Notes from Goats: Spring Fever, Milk Races, and the Jerusalem Artichoke Thief

We have 25 kids. Baby carrot sprouts. Thriving onions. Sad spinach. Too many jerusalem artichokes. I have the Spring fever in full blast.

In goat news, the does are moving on the 27th to their new home. Yes, we will march them 2 by 2 a mile down Hancock roads, skirting gardens and delicious shrubs, to their new pasture and half-built hoop house. Ready or not, here we come.

In kid news, there has been a shift of late. The kids are voracious, which was cute when they were little and suckling your fingers, neck, and ears with baby gums, but now they have small fangs. And have doubled in weight. We feed them on buckets now, which means survival of the fittest. It is a crazy milk drinking contest among 5-6 goats at a time. Six nipples are attached to one bucket full of warm milk, so whoever can suck the fastest lucks out while weaker or sidetracked goats go hungry. Before it was sweet cuddling each kid in your arms as they slowly sipped on the nipple. Harsh transition. When I arrive with the buckets, there is incessant bleating, goats knocking each other down, leaping (literally) out of the 4-foot high pen to steal a suckle of milk. There are also favorite nipples. Some nipples are cut slightly larger than others and somehow the goats always know which are better. They will knock each other off of the best nipples or stay, one mouth attached to nipple, other mouth attached to mouth like a wrestling headlock. Four buckets with 21 goats are suckling at once while I run around guiding struggling mouths onto open nipples or plucking away an avid sucker early so that they don't bloat. When I reach into the goat pen, I try to keep my fingers tucked into a fist so as to avoid cuts.

At times other than feeding, though, the kids are still adorable and playful and it is fun to sit in the goat pen while goats climb onto you and jump off your lap and munch on your hair. I feel like a crazy bird woman who covers herself in bird feed, but I am totally okay with being a crazy goat lady.

Besides goats, I have been spending ample time in the garden. I discovered the baby carrots two days ago, which Kenzie and I planted a month ago that I thought had been killed off by the frost and snow, but no, amid the baby weed cover were perfectly spaced albeit patchy, hardy carrots. I remember Kenzie, hunched over, painstakingly spacing each carrot seed exactly 1-inch apart. Now I am painstakingly micro-weeding around the tiny carrot leaves, sometimes peeking underneath weed cover to find the swallowed rabbit ear leaves. I spend hours here, Chance sleeping in the sun, my position progressing from squatting to kneeling to lying belly down in my flowery summer dress, producing a perfect red swoop sunburn on my back. Weeding, for me, usually turns out like this. There is something meditative in small repetitive movements. I could use a tool to rip up the weeds and re-seed three rows of carrots, but I cannot bring myself to do this. I feel at peace with the process, but I also feel in some way like I am saving them, rescuing the little beings that I have planted, dedicated to raising them in a tough world.

The peas are always tough. They grow in anything and it makes me feel good like I have something that people can see--oh, clearly there is a garden here. "Your peas look great," makes everyone feel better, that they don't have to say "So, what are you growing?" or worse, walk over your fluffed garden bed because they didn't realize the weed forest was a garden.

I have high hopes for my new seeds--a mixed row of mustards and kale and other spicy salad greens. I kind of like the approach of throw everything together in the same bed and see how it turns out. I would never want to eat just one kind of lettuce in a salad anyway. I guess not everyone feels that way.

Chance also newly likes gardening. I could never figure out why when I would look over at his tether he would seem to be licking his lips and looking up at me sheepishly, sure Chance sign of "I have just eaten something I wasn't supposed to, am I in trouble? and I would do it again." He had also been throwing up weird whole, finger-shaped things in the past couple of days. Finally, I caught him in the act. He was surrounded by jerusalem artichoke weeds. When I wasn't looking, he would clamp onto the long green stem and pull up the tasty morsel, to gnaw and swallow. I was wondering why the jerusalem artichoke pile in the kitchen was also dwindling. Oh Chance.