The formatting issue is now history. It turns out that Blogger now adds lines of CSS code to support a new graphics feature, and it played havoc with some layout designs - so I wasn't the only one. They installed a fix that lets you switch this feature on and off. I turned it off.

If you're interested, information on the issue and the fix are here.

Eggs (week ending 7/23): 42
Eggs (year to date): 1353

Inches of rain last night: 2.2. The rain came off the roof of the barn so hard that it stripped off some of the accumulated, impacted manure I hadn't gotten the chance to fork up and tote to the pile.

Minutes spent hunkered in the basement: 30.

Number of lightning proximity hits: Too many to count.

Number of blown breakers in the electrical box: At least one.

Number of tornadoes: 0 (but it was close).

What else do you expect when the day temp is in the 90's, it's 81 when the storm hits and 69 when it leaves? The good thing was that the first storm chilled the air so much that it defanged the tornado-making apparatus in the clouds. It all blew over without incident.

A vet came over Monday to de-horn the two young bucks and worm all the other goats. Yesterday a nephew who is fascinated with the farm animals came over and helped with chores. I put one of the wethers on the milking stand, had the nephew give him feed, and pulled his current scur easy as you please. Let the wether eat for a while to forget the unpleasantness of being locked in the milking stand. End of story.

The milking stand has made goat milking a pleasant experience according to my daughter. We don't have pasteurizing equipment yet, so the milk goes to the cat and chickens. The chickens love it. My daughter reports that the chickens now mob her when she goes into the barnyard to milk the goats. When she started, egg production leapt up to 7 eggs a day. It's back down. I'll have to see if daughter has been consistent about supplementing the hens' diet with milk.

Speaking of goat dairy products, my wife, daughter and I went with some friends to an amazing place in Akron called the West Point Market. It specializes in hard-to-find or obscure foods. For example, I was able to pick up a jar of Lemon Marmalade there (and now want to return for Lime Marmalade and the Sangria Jelly). They carried Coffee Crisps, my favorite candy bar (made only in Canada) and Aero bars (another Canadian confection). If you want grape Nehi, Moxie, Ginger Beer, this is the place to get it. It's one of the biggest wine dealers in the nation, with 3,300 labels available. Exotic fruits and veggies aplenty. Fresh cuts of meat, spiced sausages like I'd never seen. The grocery shelves had such obscure brands that when I ran into a familiar national brand (e.g., Jif peanut butter sitting amidst all the natural peanut and cashew butters), the effect was jarring.

But the point of this exercise is that we picked up (for a dear amount) a bit of goat cheese to try. This particular brand was awful - it tasted like buck goat smells, which makes me wonder about where it was processed (for the uninitiated, buck goats are particularly nasty, especially with their odd hygienic habits, and the odor of one is capable of permeating things for miles around - which is why we had the man with the band come and fix our little bucks so the offending glands that cause this behavior will fall off, making them much-more-presentable wethers).

My wife claims she's had goat cheese that didn't taste bucky at all. So we'll try a different brand next time. Meantime, the french bread, the marmalade, the guacamole dip, the birch beer, and the other cheese we got were all superb. As was the lunch we had at their in-store deli.

In store: more eggs (and hopefully increased production); finally getting to build the chicken tractor; goat milk; goat's milk fudge; and goat cheese that doesn't taste buckish.

 
"We have another kid."

This is what my daughter said to me as I walked in the door, coming home from work on Wednesday night.

It seems she was in the barn milking the two does who were "productive" when she heard a strange bleating sound. She went to investigate and found that the older, obnoxious doe had kidded what turns out to be another little buck. We dodged the bullet this time, though, because this doe usually throws triplets.

My daughter said that the look on my face was priceless.

Who is it that's enjoying the company of chooks in the English countryside? It's Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Penn Ritchie, of course!

The cynic in me says that this has "photo op" written all over it, and I don't know if I can see Mrs. Ritchie spending her Saturdays cleaning out the coop when she has all those servants around. But if she does, more power to her. If nothing else, it sets a good example for her kids.

