Timberwolf Legacies

Kinder/Nigerian Dwarf cross yearling doe available. Dam is a registered Kinder from excellent milking lines. Sire is a Nigerian Dwarf. She is super sweet and docile and causes the least trouble of all my goats. Sad to let her go, but have to reduce the herd. She'd make a great milker or pet.

A long time dream realized...I've wanted a trail in my own yard since I was a little girl.

Meet two of our farm hands: Aravis and Charlie. Aravis is the larger, tri-colored female. Her name comes from The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis. Charlie is the puppy, though you can see in the second picture that he is now as big as Aravis. They are both purebred Australian Shepherds. They have strong, though often misguided, herding instincts which can sometimes be helpful. They've done an excellent jobs protecting our chickens from predators and bringing us lots of joy.

The girls are finally letting me get a decent amount of milk from them. I had to keep reminding myself that if I just hung in there and kept making small adjustments, milking could become the peaceful experience it's been in the past. I've figured out a way to make the milking stand adjustable for different size goats, how to keep goats from flying over the wall and landing on my back while I'm milking, and how to keep the goats calm so that I could milk them out. Still room for lots of improvement...
Milking is my favorite part of keeping goats. As a mother, there is no greater feeling than providing healthy food for my family. I've also found that I feel far more attached, thus more tolerant of misbehavior, to the goats I've milked than I do with the goats I haven't milked. I guess it makes sense. You do need to get kind of intimate with a goat in order to milk her...

Anyone else take their goats and chickens with them on a weekend road trip? We are heading to my in-law's cabin in Indiana for the holiday and have the 8 goats loaded in the mini-van and the 11 chickens in a crate in the trailer. My husband will come later with the rest of the kids, the 2 dogs, and the cat. We lived on this property for 6 months during the summer of Covid while my husband and son built the cabin. We built a barn for the animals then. They've all grown up taking mini-van rides back and forth and are none the worse for the wear! I can't say the same for mini-van...

Goat Health Day. I always schedule it and then chicken out when the date comes around. I end up putting it off for a few days while I psych myself up to give a round of shots. Thankfully, my 11 year old actually enjoys this activity and makes sure I follow through. I have a little prayer I always say as I prepare to jab the goat: "Please guide this needle and let it do good and not harm". So far, it's worked.

This is Ivory. She is a mini-Alpine, meaning she's a cross between a registered Nigerian Dwarf and registered Alpine. She's gorgeous - exactly what I think a goat should look like. Her mother, Violet, was my very favorite goat. She was super sweet and gave us loads of milk. However, she was huge and her milk was kind of thin and didn't taste that great. I bred her to a Nigerian Dwarf hoping her offspring would get her sweet personality and the sweet, creamy milk and small size typical of Nigerian Dwarfs. Well, I don't know yet about the milk, but Ivory certainly doesn't have her mother's demeanor. She's friendly and will probably be a good milker, but is a bit of an outcast among the other goats. She can also jump over a 54" high fence from a standstill. I think she can fly...

What happens to cover crop when you never chop or drop...kind of pretty I think. Goats like it, too.

Meet our herd queens, Havah (black with wattles) and Silla (white). We've had these two since the summer of '20. I'd been wanting goats for a very long time and we were planning to spend the Summer of Covid on my in-laws acreage in Indiana while my husband and son built a cabin for them. Since we normally lived on 1/10th of an acre in the city, this seemed like the best time to experiment with goats.
I spent a long time researching breeds and chose Kinders to start with. Nigerian Dwarfs might have been a more logical choice given their size, but I'm not one to just do what everyone else is doing. Kinders are a dual purpose breed meaning they are good for meat and milk both. They have Nubian (big goats) and Pygmy (tiny goats) lineage making Kinders medium sized. We were also looking for a drinkable milk (I don't see myself making cheese any time soon). It turns out that milk taste has a great deal to do with breed. The larger producing goats tend to have less sweet, "goatier" milk. The smaller breeds produce sweeter milk with a higher butterfat content.
Regarding Kinder goat meat potential, well, I can't speak to that yet. I do hope to one day get into butchering our wethers (neutered males) for meat, but that's hard to imagine right now. While our animals are all have "jobs" on our little homestead, we kind of love them too.
Anyway, these girls are two now and we've really enjoyed them. Silla just kidded for her second time and Havah for her first. We are milking them each morning and are thoroughly enjoying the milk (we are having homemade goat milk ice cream tonight).

Available 5th gen buckling born March 31st. Dam (pictured) is Angiuli Girls Havah and sire is Black Mountain Lone Ranger. Mom has been a great milker for us. Ready to go June 23rd. Disbudded, CD&t, and CAE negative herd. Located in Cincinnati.