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

Filling the pregnant goat's belly

Grazing goat

Artemesia still has four weeks to go. But as you probably noticed in Mark's post yesterday, she looks very, very pregnant. I'm pretty sure she's got at least twins in there because I felt kicking at the same time this week in belly areas about eight inches apart. But I have a sinking suspicion she might be carrying triplets.

Goat eating honeysuckle

Between the worm scare and her growing kids, Artie needs a lot of high-quality nutrition. The trouble is, there literally isn't room in her belly any more for her to eat much at any one time. So I have her on a three times a day feeding schedule. Concentrates in the morning, as much fresh greenery as we can muster this early in the season at lunchtime, then concentrates in the evening. On hotter days, she doesn't really want to eat at noon, though, so I have to move everything a little later.

Out with the goats

(Yes, I do obsess over our dear little goat. How could you tell?)

Dog and goat

In other news, no one nibbled at my goat-sale post, so it looks like Abigail will be going to the butcher in about a month. From a purely financial perspective, I think that's actually the better choice since Abigail will provide quite a lot of high-quality pastured stew meat. Whether I cry when we drop her off remains to be seen.



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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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I should add that they both have access to free-choice hay all the time, of course. But nutrition per unit space is pretty low there, so Artemesia doesn't have room for much hay in her diet at the moment....
Comment by anna Sat Mar 26 07:59:24 2016
Watch the spring grass, it is so lush and high protein an animal can actually lose weight on it :(
Comment by Nita Sat Mar 26 21:10:02 2016
I eased them onto the new growth carefully to protect their gut microbes, but forgot about the lushness factor in terms of nutrition. Probably a good thing there's not enough of it to feed them all of their food right now after all....
Comment by anna Sun Mar 27 15:38:49 2016





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