Posted by Suzanne McMinn @ 5:05 am | Permalink
Daily Farmhouse Journal
We’re making goat plans. I want them near the house, where I can enjoy them. Watch them. After all, my future goatie girls are not only useful for goat’s milk soap and goat cheese, they are ornamental goats. I don’t want to have to take off across the farm to see them. I want them right here, nearby. Where I can see them from the porch. Like the chickens. We built the chicken house on the far side of the house (away from the driveway). I can see it from the front and back porches, and from my bedroom window.
The front yard is a mess. To turn it into a “real” front yard, it needs further grading, topsoil replacement, seeding. Then somebody’s gonna have to mow it……. Or! It could be fenced in and turned into a self-mowing goat enclosure. As someone who has not touched a lawnmower since I was 12, this sounds good to me. And in a rural setting, we have no need to have a “front lawn” to appease the neighbors. We can do whatever we want. I love the country!
Sharing their proximity to the house with goats came as news in the chicken house. Some took it worse than others.
Darth Chicken: “Did I give permission for goats? I think not.”
And yet, halfway up our hill as we are, we have limited cleared and reasonably level land to work with. And look how adorable this would be. We could put the fencing down the hill along the driveway so the goats would have the wooded hillside to clamber and cavort about as well as the yard.
Don’t you love the word cavort? It’s my new favorite word.
Coming over to the “near” side of the house, we have our garden, which we would need to keep safely fenced from the goats.
Georgia was over and I asked her what she thought about our obstacle garden. And waited for her to drop her pearls of gardening wisdom upon me. “Think we’ll get anything out of this garden?” I asked.
She threw up her hands and said, “Can’t ever tell.”
And that, my friends, is your gardening wisdom for the day. You can’t ever tell.
Beyond the driveway, there are a couple of extra cars parked in the old timbering track that goes up the hill. We have extra cars because we live in West Virginia and everyone has extra cars parked in their yard and we want to fit in. We’re not doing real good cuz our extra cars actually run. But they look like they might not run, so we’re close.
Out there is where we are planning to put the duck pond.
The back yard is totally unusable. The hillside goes up steeply right beyond the back porch. We keep a ladder there for easy kitty access to their hillside playland and that’s about all it’s good for.
And so, if we want to have the goats anywhere other than down the hill in the meadow, far far away, it looks like the goat enclosure and goat house is going right down there.
I’ll just settle in here with a piece of pie and watch them cavort.
