Thursday, May 28, 2009

Guineas!






A couple of weeks ago, Aaron drove down to Rockdale, in central Texas, to give a presentation to some nurses at a rural hospital. While he was there, he stayed overnight in Giddings to visit his mom and she took him to a farm where they had guineas. He brought home 2 dozen guinea eggs and we put them in the incubator, doubtful that they would hatch after the 4 hour car ride back home. But, miraculously, we've had 5 little guinea chicks hatch so far. Guineas are pretty wild, and my understanding is that when they get bigger they will just roam around the farm, eating grasshoppers and other insects. They are also very noisy, which apparently makes them good watch "dogs." We'll see how it goes, but in the meantime they are super cute.



Goat Milk Soap Making Tutorial

For those of you who may be interested, I just posted a tutorial with photos I made about how to make goat's milk soap on the website: http://www.oneworldfarm.com/soapmakingtutorial
Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The llama fiasco

A couple of weeks ago we finally decided we had had enough of our "beloved" llamas. Roscoe wasn't so bad, but Otis, his younger brother, recently discovered that he could leap over our 6 feet tall electric fences and browse the neighbors' fields whenever he felt like it. We determined it was time that they needed to find a better home, so I placed an ad on Craigslist, offering them for free. The response I got was amazing! Within 20 minutes, I had over 15 people begging for the llamas. I have found that when you list something for free on Craigslist, no matter what it is, people want it. We had a similar experience with our old carpet--within minutes of listing it, my email was crashing from the number of responses.
Anyway, back to the llamas. The next step was to pen them up so that we could actually load them when some poor unwitting soul came to pick them up. Having some idea that this would be a difficult task, we started the process about 2 hours before the people were supposed to arrive with their trailer. The llamas would not be fooled by our enticements of feed. Once they caught a glimpse of the rope, they high tailed it out of the barn as quickly as they could. I will not belabor the details of the 2.5 hour chase around our 10 acre farm (yes, I did say 2.5 hours). Suffice it to say that we ended up catching Roscoe after about 45 minutes and spent the rest of the time trying to capture Otis as he literally ran circles around the property, leaping over every fence we have. Finally, when it seemed that he would soon die of a heatstroke, and we were sure we would follow shortly behind him, Aaron got the rope around his neck. At this point he was drooling nasty green stuff, screeching like a velociraptor out of Jurassic Park, and kicking as if he was having a seizure. It was ugly. I strapped the halter on his head and Aaron began dragging him to the pen. Just as he was about to reunite with Roscoe in the pen, he had a huge flipout and ended up knocking Aaron to the ground and slipping out of his halter.

I looked up to see Aaron struggling to his feet, raise his fists above his head in defiance, and scream, "I will chase you until you die"!! (Did I mention that this was not the happiest of days on One World Farm?) Then I noticed that Aaron had blood pouring down his face. Apparently the llama had knocked him into the tin on the side of the barn and he ended up slicing his head open in the process. It was very dramatic. I convinced Aaron that we all needed a cooling off period, and we headed to the E.R. to get 14 stitches for his head. We hooked up with some friends at Fuzzy's Tacos afterwards and drowned our llama troubles with a few margaritas.

Postlude: The next morning we called in reinforcements and ended lasso-ing the llama and tackling him so that there was no hope of escape. We loaded them up and sent them on their way and wished them the best. Good riddance!

Monday, May 4, 2009

More pics of Maddie on the farm

We had so much fun with our niece Madison this weekend. She came to stay with us Saturday and we were tasked with helping to create a scrapbook documenting all of the things that she can do to help protect the environment (recycling, growing a garden, composting, etc.). These are some of the cute photos we used for the scrapbook:


Carrot

Collard Greens


With a month old hen:

In Aaron's bee keeping outfit:
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Maddie milks a goat

This is a video of our 8 year old niece Madison milking Louise ("Weezie") this past weekend.