Eggs (week ending 7/9): 38
Eggs (closing month 7/16): 32
Eggs (year to date): 1311

Last weekend wasn't so hot farm-wise. It was marred by the disappearance of a chook I had nicknamed Caesar. It was the Buff Orpington rooster, and had yet to crow or show interest in the ladies, but he was already slightly bigger than Roger, the RIR roo. Of course his color and size made him regal looking, hence the name. And he vanished without a trace. Maybe a hawk got him, but that would have been a real load to carry.

It's probably time to declare another predator war. Of the 9 White Leghorns I had in the spring, I'm down to three, and of course two of those are roos. I can only account for one, which I put down because it was crippled. The others, with their easy-to-spot white color, have apparently all become predator fodder. The only sign thus far was a scattering of white feathers near the gate to the barnyard.

I did sort of accomplish one other thing. The two kid does kept slipping through a small hole in their stable and getting into the feed room where they would help themselves to hay and trample what was left into oblivion. I solved that problem with one piece of wood and three deck screws. The fun part was watching the bewildered look on their faces as feeding time came and they discovered that their access to the goodies was cut off.

That wasn't to last. They figured out that they could jump up onto their choice of two narrow ledges and still make their way into the feed room. TIme for come discouraging chicken wire. I think between that and the heat and the disappearing chickens and the plummeting egg count, there were a few mornings in the last week that this whole farming thing was starting to Not Be Fun Anymore. I'd been in that territory with tropical fish before, only it took about 15 years for it to happen. I haven't quite had the chickens for two years, a little over if you count my daughter's goats.

That would change, thanks in part to an incredibly busy weekend. First up was a visit from a semi-relative who has been one of our goat-mentors. He brought with him his tattooing kit so we could mark my daughter's four kids with their Ultra Secret Serial Numbers. This meant gobs of green ink flowing, my father-in-law and I holding the kids, and a little blood when the tattoo stamp came off. Lots of bleating from the kids, which was soon forgotten.

Not to be soon forgotten, however, was the additional procedure that the two little bucks went through, involving a tool that looks kind of like a pair of pliers that holds a very small, very thick rubber band. I'll spare you the details other than to say that in the next few weeks a very couple of very important pieces of their reproductive business will fall off and their careers as reproducing males will be over. They will henceforth be called "wethers." We also wanted to de-horn them, but will have to call the vet to do it. We suffered a couple of major delays and the little soon-to-be-ex-bucks horns are too big to simply iron off. They'll have to be cut off before the dehorning takes place.

After washing off blood and green ink, next up was a trip to Tractor Supply - where my daughter and I spent almost twice what I had budgeted because we had to buy some new collars for new and old goats. We borrowed a set of clippers to trim the goats down but didn't get to the act - I think that will be done without me by my daughter and other helpful relatives.

Returning home, my daughter gathered a crew of cousins to paint her newly-built milking stand for her goats. She had a hodgepodge of colors left over from a project she did in high school, and the end result, in her words, is a milking stand that looks like it came from the circus. Hey, at least the wood is protected. The builder (not me) used mostly scrap lumber from the farm to build it, and it is solid, solid, solid. In his words, "It's going to take an army and two small boys to move this thing."

That of course necessitated finding a place to put the stand, so I decided to declare the nursery pen the new milking room. This means I would have to muck it out again and throw down some Dry Stall - but first things first. After toting 340 pounds of assorted animal feeds and softener salt (a new record for the trunk of the Oldsmobile) into barn and house, I got the roll of chicken wire I'd bought and put some up along the ledges of the feed room that I suspected to be the main access point of the two kid does. During this process I found a cache of 6 eggs that were laid in such a secret spot that I suspect even the chickens forgot they were there, and another 3 in an easier-to-find place. It boosted the week's egg count and my morale.

The chores continued the next day. The kid does were still getting into the feed room, so it became a wood and wire and tile block fortress - and those last preparations did the trick in keeping them out. Then there was mucking out what will become the milking room - it didn't take as long as the last time I did it, thankfully. I spread out some dry stall and will put straw down after the army and two little boys move the milking stand in. I put up some nails for my daughter to hang tools and tack from, and made a special feed mixture in an old sealable 5 gallon bakery bucket that will keep the goats busy while they're being milked/having hooves trimmed/being sheared/whatever.

