Devonviolet Acres

[frustratedearthmother]

I would be afraid to keep anything that couldn't run away from a predator, even with the LGDs. Our sheep run to the dogs for protection.

When I bought mine the breeder said that some folks "back in the day" actually used them for sacrificial lambs (goats) for valuable animals in their herds specifically because they couldn't run away.

They can run though - when they're playing or running to feed they run just fine.

 

[farmerjan]

@Devonviolet so glad to see your posts. The colors on some of the goat kids are just beautiful. So glad to see that you could get these to replace the ones you milked after you couldn't use the goat milk anymore.

 

[Ridgetop]

Our family loves goat meat!
My kids held a grudge against their cousins for several years because we went to a family campout and brought both lamb and goat ribs. The cousins said they would not touch goat meat - it was too icky! Daddy BBQed the meat and when we all went to the table the goat meat was gone! The cousins had gotten there first and eaten it all. Only the lamb was left! My kids were truly peeved!

 

[Devonviolet]

Hi y’all!!! Just stopped by to say hello.

I have two new little boys out of Danny Boy and Crystal. They are four weeks old and I got some nice pics of them today. I was online looking for the name of the color of one of the boys. @goatgirl said she thought he looked like Chamoisee, on the day they were born. However, he has lightened up a bit.

Here he is right after he was born.

Isn’t that the cutest little face? Again right after he was born.

Here is his brother. He has more of Danny Boy’s coloring. Color on the front end and white on the back end.

Here they are together. The tri-color definitely has the same light brown as the chamoisee (?), but his back end looks like Crystal’s coloring.

Here is Crystal and the tri-color

Here they are today, at four weeks. They do love the greens!

Here are the three of them. All of Crystal’s kids have those light colored eyes - just like Mama. I’m not sure what you would call them? They almost look light blue, but then again, they could be called white.

Just for grins, here are Crystal’s kids from a year ago. The one on the left is a doeling and the one on the right is a wether. They definitely have Mama’s coloring!

And here is our buck, Danny Boy. He is the most amazing buck! He is so sweet!! We adore him and he adores us!!! He is naturally polled. Our big white doe, Melody, is also polled. All of her kids have been polled, as well. Crystal is not polled (she was disbudded at 1-1/2 weeks) and all of her kids have had horns. We HATE disbudding kids. So, we decided we aren’t going to disbud any more.

 

[Devonviolet]

I have a funny story to tell about Danny Boy. His pen is separated from the girls pasture by 4 foot wide alleyway. His pen is about 30 feet by 30 feet and is made up of t-posts and woven wire fencing. When we built the pen, I requested crossbars (attached to the t-posts ) to strengthen the fencing. Well, those never got put on, and with his weight, and him climbing on the fence, he has bent the fencing, and weakened, some of the t-posts. One day DH was walking across the chicken yard, and he felt something tugging on the back of his sweatshirt. He turned around, and there was Danny Boy right behind him.

Danny Boy saw DH and wanted his attention. He climbed up on the fence right next to a t-post, and the dirt the t-post was in gave way, allowing the fence to lay down on the ground, so he could walk right over the fencing.

As DH stood there, a little surprised, seeing Danny boy right behind him, he realized that Danny Boy was looking over at the girl’s pasture and was talking to him. He obviously wanted to go in and be with the girls! One of our does, Sonata, was in heat, she was standing right near the fence waiting for him, and he wanted to spend time with her. So DH Walked over and opened the gate, with Danny Boy following right behind him.

Danny Boy had his conjugal visit, which lasted about 20 minutes, and they lost interest in each other. So, DH opened the gate, and Danny boy followed him out the gate, over to his pen and walked right through his gate. End of story. Well, not quite. . . . I checked her yesterday, and it appears she IS pregnant!

Melody was bred on January 14, so she will be due the middle of June. Sonata will be due the first week of July.

Here, here are Melody (on the right) and Sonata (on the left), eating their greens this evening.

 

[Mini Horses]

Kids are adorable! How's everything else going for you guys? Seems your still breeding a few goats. Have some chickens. Any gardening this year? Still making jewelry?

We miss you -- stop in more often

 

[Devonviolet]

Kids are adorable! How's everything else going for you guys? Seems your still breeding a few goats. Have some chickens. Any gardening this year? Still making jewelry?

