Oh January in Minnesota - love it or not, we have to deal with it!
Warning here - there will be a photo towards the end of this post with some blood in it. No dead critters; just letting you know!
Since our last post we have had most every bit of variable weather that January up north can throw at us. Ice fog, snow, frost, melting and then into the deep freeze. Not much sun in there but as I prepare this post the sun is actually out - a small consolation for our high of 2 degrees today.
Ice fog from earlier in the month was pretty but can make for dangerous driving.
We had some temps close to 30 degrees mid month which sent some of the snow on our roofs sliding off - unfortunately the goat's porte-cochère could not handle the weight!
A walk with Hoover in the days following that brief warm up had me marveling at the beauty of the frosty trees.
Kevin's brother Kent was here from Wyoming to help with wood-cutting activities. The guys probably handled more trees that week than some counties of Wyoming have!
Most of you probably know that Ole Lake Farm is named after a pothole back in the tamarack bog called Ole Lake. We don't get back there very often but "back in the day" the youth from nearby Glory Baptist Church used to go back there to skate and play broomball in the winter. The current youngsters have revived the tradition. Hoover and I followed their nicely made trail through the bog one afternoon.
It was a rather grey day!
Kevin and I have been busy cleaning corn. The corn has dried nicely in a small corncrib in the shop and is then shelled one cob at a time in our hand-cranked corn sheller. Next it goes to the Winnow Wizard which blows away any chaff, loose bran and cob bits. The last process is to grind it to order for our customers to enjoy!
Just a couple of pictures from the goat area - Tamarack is still enjoying his time with the does. He and Daisy are buds.
They enjoyed a couple more Christmas trees that we dragged in for them - spoiled!!!
Ok, here comes the bloody picture ... ready?
You might think I would be alarmed to find one of my goats in this condition but I was not. We have had this happen before with our first buck Ranger. It is not uncommon for disbudded bucks to have softish hornlike growths called scurs on their heads. Birch has a couple of them along with an actual wayward horn. These scurs can easily get damaged or broken off while the the goats are carousing with each other. I had a look at Maggie's formidable horns and that gave me a pretty good idea of how this happened!
♫ She's got horns and she knows how to use them.... ♫
Personally, I prefer my own goats to be hornless!
Maggie is not exactly what you would call a sweet goat, but Elsie is. The two visitors will be with us for a couple more weeks.
We hope you enjoy reading our blog posts! Something new I am working on is a monthly newsletter. Mainly it will be to let people know if we have any new products, where we will be vending in person, if there have been any new blog posts since the last newsletter and if anything really interesting has been happening on the farm - like new goat kids being born. If I have your email address, you might be getting our first newsletter in a week or two.
Thank you for stopping by the blog. Until next post, be well friends!
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