So by late in the day I finally got to the normal coop chores of refilling nest boxes with straw and hanging up new flypaper. I think the drop in production is a passing thing - my Red layers are in molt right now and it looks like the Wyandottes are starting to think about it, and the new layers haven't started laying yet. So aside from the observed disappearance now of both Beaker and Muhammad Ali - yes, it's time for another predator war - everything in the barnyard seems to be proceeding normally. And I passed my last morale check, so everything is good...

...except for this whole issue with the large blank spot in the blog entries. I'm pretty sure my code is okay because it looked fine until my previous post. My code hasn't changed since then, so this makes me think it might be a Blogger issue. I'll check when I get the opportunity.

Eggs (week ending 6/25): 41
Eggs (closing month 6/30): 34
Eggs (month of June): 187
Eggs (week ending 7/2): 15
Eggs (year to date): 1241

Here's a date for me to remember, for a while anyway: 6/27/05. That's the date on which I hit the mark of having had 100 dozen eggs laid this year. When you're collecting them 5, 6, 7 at a time, it doesn't seem like that many. But production should be way up by summer's end as the new hens start to lay, and the older Reds come back from their molt break.

Summer is in swing and the chooks are growing up. Members of the Class of 2005 have been spotted venturing outside of the barnyard, and have learned to come running to Brings Food Man, just a few weeks after the older Barred Rocks and Buff Orpingtons figured out the same thing.

It's been a busy couple of weeks inside and outside of the barnyard. The first thing to report is that I officially broke Lady Poofalot of her broodiness. Saturday (6/25) I took the one remaining egg out from under her (the others all disappeared without a trace) and took her off of the nest. Throughout the last couple of weeks, hens continued to lay eggs in the hatching nest while she was out, and she would sit whenever there were eggs there. In one amusing incident, I found Beaker, one of the more Silkie-looking Silkie/Cochin crosses, sitting on top of Lady Poofalot, having laid an egg that rolled down under the sitting hen.

In the meantime I did an autopsy of sorts on the unhatched egg. It broke open with a loud pop, which I took was not a good sign - I think it was an indication that there was bacteria inside generating a lot of bad gasses. There was a chick inside, but it looked to be about a week away from hatching. I figure it had been dead for a while - it didn't move or struggle when I broke the egg open. It was dead long before the 21 days plus an extra week just in case that I gave the eggs to hatch.

Meantime, Clark the goat may have slipped in the rankings and ceded his dominance to his brother Lewis. This was due to an accident he suffered while grazing in some unexplored territory - he stepped on a board that had a nail sticking out of it, and it impaled his foot. It was a good thing the nail was attached to the board - I might never have seen it otherwise. As it was, I saw what happened as Clark bleated and shook his foot, trying to get the board off of it. There was blood. My wife and I (daughter was off on a vacation with my in-laws) soaked the foot and got a goat-keeping acquaintance to give him a tetanus shot. Lewis didn't leave his side during the week or so he hobbled around, but he also took over the top goat position in the barnyard. Since Clark has pretty much recovered, I don't know if Lewis is still number one at this writing or not.

Finally, the crazy White Rock biddy is out of her misery now. She's been hiding in a back part of the barn as she completed her molting, and turned up in the barnyard on a couple of occasions when I was scattering food. She was out this morning, but unfortunately I think the roosters were too much for her in her weakened condition. I saw a rooster hop off of her and she was sprawled on the ground, not moving. One of the arrogant Easter Egger hens tried to mount her and I booted him off, then picked her up. She was still alive, but didn't want to move or walk or do much of anything else. I figured that was it, so I put her out of her misery. And while it seemed to be a waste, I opted not to prepare the body for the freezer. She was so beaten up and sick that I don't think she would have been desirable eating. Instead, I opted for the Mother Nature recycling plan.

No thought has been given to what shape this weekend project will take. Might be limited to scraping manure off of the concrete.