We miss you -- stop in more often

Awww! Thanks Mini! Yes, we are still breeding our Myotonic goats! We have sold some, and put some in the freezer. This year we have a freeze dryer, so I am going to try freeze drying a couple loads of goat burger, both for us to eat and to cut back on the increasing cost of dog food. We also have about 20 chickens, five Muskovy ducks - four hens and one drake, and four guinea hens.

A couple years ago we lost the two cats that we brought with us from Pennsylvania in 2014. In 2021, we were given two feral cats, which ran out the back door and refused to come back. So last year we decided it was time to get a couple more cats. DH went out to the workshop to get a dog crate to pick up some cats at the animal shelter. He walked in the workshop and heard a noise, which turned out to be a tiny little kitten. I wasn’t far behind him, and I walked in and found him holding this kitten, while at the same time hearing other kittens meowing. So I looked around and found three more one week old kittens, that barely had their eyes open. I found a clean 5 gallon bucket, and as we found kittens, I put them in the bucket.

Long story short. . . . I started milking Crystal, who had two kids still nursing on her, and were ready to be weaned. Sadly, we lost two of them at about three weeks. I did everything I knew to do, but I couldn’t save them. So we were left with Precious Boy and Sweet Pea. They are now 10 1/2 months old, and they are both special kitties! Sweet Pea is a short, haired tabby, and precious boy is a long-haired tabby with a black bushy tail. He looks a lot like a Siberian Forest Cat.

Precious Boy on the left and Sweet Pea on the right.

Sweet Pea on the left and Precious Boy on the right.

This is Sweet Pea

And this is Precious Boy

Yes, we have a garden. However, it still isn’t as big as I want it to be. The last couple of years, we have been slowing down. I am now 72 and DH is 76. We have a lot more aches and pains, which slows us down even more. Neither one of us ever got Covid, (or the shots, for that matter), but in March we both got really bad colds. We doubled down on the Elderberry syrup that I make, and other antiviral herbs and supplements for immune building, and it lasted less than a week for me and closer to two weeks for DH.

Back in 2013, I had foot surgery that didn’t go well. Okay, the foot doctor totally screwed up my foot!!! That caused my foot to be out of alignment, causing me constant pain, and causes my knee to be out of alignment. So, now I have arthritis and am having a lot of pain in my right knee. I do not want to have knee surgery, because when I had my left knee replaced, it took me three years to get over the surgery. That well could have been because I had active Lyme disease at the time, but I just don’t want to go through knee replacement surgery again. So, I am hobbling around, and having to be careful where I step to keep from torquing my knee wrong and causing even more pain. I also have to limit my time working outside, so I can come in the house and rest my knee.

Last year I was ready to give up the garden all together, because the weeds were overwhelming me. Then I remembered that several years ago we had talked about doing a Ruth Stout style deep mulch garden. As much as I wanted to, we didn’t get it started last fall, or over the winter.

One of our stumbling blocks, was fire ants! I’m so worried I will reach down to pick some veggies and come up with my arm covered with fire ants!!! I’m working on an ant bait, that uses Spinosad, a newer natural pesticide. It needs some tweeking, but I’m hoping it will at least keep them somewhat controlled.

We also had two big oak trees, that were dying that needed to come down. From sun up to 1pm, they were shading part of the garden that I want to plant. There was a time I would have gotten the chainsaw out and dropped them myself. however, one of them was leaning over the road towards our neighbor’s pasture fence, and I didn’t trust it to not mess up his fence. so, I ended up hiring a tree service to take both trees down. This guy was really good, and I negotiated a good price. He also brought his stump grinder, and for $400 he ground 25 tree stumps! I thought that was a great price for all he did! He also brought his log splitter and split the big trunks, which were each about 30 inches in diameter and 30 feet long. We don’t have a wood burning stove, so I let him have the wood, since he gave me such a good price on cutting the trees down. We had some big branches and a tree break in half during the ice storm in January, and he cut those for us as well. No extra charge!

