Blood, Sweat & Shit (and tears)

Farming, or pretending to farm in my case, involves much, much more than just plopping seeds into the ground, watering them and picking the fruits.  Raising livestock is more than cute, bouncing goat kids.

I could write a thousand-page book on the not-so-cute and not-so-clean happenings here at Krazo Acres farm.  And it's not even like we have a "real" farm.  Some of our farm animals should probably be considered more pets than livestock and my gardens don't provide enough sustenance for more than a few meals.

Eggs are easy though, right?  Feed the chickens, water 'em, go out and collect farm fresh eggs!  But apparently most of my twenty-one laying hens are in fact, not laying.  And one of them that did have an egg under her thinks nothing of not only pecking at my hand when trying to remove eggs from the nest (before they boil in their own shells from the heat) but felt that it was necessary to take a noticeable hunk of flesh out of my knuckle.

Paul spent two full days this weekend hauling, moving and stacking hay with a friend.  In the gawd-awful heat.  The trailer was so loaded down that he had to turn the A/C off in the truck so it didn't overheat.  They moved 132 large round bales.  Although we had a decent spring cutting, it already looks like "drought" will be the buzzword for the rest of the year.  At least we have a year's worth under cover now and I wont have to be fretting over where we're getting our hay later in the season.  I even think we have enough to get a cow.  (Can you hear Paul screaming?)

I've continued the slow progression of getting more seeds into the ground and hoping that they produce something edible.....for us and not the chickens, deer, armadillos or squirrels.  I have to keep on myself to continue planting.  For whatever reason, I keep forgetting that there are more than two times to plant stuff (i.e. Spring & Fall gardens).  I should be popping seeds into the ground at least every other week.

But in order to pop seeds into the ground, I have to prepare the seed bed by amending our "soil" with semi-composted hay, goat poop and whatever dirt I can find in order to give the seedlings a fighting chance.  I've been scraping the non-vegetative ground in the goat yard and putting it into a 55-gallon garbage can and dragging it over to the new garden.  The goat yard is so dry that even the tiniest breeze will kick up goatpoochickenshitdust and I end up covered in dehydrated caprine crap.  Oh, and a gritty taste in my mouth.  Any guesses to what I've been inhaling and basically eating while I'm out there?  Yep.  Goat shit.

Some of you may have noticed that I've been absent from my blog for a while.  Last week I made the difficult decision to schedule a "final" appointment for my 16 year old feline companion, Crackers.  I had almost an entire week to think about it and it was driving me nuts.  She finally went to join her sister, Cheese, in that big ol' bowl of cream in the sky.  Or maybe she decided to come back again to comfort another human friend.  Whatever her fate, I hope she enjoys her next adventure.

Cheese & Crackers
I miss you both