Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

Here’s a slew of pretty pictures, taken during a one-hour morning walk around the yard -

The “lawn” is largely composed of flowers. Some are just pretty:

…but many are wild strawberries (the real thing is far cheerier than

A baby fir-tree cone:

Apple trees are budding:

Not sure what this tree is, but it’s got pretty flowers:

Never got around to moving this extra horse poo to the compost bin, and now it’s lush with greenery and fungi:

The woods by the river have a number of Trillium, a somewhat uncommon and delicate plant; it’s illegal to pick any part of it - even taking a leaf may kill the plant, and they can take fifteen years to flower for the first time:

Also down by the river is the beautiful and malodorous skunk cabbage. The roots are actually edible (after cooking to destroy harmful compounds), and while this still doesn’t sound very appetizing, with all the food craziness going on in the world, the discovery of yet another edible plant on our property is a comforting thing.

Oregon grape - fruit is edible, but very sour…used more in jam than fresh:

There are a couple of these, which I believe are Salmonberry. They’re isolated, with just a few flowers each, which is too bad because I’ve been wanting to try it. If there are only a few berries, maybe I’ll save them for the seed.

I really want to grow some raspberries here…especially black raspberries, the sweetest, most amazing ones I know of. There’s one small patch at the edge of a clearcut near here from which I picked very lightly last year…I think I’ll try to find out how to propagate it before the $#% timber companies spray defoliant or bulldoze it.

I don’t know what this is, but Teri quite likes it, which has rendered a whole patch of our garden area off-limits to tilling and planting:

Catnip is pretty common in un-tilled bits of our garden, and here and there all over the property, but for some reason it LOVES the spot where I grew tobacco last year…maybe I’m creating the ultimate feline drug - Tobacnip!

Speaking of the garden, here’s the beginnings of this season’s planting, which will be much more extensive than last years, and which should benefit from the soil tests and classes we’ve been taking.

Walla Walla onions:

Shelling peas:

Salad mix:

If you’ve got Swede in the family tree (or shop at Ikea), you probably know what Lingonberries are. Delicious and tart, they are made into jams and sauces, and are full of anti-oxidants. Best of all, they grow well in acid soil (ie, all of Western Oregon) and propagate by rhizome as well as seed (they’ll slowly spread out without help from us, and won’t become out-of-control invasives like the Himilayan Blackberries that plague/feed us):

Chives and heirloom tomatoes (Purple Calabash and Brandywine) are under lights in the kitchen waiting for this extended frost season to finally end:

…and finally, no post these days would be complete without cute goat photos

Drama queen nosing through the nasty old chicken wire someone applied over the field fencing:

And Cocoa, with the evidence of a messy bottle feeding still on her face:

That’s it for today, but I’m sure tomorrow will bring a whole bunch of new flowers and cute animal shots

Just in from putting the goats up for the night. Yes, I said goats, plural. We are now the proud parents of two of these beautiful creatures. As you know if you’ve been reading along (you have been reading along, haven’t you?), Peter’s been hard at work getting our goat house and pasture ready for the impending arrival of a couple of dairy goats.

Of course, once we met Cocoa, we totally fell in love with her and had to add her to our soon-to-be herd. She was our first arrival, on Sunday afternoon. If you read Peter’s post about her first day (and night) with us, you know that she really did not like being left alone - goats are social animals - hence his night in the goat house in 37 degree weather.

So, we needed to get another goat, fast. We’d already planned to purchase our two milk goats from a neighbor who raises them, and were in discussions as to whether we’d buy a milking doe and her female kid, or a milking doe (once her kids were weaned) along with a female yearling. To our delight, Cocoa settled it for us by coming to us now and needing a friend.

On Monday, Drama Queen came to live with us. She’s a yearling doe, young and frisky, but long weaned from her mama. And she certainly lives up to her name. She’s gorgeous and graceful, moves like a deer, and has the temperament of a spoiled movie star. We love her.

Her first day with us was mostly spent establishing her dominance over Cocoa by butting her (see photo below). At first Cocoa butted back, but after a while I think she just got tired of it and learned to ignore Drama’s obnoxiousness and move away. By yesterday Drama had calmed down a lot - she now seems to be buddies with Cocoa (though she makes it clear she’s still top dog), and has even warmed up to us.

The two of them together are quite a pair, and we’re smitten.

I think we’re now officially “goat people”…

P.S. Ok, I know this is Drama’s debut, but I just can’t resist one more shot of our baby - she’s about 3 1/2 months old, so still being bottle fed once a day (though she’s happily eating her share of the “grown-up” food too).

Go ahead, say it - you know you want to:

“Aaaawwwwww, cute!”

Another P.S. Can you believe I already have nicknames for both of them? Cocoa’s is Cocoa Belly (get it? Like Kokopelli?), and Drama’s is Dramarama (or if she’s being extra dramatic, it’s Dramarama Ding Dong).

I’m restraining myself and letting Teri blog about our second goat when she gets some time, but I couldn’t resist a little Cocoa video. She follows me around like a puppy -

After all the planning, preparation, and stockpiling of supplies, Teri and I have our first kid. We didn’t, of course, think we’d have one this soon, but fate intervened -the mother didn’t want it, and the people she was living with already have loads of ‘em.

