Busy Crazy Days

Once again I find myself starting a post with the line "it has been a while since I last posted..." although this time for mostly good reasons!

We are a few weeks past Rodeo time. This time of year has always been busy and hectic but in the past it was either because we were showing goats or just because we flat-out love the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and spent as much time there as we could. This year we bumped it up a notch because both Tim and our oldest, Katarina are on the Sheep and Goat Committee and this requires many hours of volunteering at the show and comes with free entry so as you can imagine, we were there more than ever. Toss in the fact that two of the girls helped out part-time at a friend's concession stand and it seemed as if the entire family was never together around the table for almost an entire month. I have a post that I want to write specifically about the livestock show and rodeo but I am still trying to wrangle the pictures out of my phone...photographs are both a huge blessing and I swear, the bane of my existence, somedays!

Things are moving fast and furious here on the farm. Milk production is climbing rapidly, thanks to the kiddings in February and early March. We have added several seasonal markets to ride the wave and are excited about climbing out of the debt accrued over the past six months! We have some new products that we are working on, but I keep running into more ideas than time, especially since two of the seasonal markets are in Austin during the week.

Farm day is coming up later this month. It seems impossible that the last farm day was almost six months ago, it literally seems like it was just a few weeks ago. I am looking forward to it, especially as we have one under our belts and have some adjustments that we want to make to help things move more smoothly while still allowing people to try their hand at milking and cheese curd scooping.

We are finally out of a drought! We are now considered simply "exceptionally dry". I'll take it. Our pond is higher than I have ever seen it and we have lost some of the trees not killed by drought due to them simply falling over with the ground being so wet. Unfortunately this has also brought about increased numbers of flies although they still seem to be largely held at bay by the fly predators.

The farm is so GREEN! Between the drought last year followed hard on by Winter I had forgotten how verdant this place becomes. The browse is abundant and we are soon at the point of being ready to let the goats back out to have at it. The only issue is fencing...we learned last year that although yes, the goats had their free reign of more green stuff to eat than they could ever consume (at the current number of goats), the curiosity and proverbial greener grass across the fence made for some exciting adventures. While it was great to meet our neighbors tucked at the back of the 22plus acres adjoining us, it would have been better to have not had to do it because our goats were on their porch. So...for the time being the goats are having to content themselves with more hay and less freedom while we shore up the fencelines. Maybe we can make farm day a working farm day...