Endless winter

Okay, enough already! I don't care what anyone says but February is the cruelest month, at least here in Nova Scotia. We are tired of the snow and ice and wind and rain and frozen water buckets and frozen manure and miserable goats who can't get outside to chew on trees and not being able to ride our horses and salt on the cars and whiny kids on snow days... I could go on.

Which brings me to snow days. Louise and I used to love snow days. Sit home, turn on the telly and watch some daytime tv. Eat whatever, in front of the telly. Read a book and watch the snow fall, knowing there was no where we had to go. Then we got this crazy notion that we would foster children. Don't ask me why. Some kind of shared martyr syndrome. So now we have 2 kids, a 12 year old boy and his younger sister. Snow days are completely ruined. I dread snow days! Imagine the bickering and shouting that goes on with 2 kids locked up in the house. We tried letting them watch tv all day. That just turned them into hyperactive demons. So we have to find ways to keep them busy, none of which involve us sitting in front of the tv eating junk food. In fact, since we have had the kids, we have to sneak our junk food after they have gone to bed to avoid setting a bad example.

Many changes 1

I have not posted for a while and it is not that I have had nothing to say, but rather that I have not made the time. Many new additions to the farm. Buttercup has had a new calf, born Dec 18th, 2008. Moremeat is his name, Moremy for short. He is a beautiful purebred Dexter. Unfortunately, as his mother is not registered, he cannot be either. Hence, he is castrated and will live up to his name. We were hoping for a heifer.

We now have 2 gilts, that is unbred female pigs. Winnifred and Pruscilla. Winnie is a purebred, registered, Tamworth from Bob Ottenbrite's farm. Pruscilla is a spotty pig from a pig farm that was going out of business. Scilly has had her tail docked, a barbaric practice of intensive farms to prevent them from chewing on eachothers tails. Both the girls are large, pushy but friendly. They eat like pigs. We will have them bred in a month or 2 to provide us with the young pigs to raise for meat this summer. As most of the pig farms in the province have shut down, we have no real worry about selling our excess piglets.

We sold Rhyme and Raisin, our 2 youngest goats. We were finding they were bullying their mothers and eachother and we were getting no pleasure from having 4 goats. Now Pyramus and Frisbee seem a bit happier. I think the 2 girls went to a good home, where they will be pets.