Now we have a big burn pile (17 feet in diameter) with all the smaller branches from the tree canopies, that needs to be burned before we can do anything else in that area of the garden. We have a cedar tree about 8 feet away from the burn pile, so that has to come down before we can do anything else. Of course that wood will go on the burn pile as well. Although, we will most likely save the trunk to use as a post somewhere on the property. Most likely, we will use it on the three sided shed, that I want to build on the back of the barn, to store round bales and our yard tractors.

Hopefully, this coming week, we will start putting down feed sacks, in the garden, to keep the weeds down, and then put 8” of hay on top of that. The paths will have feed sacks and wood chips on top of that. Eventually, we plan to go out in the woods and dig up leaf mold to use as part of the deep mulch layers.

The little wagon that we bought when we moved here (4 cubic feet) just wasn’t big enough to do that. So we went to tractor supply and bought a 12 cubic foot Gorilla Cart. We are both just amazed at how big it is! And we are loving it! The cool thing is, it has a tow connector and when we go back in the woods to get leaves, we can tow it behind our Husqvarna lawn tractor.

Several years ago we bought Five 4’x12’x12” sheet metal raised beds at Northern Tool. We never got them put together, but now we are planning to get that done. One of the things that held us up, was that 12” was not high enough for these old bodies to bend over to maintain them. I recently came up with the idea of putting down our hardware cloth. (to keep the pocket gophers out of the garden), put a row of 8x8x16” cinderblocks on top of hardware cloth, and then build the raised beds on top of that. That will make the raised beds, 20 inches high, which will make it a lot easier to work with. Once we get the burn pile burned, we will start putting the raised beds together. We are saving some of those branches, to fill the bottoms of the raised beds, layering, branches, hay, wood chips and leaf mold ala’ Huglekulture. Then the top 10 inches will be a mixture of compost and garden soil, with hay mulch on top of all that.

Okay, I think that sort of brings y’all up to date on what has been going on here at Devonviolet Acres.

Well, one more cool thing .. .. .. A while back, I found a blog post online about a homesteader collecting huge bowl of wild violet flowers for making home remedies. I have a few wild violets around the house, but my dream has always been to have lots and lots of wild violets on the property, and even back in the woods. So, I took a chance and wrote to her, asking if she had any extra wild violet plants that she could send me. I told her I would pay for them and the postage. It turns out her woods are absolutely full of wild violets. So this kind lady sent me about 200 Violet corms. The only money she asked for was the cost of shipping! I sent her a check with the cost of shipping and a little extra for her time. I have planted them in plastic boxes, and they are starting to come up. my plan is to get them growing with nice root systems and then plant them in the ground around the property. I am so excited, that Devonviolet Acres will now have lots of violets on the property!!!

 

[Devonviolet]

Kids are adorable! How's everything else going for you guys? Seems your still breeding a few goats. Have some chickens. Any gardening this year? Still making jewelry?

We miss you -- stop in more often

Sorry, Mini, I just realized I didn’t answer your question about the jewelry. I haven’t made any jewelry recently, but I have been looking at lots of designs on Pinterest, that I would like to try making. I have also subscribed to quite a few YouTube channels, and watched lots of tutorials, showing how to make wire wrapped jewelry.

I have the supplies to do wire wrapping, which I am slowly learning to do. My problem is finding the time and drive to do it. I have to go really slow, because my essential tremors have gotten worse over the last year. But I do love making jewelry, and I am bound and determined to at least make some of the more simple designs. it just takes me longer.

Here are some pieces I made for my granddaughter on her birthday this past February. I made a pair of pearl earrings, but I can’t find a photo of them.

 

[Baymule]

Thanks for the update. I’m so glad to see you on BYH! You are a wealth of wisdom and herbal remedies. You taught me about elderberry syrup and I’ve been making it ever since.

Your goat kids are adorable and as always, so well cared for and healthy. If Crystal’s boy, the color in question, was a horse, I’d call his color a line back dun or buckskin. LOL

 

[Mini Horses]

WOW!!! YOU GUYS ROCK! You've been this busy, getting so much done and we have missed out on all the happenings. . I'm certain that garden will get working. Slower is ok....I'm a little slower, too. .

Sorry about the foot. Appears you are dealing with it -- functioning within those limits, adapting. Cats? That was devine providence. Love it!

The jewelry is lovely.