Thursday, March 1, 2012

Broken Magnolia Farm


Our accomodations

     The past three weeks have been an exciting whirlwind of caprine care and farm renovations. Broken Magnolia Farm is a 35 acre meat goat farm run by the Daigle family. Katherine and her husband John live "down the hill" in a house they gutted and rebuilt, and their son James lives with his daughter who’s seven and his son who is three "up the hill" in a house they built themselves.  We stayed in a recently remodeled  room built by previous WWOOFers in the basement-garage area of James' house. The room was quite comfortable, and had more space than we are used to. 
Just kidding! Holly sings the praises of our new room


The kitchenette in the room consisted of a microwave, minifridge, and an electric kettle, so we got creative in preparing our breakfast and lunch. We discovered you can boil eggs in an electric kettle, "scramble" them in the microwave, and even make a microwaved quasi French toast.  
 
Randy, Katherine, and John


Katherine used to be a math professor, and now focuses on the goats and her grandkids, while John still teaches at Ole Miss, and restores old cars and motorcycles in his spare time. James has a karate dojo and is a painter, and has a show up in Oxford which also features his daughter’s artwork as well as his grandmother’s.

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Quaid, start the reactor

     We were lucky enough to be here for the kidding season, and with a herd of 25 goats there was plenty to  do. Now we have (limited) mad goat skills, and feel comfortable drenching sick goats, identifying scouring goats, catching ornery goats, inter-muscularly injecting goats, and ear tagging newborn goats. The goats have two guardian dogs, Flo and Freya. Flo is in charge of the does, and is an excellent canine midwife. When the does kid, Flo is right there to help with the clean up. She nips the umbilical cord off and helps the mamas lick the babies clean.  

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Flo breaking the amniotic sac of the second kid
She even eats the afterbirth if the mama lets her. She greeted us every morning and loves to be scratched behind the ears. Unfortunately she got into a scuffle with a skunk recently and we've been giving her a wide berth.
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Trying to keep the kid warm
     The first doe that gave birth had twins, and when Katherine found them in the morning, one was inside with the mama and the other was shivering outside the barn by herself. Katherine put the cold one in her coat, and then I had it in my coat for a while, but even with the aid of a hot water bottle it wasn't warming up enough. We decided to bring it inside, and even after all the coat time, its temperature was still 10 degrees colder than a goat's should be. But, after a few hours it was warm enough to go back to its mama. Unfortunately, its mama did not accept it back, probably partially because of the time lapse and the fact that it smelled like humans. Without its mama, the kid went downhill even though we tried to bottle feed it, and got listless and lethargic, and did not want to eat. So, Katherine decided to try to convince one of the other goats to adopt it. When another doe gave birth the next day, she smeared some of the placenta on the orphan, but the doe didn't buy it. But, another doe nearby saw the baby and started cleaning it right up and letting it nurse! 
 The orphan doeling lived happily with its two siblings and mama for several days. But then, it was found dead in the middle of the night. This was after another kid had died unexpectedly despite all of our attempts to save it. These two, along with two who were accidentally ran over, meant that four kids died in the first week or so after kidding. This is apparently about average, there's always accidents and illness.Although many of the goats gave birth without any humans around, we got to help out a few.  
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Kid cuddle puddle

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Black Headed Nanny, who looked this way for a
good week or two before finally giving birth to triplets

                The charming hamlet of Taylor, MS is the oldest municipality in Mississippi and was once a booming railroad town. Whenever the population dips and the town is in danger of being absorbed by another township, the population requirement is lowered so it can remain the oldest in Mississippi. Taylor has a restaurant called Taylor Grocery (which hasn’t sold groceries in years), four or five art galleries, a few churches, a post office, and apparently a fire department though we never saw it. There are also pecan trees all around, and whenever we were in town and came across pecans on the ground we stuffed our pockets. Pecans are typically harvested in late fall, so some of them were rotten or shriveled, but we enjoyed our fill of them. Towards the end of our stay we decide d we didn’t want to miss the world famous catfish that Taylor Grocery is known for. Besides which, neither of us had ever had catfish before. Taylor Grocery gets surprisingly busy on the weekends, so while we were waiting for a table we wandered around the art galleries. The restaurant has a sign out front that says “EAT or we both starve,” is also known for letting its customers write all over the walls. There are decades of layers of writing all over every available surface, including the plastic-coated table cloth which we added “H.E.R.B. WWOOFing through 2/12.” We went all out Southern style and ordered fries, Deb’s famous brown rice, fried okra, and hushpuppies to accompany our two whole fried catfishes. It was delicious. To finish it off, we had chocolate cobbler for dessert, which neither of us had ever heard of, and was incredibly rich, but also quite scrumptious.
               Oxford, about ten miles away, is a college town, home of “Ole Miss,” which we now know more
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Randy and James inspecting the windmill
about than we ever cared to know. We went into Oxford every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings for Karate lessons from James. Katherine and John also took classes, and the kids played on the side, so it was quite the family event. After three weeks, we both know half a kata, and a variety of self defense maneuvers. We were amazed at how much repetition was necessary to really get the moves down.  
Holly with James and his kids
Karate was a great change of pace, and we are so thankful that we got the opportunity to dabble in it.

     We also went into Oxford on one of our days off for the 9th annual Oxford Film Festival. The film festival was exactly how we both expected it to be.  I thought many of the films were trying too hard to be edgy and experimental and were just violent, weird and inconclusive. Randy enjoyed every film from the well done to the bizarre stilted attempts at cinematography. Due to time and the crowdedness of the venue we did not see as many films as we wanted to, but we sure have been to a film festival.
     Our last jaunt into Oxford was to see the live broadcast of Thacker Mountain Radio, a long running public radio show featuring music and readings by authors. Once a week the Off-Square book store pushes the shelves out of the way, a couple hundred people cram in, and the largely unrehearsed broadcast commences. We were not able to stay for the whole thing, but we got a feel for it, and it was a good time.
    We returned home to an amazing send-off dinner Katherine had cooked. She really outdid herself and
Thicket; Randy's favorite goat
made a traditional Louisiana Friday night dinner with white beans and rice, fried catfish, homemade coleslaw, cornbread, and fried squash. We had no idea when we would come across food that good, so really packed it in. 
Three new WWOOFers had come a few days before, so we left knowing the farm was in the capable hands of Maria, Kevin and Kelly.

Here are a couple of our more edible microwave experiments.

Microwaved "French toast"
1. Cube the bread,
2. Mix up an egg and milk with either cheese and spices or cinnamon and sweetener. 
3. Coat bread in milk mixture
4. Zap!

"Hot cereal"
1. Fill a cup with date mush, assorted dried fruits and nuts, fresh banana, and spices.
2. Pour milk over the mixture.
3. Microwave mixture.
4. Pour over your choice of cereal and enjoy!

By the Numbers:
Barns/sheds/outbuildings cleaned/repaired in preparation for kidding: 6
Pregnant does: 15
Kids born while we were here: 25
Kids born while we were looking: 6



Holly vs. Kudzu

3 comments:

  1. These are wonderful photos and I like being able to both read and see what you're up to. Every picture tells a thousand words. I'm glad Broken Magnolia went well and I'm looking forward to hearing about the next installment. Love to you both, Mom

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  2. I second your mom's comments. The pictures are so cool, although some of them I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. I think it's so amazing what you're doing. You're seeing a completely different side of America. Keep on writing!

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  3. I'm grateful we were able to talk recently.
    I'm also thankful you are keeping this blog! This is a beautiful account. I love the photo of you keeping the kid warm.
    Be well, you two.
    With love, Julia

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