Goat Babies and Milking

Since my last post we have gotten more snow and goat babies. I'll start with a picture of the pasture where the goats live. You can see the red-neck shelter and bales we use as windbreak. No pens or many places to corner and catch a goat mamma to milk her. A note, I am standing on the stack of straw bales next to the barn, the edge of the barn roof can be seen in the right corner.

Now for the Goat Babies:

First Streusel had twins, a week early, on a stormy cold windy day and we lost one. Everyone got blankets to keep warm the first few days. We used different colored vet wrap for each set of kids to keep track when they were little.  These are Streusel's first kids, and we planed on milking her however she isn't quite tame enough to catch every day.

Patches here got lots of attention she is a real pet.

Next Muffin surprised me one evening with triplets. Two bucks and the cutest doe ever. Muffin is an sweet doe of unknown age, she has also become our exclusive milking doe.  Kids get put in the chicken coop/barn at night, we milk once in the morning.

Socks is the little black and white doe. She was quite the handful getting stuck and needing rescuing . Her brothers don't have names.

 

Third to give birth was Cake, our bossy older doe. She calmly had twins one evening after feeding.  So uneventful was their birth I didn't take any pictures of the kids after birth. Or any with their cute little blankets. Probably because we are not planing on keeping Cake or her kids. Or more likely I was too tired.

Cake is the one with the green halter. Her twins a black doe I call Star and a tan buckling.

Finally a couple days after Cake, Sprinkles our other first time mom had her baby. As big as she was I thought certainly she would have twins. Nope I found a big buck kid back behind the flax bales wet and cold, Sprinkles only kinda knew what to do with kid, mostly she ignored him. She just isn't very high in the herd and wasn't let into the shelter. We quickly dried the buck off and he spent the night in the house. The next day after a bottle of colostrum (from Cake none the less) I brought him back outside where mom quickly  took over and he happily nursed.

Meet Silly who was born as big as Patches at a week old. He rarely spends time with mom, and  is always trying to nibble on my clothing. Hence why he got the name Silly.

Now on to Milking. 

We had planned on milking at least two of our goats if not three. However we quickly learned that in order to milk one has to be able to catch said goats, said goats have to be tame. Tame has a new definition in my book, like puppy tame, catch-able  not just eat some grain out of your hand or bucket, but huggable, and able lead. This tameness issue and our lack of pens quickly led to the conclusion of only milking our friendliest goat Muffin who has triplets.

 It still isn't easy to catch Muffin everyday, But diligence and persistence are my goal, not a ton of milk production. So far it has paid off. We catch the kids at night and they sleep in the chicken coop/barn structure. Then in the morning I chase Muffin around and around until I can corner her in the redneck shelter or over by the water tank, then we walk/drag her to the milking stanchion where she mostly relaxes and I can milk her. So really it is the catching that we have issues with, Husband works every three days and it is a blessing when he can help me catch her.

One quart a morning is now my current goal after a week and half of once daily milking. I could probably get more than a quart from her, however I don't worry because a) I am consistently getting one quart a day, b) my hands are new to milking and get tired, c) Muffin has triplets so they get anything I leave.

Milking Muffin this morning Saturday March 20, 3013