Goat cookies, beehives, and other stuff

Some of us did not want to get up so easily this morning....

It's hard to believe there are only two days left in November! Wow. Time flies. I've got to finish Christmas cards and articles that are due.

The new switches Kevin rigged up for the mule work great. It looks a little crazy, but I couldn't care less, it works! I'm so glad we are not without the machine because of  a silly thing like the starter switch.  We'll get a new one eventually and replace this, but for now it works fine.



Yes, that is the lids from my yeast containers he used! Talk about putting things to good use... :)

This morning before I went up to the barn, I made some cookies. For the goats of course!



Yuuummm.

I mixed together shredded carrot, oats, and molasses. I did not measure, but I used about 2 cups carrot, 1 1/2 cups oats and enough molasses to make it all stick together. I baked thema t 350 for about 10-15 minutes.

They went over very well as expected, and will become a more regular treat here. Everyone went nutty over them. The sheep couldn't care less, one of my ewes, Lila, came over and tried a bite but she chewed it good and then spit it out.

Bucket loved them....



hmmm this tastes good...

Izzie loved them and gobbled them down.



But no one loved them more than Sammy and Bea, the cookie monsters!









Later this afternoon I headed out to take a better look at my Christmas tree candidate for this year. On my way I noticed that somebody had been eating pumpkin.... I'm not going to say who of course, but maybe the one with the seeds hanging out his mouth!




Certainly it was not Sammy... no idea how those seeds got there, and the orange on his beautiful white face.

Maybe it was Izzie and Bean?



So what do you think? I think this tree will be perfect. We have 700 acres of bush here, and we only cut one live tree a year. All of our firewood is deadwood. And after we are done with the tree, the deer eat it, so nothing is ever wasted.



I think it will be just right.

Charlie has been back yesterday and today with his digger putting a drainage system in for the pond that's flooding our driveway, fixing a few mud holes, and, doing a couple other jobs. Yesterday when I went out to check on them, ah, chatting.... or working rather, the drainage was coming along good.



Then today they worked on the other culvert, clearing it out...





The drainage ditch was still working well this morning, when I went and checked it out, after the guys had cleaned it out again.



The pond was making a ton of noise with the ice shifting and cracking, it was so strange listening to the popping and cracking and creaking



Is it crazy that it's only December and it's time to start planning for the spring? If we don't we'll already be behind. A lot of spring activities need to be planned, and things ordered well ahead of time in the winter. Which is always a good thing because it keeps us busy and looking forward to things when it gets really cold outside.

We've started our serious bee research. We plan on starting with one hive this spring. Our bees need to be ordered around January to make sure in May, we'll have them. We are very interested in the Warre hive instead of the typical commonly used frame hive... there are several reasons why we like this hive better. We've leaned some interesting things about hives lately.

This is a really great site about top bar hives: http://www.bestbeekeeping.com/top_bar_hives.html

We are still learning and it's going to be a great December project reading everything we can, and throughout the winter. But we really need to get our bees ordered in January/Feb.

I've also got my spotted Nubian doeling reserved from Capricornview Farm! We wanted one last year when we picked up Bea but they all were sold. I'm so excited. We are going to buy a few boys to raise too. The kids will be born from March till May, so they could come anytime then. My goats are all due mid/late April.

I've pretty much got my order for the hatchery for spring done. I should be thinking about Christmas instead of baby chicks right now... But what the heck, priorities, priorities. A couple of the breeds are rare, so they need to be ordered in advance.

We will be introducing a new breed of turkeys to the farm and getting some more laying hens.

I'd like to get Guinea hens again, since they eat ticks. But try and keep them at home. They are really hard to keep fenced because they even dig out. People do keep them free range but I find they need to keep so many to replace the ones that wander away and I don't want guinea hens everywhere. So I'm not sure about that.

For dinner tonight we had pasta, with bison meatballs. I've made all kinds of meatballs, turkey, beef, caribou, buffalo... I just alter the spices to my taste, which you could do as well. Usually I only use BBQ sauce in my beef meatballs, unless I'm doing Italian and then I add lots of fresh herbs.

For these I used salt, pepper, panko bread crumbs, 1 egg, and about 1/2 cup of BBQ sauce in these meatballs. Because I used a spicy onion and garlic BBQ sauce, I didn't add either of those like I normally would. 

I baked them on a cookie sheet at 425 degrees for about 15 minutes and then I put them, my sauce, and some shredded mozzarella back in the oven for about 25 more minutes or until my pasta was ready anyway.

They turned out pretty good. Tomorrow we'll have meatball sandwiches with the leftovers.
While I was out this afternoon finally after weeks of trying, I got a picture of a Chickadee in the forest :) This bird was on our new road and kept coming out onto the road even with me there. Kevin said he was out there on the road while they were working even. I guess the tractor pulling up the dirt brought some bugs out because this little bird didn't want to leave the road, even with us there.

 Deer Norman showed up tonight over where our sugar camp is. He is not in rut any longer, so it's over. Maybe we will see Torn Ear again now.