We have a small house, and kids can make a real mess with the milk and poop and whatnot (plus diapers are EXPENSIVE!), so we’re keeping her in a shack out in the yard for now. I know that sounds messed up, but we’re not cruel; there’s a nice thick layer of straw on the floor and a bucket of water.

OK, April Fools is past, I’ll stop trying to confuse you.

Last month, I went to pick up our milk and eggs at a neighbor’s farm. The milking wasn’t done yet when I arrived, so I wandered down to their goat barn, where they’ve got dozens of meat goats. They were all fun to watch, but one in particular really got my attention - she seemed to have no fear, and soaked up affection like a sponge. On a later trip, Teri got to meet her, and was also struck by how sweet she was.

After that, we had a BBQ and invited our farming neighbors. We commented on the friendly goat, and they kind of chuckled - “Oh, do you want her?”. We hadn’t realized it when we met her through a fence, but she is almost completely blind, and has been a big pain. She would get left behind by the herd, and once they had to hunt for three days before finding her.

Yesterday we finally went to pick her up. Her name is Cocoa, and she gets around amazingly well for not being able to see much.

Goats are social animals, and having been rejected by her mother this one is more partial to human company. The bleating whenever we left her alone in the pen yesterday was heartbreaking. I ended up putting a tarp down and climbing into my sleeping bag wearing a down jacket…in the goat house. Once I settled down to sleep, Cocoa did the same. It dropped to about 37 last night, and I have this thing where I wake up whenever a goat walks across my face, so I’m very much looking forward to a nap!

She seems to be happily settling in now. But let’s get to the part you’ve all been waiting for, the cute photos (all taken by Teri)

This shot, taken as she turned her head, really shows off her Bassett-hound ears:

Here she is with some grass hanging out of her mouth:

A closer shot (you can see some of the notching in her ears here - too many adventures, probably involving barbed wire fences she didn’t see):

And finally, enjoying some fresh alfalfa hay in her new house:

Painfully cute, eh?

And there’s more to come! You can’t keep just one goat (and Cocoa wouldn’t provide a lot of milk anyway, being bred for eating) because they get lonely…but we thought we’d give her a little time to settle in and get familiar with the place…

Note: Don’t worry, Cocoa isn’t here to become goatburger (though I’ve had goatburger from the same farm she came from and it was delicious). She’s probably going to be “just” a pet, since her kids wouldn’t have much sale value and she isn’t from breeds known for high milk production (she’s a Boer/Kiko mix). The other goats we get will be for milk purposes, though of course they’ll get all the attention and skritches they want.

So we’ve been puttering along, living half in the 21st century and half in the 18th. No more of that!

We’ve traded the Beetle for a donkey named Cantankery. He’s only got one eye and he limps a bit, but if you pull really, really hard and hold out an apple he can sometimes be made to move. The best part? Instead of putting $3.50/gallon gas into our vehicle, now we put in grass and gas comes out the back…for free!

Some fool traded me an old buckboard for the Vanagon! Teri has some equine experience, so it’s her job to harness Cantankery to the wagon. I’m sure the next try will be successful, and I assured her that the hoofmarks will fade with time.

The whole flush toilet thing is just wimpy, even on those mornings when the seat is 30° because we let the fire go out. We’ve replaced it with a shovel and a copy of “How to $#!t in the woods“. Fortunately we have an endless supply of fir tree cones already.

Computers: no more Windows, no more Linux, we’re switching to using a bead-based system. Especially difficult computations will be done using a lump of charcoal to write on dried leaves. Not too sure about this one though - I think I got Grand Theft Auto installed on the abacus, but the framerate is miserable and I keep getting carjacked waiting for the screen to refresh. Oh well, still better than Windows Vista!

Bedding: we’ll miss the 10″ thick futon mattress, but have carved out a nice little den in the duff under some blackberry bushes. This required a few minor skirmishes with the critters who were already nesting in there, but rabbit-burger, as it turns out, is quite tasty!

Beer: ahh, nectar of the gods, but not local…having discovered that pretty much any organic matter can be fermented, we’ve devised a system to make wine out of poison ivy and last year’s mushy, brown, leftover apples. It’s just like a tropical drink - who gets the worm?

Clothing: goodbye to cotton, polyester, and wool - we’ve planted a fig tree; there’s apparently a long tradition of using their leaves to cover the More Tender Parts of the body. I have some concerns about the large snake under our apple tree, but he only talks to Teri anyway.

Running water? Bah! How lame, with a river just a few hundred yards from the house. All our water will now be carried in buckets, and you know what they say - “If it’s still liquid, that’s yer hot water.” This is Teri’s job, because I want “Woman strong like bull, good for pull plow.”

Finally - communications. This will be our last web-based blog post. In the future, we will be using smoke signals, so you will need to visit one of the nearby mountain peaks to read the blog. We’re not luddites, though - we’ll be using that new-fangled “Morse Code” for our posts. Images will all be encoded in GIF format, since that is easier to represent in text. Image dimensions will be in the header, so you can use a piece of graph paper to reproduce the image by filling in the appropriate squares.
Happy April first!