October races by

October has almost rushed by and we haven’t done a single blog post! My only excuse is that it has been such an incredibly busy month that I haven’t had the time or energy to post. Here are some of the things that have taken our time:

  • Visitors from BC & Alberta. We were happy to welcome this month my Mom and sister, Ruth, from Alberta and sister, Joy, from BC along with friends from BC. The sun shone on a number of the days they were with us and the County put on some great fall colours for the western visitors (technical difficulties are delaying posting those photos).
  • A visiting buck. If we want little goat kids next year, there needs to be a buck in the picture so we borrowed one for a month. He was a handsome young fellow with a very sweet temperament. We had worried about having an ill-tempered buck around but this one was friendly and, in fact, was so people-oriented that he wanted to follow us and quietly whimpered when we didn’t want to pet him because of his overpowering “buck” smell. However, the nannies thought that he and his buck “cologne” were wonderful and flirted shamelessly with him. The little doelings, who we had thought might be a little bit on the young side this year and thus kept in a separate paddock, expressed their keen interest by jumping their fence in order to be with him. We’ll see in late February/early March the results of all this interest.
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The handsome buck that we borrowed for a month. He is a Kiko, a hardy breed developed in New Zealand.
  • Pigs to the butcher. Five of our eight pigs have now gone to the butcher. The first two went in September and three more this week. We have really enjoyed the pasture raised pork ourselves and sales of the meat have been encouraging (see Pastured Pork).
  • Building a hoop house. We need an outbuilding for housing the goats and chickens in winter and for farm storage year round so bought a large hoop house (24 feet by 72 feet) in the early summer. We had hoped to have it erected this summer but, instead, spent three months contacting various contractors trying to get someone with the equipment to move the one ton cement blocks of the foundation into place. People with heavy equipment were so busy this summer that we only had the foundation done early this month. Since then, with the help of family members, have been busy trying to to get it finished before winter hits. (more on this in another post).
  • Dealing with Lyme disease. Yes, symptoms of Lyme disease have reappeared this month and the Lyme test came back positive. The symptoms (headache and blurry/double vision) have not been quite as acute as the symptoms I experienced in July (see Lyme disease strikes) but have slowed me down quite a bit and are concerning because they mean that the Lyme disease is now disseminated in my body. The medical people are taking this very seriously and I have visited more specialists and had more tests done in four weeks than seemed possible in a relatively short time. I have been on antibiotics all month (mostly doxy) and the infectious disease specialist should let me know in a day or two whether he thinks I should switch to another antibiotic (ceftriaxone) delivered through IV. It’s been a journey and one that certainly involves a great deal of trust and faith.
  • Fall harvest. We weren’t able to plant much of a garden this spring so don’t have too much of a harvest this fall, but we did enjoy seeing the results of some peoples’ harvest at the Wellington Pumpkin festival.
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Grand children Isaac and Elise admiring one of the giant pumpkins. The largest weighed in at just over 1,800 pounds!

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