4/13 Spring in the rainlands. It doesn’t actually stop raining, ho ho ho that would be silly! Nobody would suggest such a silly thing! But sometimes there is a little sun in with the rain, and every drop burns.

We skipped milking the goats today; they’re not making a huge amount of milk, every other day should be enough.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend saw a mouse in the kitchen, so I put out the live trap and caught the fuzzy little guy and passive-aggressively dumped him in the weasel hunting grounds in the back pasture.

The plums are done blooming. The chokecherry is blooming now, and the regular cherries are about to start.

4/12 Flowering quince, which is not actually a quince tree that has flowers on it. This helpfully confusing name brought to you by the equally helpfully named Committee For Not Committeeing Things.

Ah, another glorious day at Lazy Evaluation Ranch! First we tried to plant Glorious Trees Of Mighty Wood in the swampyMost Lovely Water Enriched Wild Rose Pasture. Most Lovely Water Enriched Pasture promptly broke the Shovel of Victory and slurped the Rubber Choreboot of Diligence off the Foot of Myself.

Then it was time to do battle with the forces of Mighty Kingdoms of Goat and plunder their milk! Sadly, Most Noble Goat Warrior Soup-Nose fought honorably and the milk poured over the ground. No tears were shed.

Hot date night in the duck pond, if you are a salamander. It looks, um, crowded in there. And, er, cuddly. Yes. Very cuddly.

4/11  Here is Soup Nose, who is a very good goat who would never open the pasture gate with me standing right there, or anything.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend suggested that we try milking Soup-Nose as well as Tesseract today - Tess and Soup are sisters and “precocious udder” runs in families. There’s no way Soup-Nose could be pregnant either, except in the way that a goat-angel visits her and announces stuff. And then the Three Wise Chickens Bring her grain, grain, and more grain, and she has to stay in a hotel in town because there’s no room in the stable. 

So I held Soup Nose’s head and fed her raspberry alfalfa treats and lied to her that the Blue Haired Girlfriend had nice warm hands, and the Blue Haired Girlfriend milked.

Got about half a cup - actual milk, not the weird clear stuff normally inside udders - out of Soup Nose. Smells good.

Hm. So… two goats with a somewhat rare condition producing bonus milk. If the peacocks start making milk, I am going to have our water tested.

4/10 Today we tried to milk Tesseract, who looks exactly as innocent as she isn’t. 

Tess has never even met a buck, we don’t have one. She is miraculously in milk only as a small part of her fiendishly brilliant war on pants - if she leans against the barn just right, she can spray milk at pants and shoes.

So we weren’t expecting this and don’t have a milking stanchion or a strip cup or any other magical milking tools. The Blue Haired Girlfriend held Tess’s head and told her she was a good goat and fed her oatmeal treats, and I fumbled around at the kicking end and got about 2 tablespoons of milk into a canning jar.

Smelled fine, but you are supposed to wait a week before you start drinking milk from cases of “precocious udder” because who knows how long it was in there before you noticed?

I seriously wonder about the sanity of whoever was standing around having their clothing chewed on by goats and decided “I will take this troublesome thing home with me, squeeze it, and drink what comes out!”

crunchykatie:

fat-birds:

owlbehawkward: “Ginger” The fattest chicken I ever did see :)

Hi Ginger, let’s be friends.

FAT CHICKEN!

Oh dear, someone else has a Buff Orpington fluffmonster hen even bigger than ours. I feel so inadequate.

4/9 Vegetable sprout says: I will grow up to be food! Hooray!

Soooo, today we took our brand new shiny hand drill to the oak tree killed by the ice storm. The metal peg holding the handle on the drill broke. And then the chuck broke. Now, you might think that perhaps this hand drill had very shoddy construction, instead of the obvious truth that our fallen oak tree is clearly made out of diamonds.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the Blue Haired Girlfriend offered about a tablespoon of fancypants wine to an underaged goat. But if she had, the goat would not have liked it. Neither would some underaged chickens.

The chickens love horrible cheap beer. They jump in the foam. I hate to say it, but I think we might have hipster chickens. They’re into underground things. Like worms.

4/8 Moth and plum blossoms. This might, finally, be the last plum blossom photo! The Blue Haired Girlfriend took this one, but she took it with my camera, so I get to use it anyway according to a rule I just made up.

Because our friends are no longer terrified by our home-fermented apple cider, we are just going to have to start growing edible mushrooms. We now have a bag of 100 oyster-mushroom-mycelia-infected carpentry biscuits and a hand drill. Bwahaha! Fear me, dead trees and very slow-moving chickens!

Planted purple seed potatoes in one of the new beds. Last year all our potatoes rotted, but these are supposed to be a more mold-resistant breed. I’ll believe that when it happens.

4/7 Behold! Soup Nose’s Nose!

Me: AUGH, what happened?
Soup Nose: An evil wizard came by!
Soup Nose: And stole all the rhubarb leaves!
Soup Nose: … and some of the apple leaves.
Soup Nose: and all the quince leaves.
Soup Nose: But it’s okay, I escaped and chased him and got the leaves back. Right here in my mouth!
Me: But… the quince… my friend the tree….
Soup Nose: Are you gonna eat the rest of that tree? Can I have it?

At least an “evil wizard” did not eat the currant flowers. This time.

4/6 The beehive warped over the winter, and the bees, if they were completely crazy little bugs, could go in and out through a tiny gap between the hive boxes instead of their actual well-designed front door. Luckily, bees are sensible, responsible bugs, and not at all sugar-crazed hexagon fiends highly optimized for baffling bee keepers. So I am sure they will not line up hundreds at a time just so they can squeeze into the hive through a nonexistant door. That would be silly.

That is why this is a picture of some ferns or something, and not hundreds of deranged sugar-crazed hexagon fiends hanging out on the outside of the hive.

But at least it was finally warm enough for the Blue Haired Girlfriend and I to pry apart the entrance of the hive and set it much larger. So there should be less of this sort of thing.

Bees: they’re their own knees!

4/5 Here is the World’s Most Incompetent Ninja.

He is cleverly disguised as a plant, but has forgotten that plants are, you know, green. And have leaves and roots and stuff. They do not lurk underground as a big fleshy lump. They photosynthesize, not steal nutrients from trees with the aid of evil fungus henchmen.

Once every couple of years he suddenly remembers he is disguised as a plant and better grow something, so he makes this huge bright pink stem with no leaves and a bunch of creepy-looking flowers on top. The goats, who consider things like plastic grocery bags delicious, won’t touch it.

I don’t think the World’s Most Incompetent Ninja has even seen a plant before.