Prayers for Joplin, Mo.

Joplin, Missouri was hit with a devastating tornado yesterday which has resulted in terrible damage and many lives lost. The people of Joplin are certainly in my thoughts and prayers today and I hope they will be in yours as well. Joplin is only about an hour's drive from our farm and I have been there many times. I don't even recognize it now in the terrible pictures and videos of the town that have been posted since yesterday.

I don't believe the people of Joplin had much notice of this tornado at all. It is very scary and my heart goes out to every person that has been affected by this terrible disaster.

If you would like to help you can donate to the American Red Cross and The Salvation Army. There has also been a Facebook page set up at http://www.facebook.com/helpjoplin and a website at http://www.helpjoplin.com/. Blood donations, especially Negative O blood are also needed. The helpjoplin website says to go to the Springfield donor centers to donate blood.

And the Winner Is...

There was supposed to be a video of my husband picking the winner here but after he picked the winner's name out of a bowl and I tried to load the video on to my computer it would not play. I could not figure out what the problem was. So sorry about that but the name he drew out of the bowl was Lydia! So congratulations Lydia, you are the winner of the two bars of goat's milk soap!

I want to thank every person that took the time to suggest names for the baby goat! We went over the list of all the names suggested and it was hard to pick one out of so many great names. (many of which I am sure we will use for other goat's names in the future!) In the end I decided to use Flartus's suggestion of "Zoe" and add a Y. I have been calling her "baby" (what all unnamed baby goats get called here) and she comes running for her bottle now when she hears it so I thought "Zoey" sounds a lot like "baby" so she should still come running when she hears it. The name also seems to fit her very well.

I also want to apologize for being a couple days late announcing the winner! Things have been so hectic with new baby goats and trying to get the garden going with some pretty strange weather this year.

There had been lots going on here on the farm with new baby goats, the garden and getting ready for the farmer's market not to mention remodeling the kitchen and dining room. More on all of that later! Thank you all!

New Goat Baby and a Soap Giveaway!

This is a video I took last week of one of the newest goat babies born on the farm. She was the smallest of triplets and was only a tiny 4 lbs at birth. I just weighed her today and she is now up to 11.5 lbs and growing. These are her mom's first kids and even though "Red" is proving to be a good mother she only has two teats, (some Boer goats have more than two.) That doesn't always work out the best with three pushy kids, especially when two are much bigger than the third. This little girl's two big brothers tend to push her away from her share of mom's milk.

My original plan was to pull one of the bucklings as a bottle baby and leave this doeling and the other brother on their mom. Goats don't always like to cooperate with our plans. The little doeling took right to a bottle easy as pie, but her two brothers wanted NOTHING to do with that bottle. They are two of the most stubborn kids I have ever worked with and it didn't make a lot of sense to keep messing with them when the doeling was more than willing to take a bottle right off the bat, no fuss. So for now I have left all three kids with their mother and am supplementing the doeling with a bottle 4 times a day as well. This seems to be working out very well as all are growing and seem to be doing just fine.

She is a 50% Boer doeling with spots. She is not nearly as wildly dappled as her two brothers (you can see them in the background at the very beginning of the video) but she is very sweet. Maybe in a couple years we will be able to get some nice percentage Boer kids out of her and our spotted Boer buck Frost.

Now I just need to think of a name for her! That is much easier said than done considering I am pretty much terrible at thinking of good names for the animals. I would appreciate some help with this. In fact I would so much appreciate some help with naming this new baby goat that I am going to give two bars of goat milk soap to one lucky person that offers a name suggestion for this new little addition to Shiloh Prairie Farm! My non-biased husband will draw the winner's name randomly from the names of every person that offers any name suggestion in the comments below.

Important Info about the giveaway.

1. The giveaway will be open from the time this is posted to May 9, 2011 at midnight. So you have plenty of time to think of some great names! The winner's name will be posted on this blog after May 9th, 2011.

2. The winner will be drawn randomly from entries in the comments below. To be eligible you must leave a comment below and submit a possible name for the goat baby in the video above in your first comment. (Don't worry if you can't think of any great names, the drawing is random from all entries. So you could submit "Mud" as your name suggestion and still be entered in the giveaway but remember that my husband and his quirky sense of humor does have half the vote in the name we choose...do you really want this baby goat to go through the rest of her life with "Mud" as a name??)

3. Get an extra entry by writing about this giveaway on your blog, Facebook, or twitter with a link to the giveaway. (one entry for each). Just leave a separate comment below with the link to your post for each extra entry.

Prize will be two bars of homemade goat milk soap made by me and sent to the winner.

Thank you and good luck!

New Kids on the Farm

"Japan" (named Japan when she was born because the marking on her side sort of looks like Japan's flag. She was named before that country's recent tragic troubles) is a 75% Boer / 25% Nubian doe and she just had two new kids a little bit ago, both girls! One black and one light red one. These two new girls might be keepers, time will tell. These are Japan's first kids.