Better late than never

Finally our last goat kidded, a buck and a doe from our Anglo-Nubian billy goat. The boy has floppy 'aeroplane' ears and the girl hasn't! Strange since they are both Nubian x Slovak shorthaired white goat crosses... It will be the first billy of the year not to be castrated because we will try to sell it for breeding.
Our little 'inbred' billies have left our farm, one went to friends and the second has gone to the happy grazing grounds (and/or our freezer).

Easter on our farm

Lubos from the great website Slovak Cooking writes about easter in Slovakia in his newsletter;
It’s not Easter bunnies or chocolate eggs hiding in a bush. In Slovakia, Easter Monday is celebrated by guys chasing girls around with a whip (a switch) made off willow branches (korbáče) and also pouring buckets of cold water on them. And as a sign of gratitude, girls reward the boys by giving them beautiful hand-decorated Easter eggs, chocolates, liquor, or even money. What an awesome traditions! Ok, perhaps some girls will disagree with me.


Easter at our place was with lambs going outside for the first time. Very exiting for them (and for me more frightning than exiting). In Holland some farmers give tranquillizers to calves going outside for the first time. I now understand why! A group of over exited young animals don't see any fences or barriers. So we are starting slowly, everyday a few more minutes.


They grow very well, more than 300 grams/day. - And this is the most beautiful girl of all.

Very busy

With great wether, camping season to start soon, gardening season started and lots of young live on our farm we are rather busy!


However we got help from our new electrician, if she is not too busy playing in her sandbath, she assembles the elctricity for our campsite.


Lambs are doing well, eating, growing, getting used to their new environment. Goats are less happy, they have lost complete freedom till at least end September. We fenced a field around our pond for them.


The garden is, although it is very dry, doing fine. Potatoes are sprouting, peas have germinated, spinach too and was then eaten by a chichen :-(, red beets, lettuce, onions have surviced chicken attack.


And last but not least - our road is about to be finished! We have been scooping many cubic metres of gravel on the stone-filled tracks.

Deer

This late afternoon a nice herd of red deer in our 'garden', normally we have fallow deer around our house. They were much shyer and ran away before I could take a close-up picture.

Breeding and keeping livestock

Cutting tails with a knife, piercing ears, castrating without anaesthesia, trowing with young animals, weight them bij binding a string to their front legs and hang them on a scale in the air, not feeding them enough because feed is expensive..... this all might be normal to certain farmers, it is absolutely not normal to us.
We now have a stable full of lambs, slowly getting used to their new home... I would like to fully feed them but for now we are careful not to overfeed them with concentrates since they are not yet used to that. Clean water, good hay, some concentrates, fresh air, love and attention hopefully get them over being separated from their mothers and some rough handeling.

Animals

On the left side stork on the right side (our) goats.
Click on the picture to enlarge.

Harrowing

We still get questions from people in Holland if they do have tractors overhere - in western Europe we do think that fields are still worked with horse and plough.

Barter trade

I exchanged our geese for chickens and pigeons. The geese didn't do what they were supposed to do; keep our Christmass tree field free of weeds. They didn't stay within the fence - prefered total freedom. Understandable but with a campsite not practical. They do shit a lot and make too much noise in the mornings. Sleeping guests would be awake before six o'clock. Not really what you like when you're on holiday.
So I did put an advert on a Slovak website: 4 geese to be swapped against chickens or pigeons. Or any other interesting offer. Please send me an e-mail.
So I got several phonecalls and strange offers; fishing rods and enamel pins (?), money and finally somebody called with chickens and pigeons. So finally we got chickens on our farm, six bantams, laying 6 eggs a day so far, and a couple of Slovak pouter pigeons.