The goat formerly known as Simon.

No, it's not what you might think; our little buck is still in the herd.  We do, however, have two very indecisive people still trying to name him. 

 He's been called: Tucker, Tuck Tuck, Theodore, Teddy, Dingle and Ned...though we must admit, he responds to none of these names!

Tuck Tuck remains a very calm and sweet goat though.  We were worried about weaning him off his bottle last week as Lola and Abby screamed bloody murder when they were weaned, but he didn't even protest.  Ned loves to play with (and hump) Oscar (a promising sign)!  He's a bit taller than Oscar now, which is encouraging for the upcoming breeding season.

Oscar continues to amaze us.  He is now very comfortable around other people and regularly will allow us to scratch his head and occasionally his back.  Teresa even managed to brush him the other day, much to his delight!

Lola is still producing over 1/4 gallon a day of milk (14 months and counting).  We decided to dry her off by September to give her body a rest.  We'll miss the cheese, yogurt, caramel, ice cream and other treats we've made, but the lady needs a break!

P.S.  Eric found a snake.

Freebies! Free Bees?

As discussed earlier, our honey bees did not survive last winter due to somewhat mysterious circumstances.  The experience of losing two seemingly healthy and strong hives has created far more questions than answers.  Many of the questions that I have about keeping bees are about how to provide the bees with living conditions that most closely mimic those found in "naturally" occurring colonies.  My hunch is that, by providing these conditions, bees are able to fully take advantage of their innate tendencies, make more bees, produce a honey crop, and do all of that with a minimal amount of beekeeper intervention.  Unfortunately, I think that I have been failing to provide "bee friendly" conditions by using conventional Langstroth hives and their associated methods.  Thus the bee deaths of this past winter.  

Luckily, there are other people that share my philosophies.  Even more fortunate, they write books and have left a paper trail.  I have been reading and studying the methods of Fedor Lazutin and Georges de Layens.  These methods have been made readily available thanks to the work of Leo Sharashkin.  Leo does a fantastic job of presenting how to keep bees in a natural way.  What you see in the pictures are swarm traps built by me to the specifications on Leo's website.  Catching feral bees or local swarms is an important step in establishing a sustainable apiary.  I was a little bit late to the game in putting the swarm traps into trees.  Life was a little bit busy while building the traps and I was delayed by a certain baby goat among other things.  With some luck, though, I hope to catch a swarm to install in a new hive.  Hopefully, there will be more updates to follow this year.

Fox Kits

The neighbors up the road apparently have baby foxes living under their garage.  

Caught these two playing one evening!

New 'kid" on the block

Little Simon, a mini Nubian buckling, joined Silver Hill Farm last weekend.  We are bound and determined to get Abby bred this year!  

Eric is very happy to have another male body on the farm! 

 

From Paris to West Windsor

This post was to wait until later this month to celebrate the one year anniversary of our going to solar power.  Unfortunately, our federal government continues to lead us astray by ignoring the realities of climate change and we have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.  Without becoming overly political, I will simply offer a few statistics of how successful our solar array has been as one of the efforts that we are making at decreasing our impact on the environment. 

In a little less than a year, we have generated a total of 5.17MWh of electricity.  To put that in terms that make sense, that is the equivalent of 15,661.63 light bulbs running for an entire day.  That equals 8,002.95 pounds of CO2 emissions saved or 201.57 trees planted. 

Apparently, a major motivation behind withdrawing from the Paris Agreement was that it was "bad for American workers."  We are American workers and we have not paid an electric bill for over a year because we care about climate change.  In fact, we have a credit with our power company for generating more electricity than we use.  That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

A forest update

We've been out working in the woods this spring.  

The trails that we built last year needed to be maintained, so while Teresa raked and cleared, Eric cut down the smaller white pine trees to try and allow some sunlight onto the forest floor.

The newest addition is our fire pit.  This is likely the first and only project we'll ever complete that will take us LESS time than we expected.   

Goat approved! 

Winter Losses

As winter progressed this year, we became more and more suspicious that the bees didn't survive.  On warm days, not a single soul could be seen flying from the hive.  When the weather warmed, we opened the hive to see a few bees trickling out, but turns out they were thieving honey.  Both hives were completely dead.  We're still not 100% certain as to the cause, but we do know they left behind a BUNCH of honey!!  

Finished processing it today and ended up with this:

60+ pounds of raw honey!

Stayed tuned.  We're going to try and make beeswax candles from the comb.