Wednesday, April 22, 2015

2015 Kidding Season Totals

Yes, I said "Totals".  Which means that kidding season at Krazo Acres is FINALLY over!

Lily, our final hold-out, decided to go into labor this morning around 10:20 am.  Which would normally be hunky dory with me because she didn't do it in the middle of the night, nor during last night's rain storm.  But I DID have an appointment in town that morning.  At 11:15.

So, yeah.  I went to my appointment with dried afterbirth on my sleeves and smelling of barn'ish stuff.  Which in any other normal universe would probably be frowned upon, but the meeting was only with my tax lady and she's quite the outdoors woman / hillbilly herself.  So yeah, she understood.  And I even walked in two minutes before my scheduled appointment.

Anyways.  Lily picked the new go-to spot for laboring; underneath the new lean-to.  When I got there she had already had one kid on the ground and the second was coming.  Not sure about the first, but the second kids was presented correctly and I didn't help at all.  Once she got back up, I did assist in cleaning them up (mainly because it grosses me out when the mothers eat all that birthing goo) and put them both GIRLS into the kidding pen.  Whoo hoo!  And they were both very stout.  Lily followed right behind me and I filled up a water and grain bucket, made sure both kids were up and headed to town.
Lily's doeling, Maypop.
Lily's second doeling, Dandelion.
So here's the 2015 Kidding Totals

Dilly: 2 bucklings (both died from apparent WMD)
Clover: 1 doeling
Pyewacket: 1 doeling, 1 buckling
MamaGoat: 1 buckling
Annette: 1 doeling, 1 buckling
Lira: 1 doeling, 1 buckling
Lilly: 2 doelings

So all in all we had twelve kids with a 50/50 female/male split.  Even though we lost two of the bucklings, it was a very easy birthing season.  I didn't have to "go in" to rearrange, flip over or otherwise do anything out of the ordinary for a single doe, and three of them were basically unattended and unassisted.  Sure beats the snot of of last year's horrendous kiddings.

The dairy kids are already up on the local FB sale block and I have two people interested in three of the bucks (well, we'll see when I get some greenbacks in my paw) already.  I'll just have to find someone to buy the two remaining dariy doelings and we'll be set.  The others are Boers and we'll be keeping them for breeding stock.

Since we lost both of Dilly's bucklings, we won't be butchering any of "our" Boers, so I guess I'm lucky that I went and picked up those two buckling bottle babies otherwise we wouldn't have any goat in the freezer this fall.

6 comments:

  1. Nice turn out and already having a possible buyer is great. We have a few people ask, but so far we have not sold our measly three here. Speaking of stocking the freezer, I need to get my fishing license so we can restock the fish in ours.

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  2. Great end to your kidding season! You deserved an "easy" goat birthing year after the last one. Good that you've got the kids all (mostly) accounted for (sold, kept, sending to freezer camp) but I know you've worked at that. Now you can wash your birthing clothes and on to other homestead-y matters!

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  3. Cute kids! Congrats on a stress-free kidding season. I like it when the mama goats take care of everything themselves. :)

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  4. Congratulations to all involved! Nice to hear that kidding season went (relatively) smoothly this year. Love those Boer babies!

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  5. Carolyn,

    Lilly's little ones are just so adorable, I could snatch them up ;-)
    Now it's time to relax a bit.....

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  6. So glad that this year was so much easier! Maypop might be the cutest kid I've seen!!! What a cute little face!

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