back to life. As example look at the very bottom picture and compare to the top picture in this post, they are taken from the same angle only about six weeks apart. No fertilizers or chemicals, just water and poop.

We need animals!!!

So one of the first orders of business was to get some animals for our new farm. Now, how I went about this explains a lot about my character. It was early August and our offer had been accepted but if you've ever purchased a place you know that it still takes a month or so for everything to go through. So in reality, it wasn't quite OURS yet. But that didn't deter me. I wanted chickens so I ordered a batch of 50 Barred Rock chicks. They came in the mail to our duplex and we set up a brooder on the dining room table. We now officially had chickens..... though we didn't officially have a farm. Still don't know what I would have done with those chickens had the sale fell through.

The Beginning

I was staring at the computer reading the real estate listing for this place thinking "Well there's gotta be something wrong with that" 2.5 acres for $###,###. You see we were living in our duplex with our two young children and had been looking for a more country lifestyle for quite some time. Problem was, we didn't have any money to buy anything so we had pretty much given up. Then six months later, this listing suddenly popped up on my computer like God was saying, "Hey, I found you a house!" We went out and looked at it, loved it, and made an offer, (a really low offer: did I mention we had no money) They accepted the offer and we had our house. Fixer upper really can't describe this place it was in pretty bad condition by today's societal standards but I thought it was the greatest place ever. It was located on one of the busiest streets in the city but the property was still not in the city limits and considered county, which meant I could have farm animals. The neighbors in the 4 plex right next door I'm sure appreciated this. Well this was the beginning of our journey, over the next while I will try to explain how we went from a poor duplex family to certified city farmers, its quite a journey.