The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Feeding tree leaves to goats

Talking goat

"I don't want to go out," Abigail said on Wednesday morning when I went to tether our little herd in the woods.

I was gobsmacked. Abigail not only always wants to go out, she wants to get to her fresh forage now, ASAP, hurry up, do you get the message?!

But I think the deer flies the day before got to be too much for her. We had a light rain in the morning, so I put the herd out later than usual. And when I went to bring the goats home, the pesky deer flies were buzzing in their loops so annoyingly that I was barely able to gather three goats before rushing for cover myself. I should have worn a hat...and I'm sure that, as a tethered goat, the deer flies were twice as annoying. (They do bite, but it's really the buzzing that drives you mad.)

Feeding tree leaves to goats

Goat eating black locust leavesSo I met Abigail in the middle. I tethered her out early, took her in a bit after lunch, then cut some locust boughs in the evening to top off her belly. No, Mark, I don't know what you're talking about when you say I spoil our goats....

More seriously, I do dream of eventually having large enough pastures so our goats can get all of their nutrition on their own schedule, retreating to the barn when necessary to beat the flies. In the interim, tree boughs seem to be a quick-and-easy solution for supplemental feeding when it doesn't make sense to bring the goats out into the woods to eat. Like tree hay...but for summer nutrition rather than winter feed.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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