We had some good friends stop by Sunday afternoon to see what all the excitement was about a few goats. The two little girls were quite brave to face their fears about the dogs. I think by the time they left they were no longer too petrified to funtion.

Some friends from Italy (TX) over on Sunday afternoon to see all the new baby goats.

We just had triplets the day before. Now this goat has twins. One positive to report among many, there’s only one goat left who is expecting. So one more entry on baby goats being born. But they are irresistably cute.

Can you believe it? Two more twins. It happened Sunday Morning. These look a little more like traditional Boer goats.

That’s not really true of course, as these pictures will prove, eventually if you keep reading. But there is work always to be done, that much is true. And on Saturday, that’s what we’re usually doing. But we generally work together, so it’s not too bad. (It’s great in my eyes, of course.) Today, we had to put up a new gate, feed cows, wash equipment and change oil (it was a nice sunny day) and finally clean out one of the barns where the goats, mini donkeys and chickens lived all winter.

Some jobs at the ranch aren’t so pleasant. Like cleaning out stalls. In this case, this is a stall, where all the chickens go at night. It’s specially fenced to protect them from any predators. But it can get pretty bad in there.

We hauled about 6 manure loads out of the 4 stalls. What a spring cleaning.

Here’s a load of chicken manure that Rebecca is preparing to spread out. It’s going to make some very good fertilizer for this grass along the driveway. I got that manure spreader for Diane and Rebecca for Christmas, the year before last. A lot of people, upon hearing that were aghast that I would buy my wife such a gift, but she was not only surprised, but thrilled with the gift. Rebecca was also very appreciative. It’s one of the best gifts I’ve come up with.

See it in action below.

Here it is in all its glory. Just look at that chicken dung fly. This is so much better than the wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow method we used before last Christmas. I must really love my wife to give her a gift like that.

It wasn’t all work. The little boys thought they worked so hard (and actually they did), that they needed to go swimming. They knew it would be cold but braved it anyway.

It was warm outside (85F) but I bet the pool was about 60F. However, Russell and Robbie were determined to go swimming. Another day ended on a good note.

We had an idea that Lorene, our first goat we ever owned, might be having triplets. She was so big and looked so uncomfortable. Sure enough that’s what she had on Saturday.

Triplets! That’s a first for us. These babies seem to be the weakest of all the babies born. In fact, it seemed like Lorene was going to ignore them. I say she would have eventually taken care of them, but Diane and Rebecca weren’t as confident. So they’ve stepped in on a regular basis to feed them colostrum and goat’s milk (they tie up Lorene and milk her!) and the babies are gaining strength. That’s a lot of work, but for Diane and Rebecca, it’s a labor of love.

They start learning to operate smaller equipment at an early age. About age 12 I start training the kids to operate the tractor. Luckily with big pastures, there’s lots of room for error. But we are very careful with the equipment.

Eric’s becoming quite the skilled tractor operator. Soon enough he’ll graduate to carrying around hay with it.

We do most cattle rounding up with the four wheelers, but we do like to ride the horses. Rebecca is active in training and showing horses. She works with some wonderful trainers in Burleson, TX. She takes lessons from Kristen Clemons who works for Paris Hughes at Hughes Quarter Horses. Kristen does a super job. It seems like her girls always win the top spots in all the horse shows. We’ll have more on Rebecca showing horses to come in this space.

This is Bonita, being ridden by one of our ranch hands. Bonita is a nice Arabian mare who is so gentle with little kids. She’s getting on in years, but she’s still pleasant.

Future cowboy on Lacy our Palamino mare who is about to have her own baby shortly.

Won’t be long now and this will be solid green leaves obscuring this creek. There are several spring fed creeks that wind their way through the ranch. It makes for some good clear lakes and drinking holes for the animals. Little boys can spend hours in a creek.

This is the main spring that just pours out water all year long. It slows down in August typically and even has run dry in the dryest drought, but it runs very dependably otherwise.

Well we did get some turkeys. Right now, we keep them in a box in the house to keep them warm. They were $7 a chick! Man, we’re in the wrong business! When they get their feathers and it warms up some more at night, then we’ll keep them outside. For now, though we’re putting up with the noise the make. Hopefully, the little boys won’t love (squeeze) them to death in the meantime. They have named them. It all started with Russell naming his favorite one “Turk”. Then we came up with Dirk (from the Dallas Mavericks), next we thought of “Jerk” as if Beef Jerky. We thought of “Work”, and “Zork” from Zurg in Toy Story. I thought of “Murk” just to come up with 5 names.

You might think by naming these it’s going to be hard to eat them when the time comes. Well, if they turn into to too much of individual pets, it might be difficult, but usually we don’t have that as too big of an issue with that. It’s all part of life.

When all the cows are lying down like this chewing their cud, it means they’ve had plenty to eat. If all they do all day long is walk around foraging for more, they’re not getting enough grass to eat.

When I walk through here with the dogs along, all the mama cows start calling their calves to make sure everyone is ok. If I don’t have the dogs, the cows don’t get nervous. But I like to see them taking care of their calves. There’s plenty of coyotes, so they have to be vigilant. I’m sure to them the dogs are no different from the coyotes.

Back towards the northern corner of our property is The Lake. There’s some big bass in this lake. Plenty of folks who have lived out here for years seem to know about this lake because every once in a while someone will mention that they used to go fishing back there when they were “a kid”. And it is true there’s some nice fish in there. It’s fairly deep in some parts — maybe 25 feet or so.