Alphonse the Billy Goat and Winter Solstice

We have acquired our first billy goat! This is Alphonse, a good-natured, handsome alpine who was given to us by a friend with a large herd. She was getting tired of having him around, apparently mostly on account of his unpleasant odor-- she suggested we keep him for a while, then eat him, which is hard for me to conceptualize. He is a very young, somewhat timid little goat, with a pointy beard and a rangy look about him. I like him a lot.

Bruce and I were becoming concerned that our mama goats were going to go through their fall cycles without being bred, mostly because we have never gone through this process before and are so unsure of when they will be in heat and how to proceed. Having a billy goat around simplifies everything. He immediately adjusted to living with the other goats:



Hagar, with the buck teeth here, regards him with her usual mellow curiosity. Hannah, our pretty alpine mama, loves an opportunity to push somebody around-- she butts him relentlessly with her horns. Alphonse, however, seems to take being butted in stride. He spends most of his day eating hay and chewing the bark off of the pine trees in the goat yard. Everything smells pretty bad since we brought him home, but, whatever.

We are staying pretty hunkered down these days. Silvan and I have a lot of time to spend together, working on our various projects inside:



We are making a big deal about Solstice this year, for Silvan's sake and because this holiday stuff makes more sense with a little one around. Our magic Christmas tree:



I like the idea of bringing a live tree inside for the darkest days of the year, when I'm missing green things the most. And it's not hard to imagine early spiritual traditions, centered around the cycles of the natural world, would have started this practice.

Being pagan in the modern world involves a lot of creative re-interpretation of Christian holidays, re-imaginings of the little we know of older traditions, and a good bit of just making up a new tradition as we go along. As we work toward a coherent Solstice narrative that makes sense to us and to Silvan, we're forging a path for ourselves. It's a difficult process, but I think we'll emerge with a set of traditions that is perfect for us.

The Farm in December

The first really cold weather of the year hit this week here in southern Indiana. I've been spending a lot of time holed up by the wood stove, and the animals have been hunkering down too. Our five most well-behaved cats stay inside with us most of the time these days, but everyone else has a den of some sort. Bruce and I have been fussing over animal shelters all month, and this week was our opportunity to test and fine-tune the efficacy of our winter shelters.



Goats, chickens, peacocks, and our lone guinea all live together in the goat shed with a heat lamp in very cold weather. I was concerned about how these very different creatures would co-exist-- the peacocks are belligerent, the chickens are totally out of it, the guinea is relentlessly aggressive, and the goats love to butt things with their heads. But they're all doing amazingly well together, and it's one of my favorite things to stand in the goat shed, drink a beer, and visit with everyone while they're roosting and curling up in the straw for the night.

As we work toward getting the animals used to bedding down for the night in the shelters we've made for them, our mother hen, Puff, has posed the biggest problem:



In addition to the chicks Puff hatched this fall, we have 13 chicks we incubated in early November:



The chicks all need a low heat lamp, so I was hoping to bed them down together in our little playhouse brooder at night. But Puff is a good mama, and is going to make sure her chicks are warm no matter what. She sometimes flies at the older chicks, clucking angrily, and chases them out of the brooder. I will find her sitting happily on the roost, her chicks peeking out from under her wings, while the 13 older chicks peep woefully in a cluster outside the door. Just when I started getting really sick of chasing them all back into the brooder and shutting them in with Puff and her wrath, they all seemed to reach some kind of agreement.

Cloud Dragon watches them hungrily during the day.



The new baby lionhead bunnies are just beginning to emerge from their fur-lined nest and hop around the rabbit hutch. This is Silkie, the loveliest and softest of them:



Their hutch is in the greenhouse for the winter, and they seem happy and warm. Pennyroyal is growing thick on the ground in there, so it smells nice and sweet and green.



I worry more about our boy rabbit, Mopsy, who is spending the winter in the enclosed hutch by the toolshed:



We keep lots of straw in the hutch with Mopsy so he can make a warm burrow.

I am getting really excited about the possibility of breeding lionhead rabbits. We have lucked into a beautiful, healthy breeding pair, and the three babies are gorgeous. I think these rabbits will make great pets.

The ducks are out and about all day, splashing in the creek and sometimes dripping icicles from their wings. They are ecstatically happy every day, same as usual:



At night they know to bed down in the duck house we made for them, and they are still laying their pretty blue eggs there. I have noticed an increase in chicken eggs, as well, since we began using the heat lamp at night.



I am finding it hard to keep up with the farm work as it get colder. Getting fresh water to all the animals in freezing weather is a lot of work, and the daylight is already gone by the time Bruce returns from work. But it is worth it to have so much life around me at a time of year when everything seems dead or dormant. And solstice is right around the corner!