Six months in and just getting the hang of it!

We moved to a 5 acre lifestyle block on the Whangaehu river just outside Whanganui just before the floods! Luckily our property was ok but all our neighbours had terrible damage from slips and flooding, we were trapped for days with no power or phone - dramatic to say the least! We live on a dead end road in a valley and the community were fantastic in helping - everything we could have hoped for when we finally (after 45 years) got our own land! We then survived the wettest winter the area has known and the ponies ended up on the driveway as it was the only ground that they weren't sinking into!

Our two lovely dairy goats survived and our Toggenburg had a single male kid - we call him Shortstraw because twin girls would have been better! His poor mum then had a blocked teat - managed to clear it but by then she had got into the habit of kicking the kid away because it was so full and sore. She then got the early signs of Mastitis so I had to give her a massive shot of antibiotics in the neck for 3 days which was very traumatic for me as well as her! Then she managed to get a hole in it so we had milk leaking out continually - very worrying! Then I found out that because she has such a pendulous udder and such tiny teats (hadn't checked this before buying) she was impossible to hand milk! Meantime (this is 10 days after kidding) I found a battery operated suction pump for sale from Florida USA and it arrived just 4 days later! Then all the drama started to calm down with the kid having one teat and me the other. If I didn't milk her every day the hole started leaking from pressure - it took 10 weeks to heal!

My other doe who is an Alpine Nubian cross kidded a week ago and although she had a very very good diet before mating - which I heard had a big impact on whether they had singles or twins - we got another single kid - but at least she was a girl and so very very pretty! We are getting so much milk I am going to have to start making cheese! Would love a pig but can't afford the fencing as yet - maybe next year!

So the land has just about dried out and I might - just might - have time to get the garden sorted by Christmas but with work, animals and a teenage daughter there is never enough time!

I love this site it is really great and a real help to a Newbie like me!

Hi welcome, just up the road at Halcombe....yes very wet winter, one of the wettest for a few years, and a wet spring.

Ha! One of my does leaks milk every day, but that's from the proper place att he end of the teat. She's feeding a robust female kid and I have to milk her once a day. She's giving about 5 litres.