All Is Well
Yesterday’s sunny warm weather made a world of difference for the young animals and for my mental state.
The indoor bottle-pig, Napster, has made a wonderful recovery from what looked like a descent into infection and is now snuffling around her hamper happily and starting to get smelly, which is good. That means she’s eating and absorbing and evacuating.
The baby pigs in the house with their big mama made it through a 30 degree night and a 40 degree night, and things are now looking up weather-wise. So they seem pretty stable out there. Yesterday morning I came out to check on them, so afraid the heat lamps might have fallen and they’d be either frozen or burned, and found all five lined up outside of the shelter, basking in the warm morning sun.
This is how the babies are staying warm at night – dual heat lamps, a tarp over the door of the shelter, and a gigantic hot mama to snuggle with!
Our 40 baby meat chickens, which lived in the living room for a few weeks under heat lamps, then graduated to the garage under lamps, have now moved outside! This is a great relief to us, as chickens just really do know how to smell up a place. They still require a heat lamp at night, but we’ve got them in a nice little house very near to our own, which makes taking care of them a snap. Their rate of growth has already shocked me, but I think they’ll do even better with fresh air, sunshine and bugs to eat.
Cream, one of my sweet dairy goats, had two strong bucklings last night, so that means we’ll be drinking goat’s milk again in a few days!
The upside of all this unseasonably cool spring weather is that we’ll have a fabulous pea crop this year. I knew there was an upside to the horrible cold nights and dreary rainy days, but I just couldn’t find it for a while…
Martha Loewenthal said,
May 5, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
Didn’t read the newsletter until I had already e-mailed you. Boy, lots of tough weathe to deal with. Let’s hope it improves from here on !
martha
Jodi said,
May 5, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
Funny, Kriss, I thought I was the only one who has kept an assortment of animals in her house! Ain’t life grand!!!
Onward and upward with spring!
Congrats on the babes. The pigs are so adorable (for now…).
Jodi
LaShawn said,
May 6, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
Yay! Napster’s feeling better! Glad to hear the little piggy pulled through!
kriss said,
May 7, 2008 @ 6:53 am
She is really doing great – adorable, vocal, now drinking water and eating feed. She’s even created her own little bathroom in the one side of the feed trough she lives in. I think that she will actually go to live with the baby goats instead of back in the pen with the scary big mom and tough little babies.