Goat Knoll Diary

Goat Knoll - Cashmere goats and cashmere fiber from an Oregon farm

What's Happening at Goat Knoll

A chatty little diary of more than you probably want to know...

August 6, 2011 Summer has been good. Here's an update: Kidding and lambing are long-past done. Kids (21 final count) have been weaned and we're weaning our lambs (4 ewes!) tomorrow. The garden has finally taken off and we're living on the veggies it produces. We've been trying to do more with mulching in the garden this year. The mulch - provided from the old bedding/goat poo in the barn - keeps the plants thriving and their weeder hanging out with the Maytag man (Don't tell Paul). Since we have to clean out the barn and put the stuff somewhere, this seems to work better than just spreading it on the garden plot when it's done in the fall. We bought a new breeding buck yesterday. We still have our wonderful SWC Mithril and use him when we can, but FXMF Cinnamon Bear has arrived for the does' viewing pleasure. We also built a new barn for our sheep. And last, and probably least, we acquired another barn cat.


2011 weaned kids.	2011 ewes and their new lambs. Lambs look black here, but they all developed into a beautiful chocolate-lab brown.

Ewe Drop Inn - in progress.	The ever-patient sheep, waiting for the finishing touches on their new building.

It's done! Sheep are happy! We're happy! Our friend Clint Boatright of Castlestone Home Builders & Design, Dallas, constructed the building. Most of the dimensional lumber came from wood milled from trees on our farm.	This is Ghost, the new barn cat. We acquired him from a niece. He had less-than-perfect house habits. Once adjusted, he does quite well in the barn. He has learned: you can choose your own bathroom spot and no one yells at you, stay away from Diedre (a cat) - she owns the barn, and those nice people who brought you here in a cage aren't so bad after all.

March 27, 2011 We've had a great spring! And it's just barely spring. We have 16 kids so far, with 5 does left to kids. Our cashmere is harvested and our sheep our sheared. Lambs are due after the last of the goats kid. Sounds like we even had a plan this year. We even managed to slip in a week to Kauai.


New beaded Shetland hat knitting kit. Pattern by Linda, knitting kit available in the Farm Store.	Kauai (sigh...)

Dewdrop (left) and two new (cute) doe kids born March 1st. Photo taken when they were 3 weeks old.	Nickles and her two new kids - one day old.

A young kid exploring on a straw bale.	We're training this kid to eat blackberries. (Ha-ha)

January 20, 2011 We are getting ready for the kids! and the lambs! Kids should start arriving late February. We're excited, but not quite ready. We've done the pre-kidding vaccinations on the does, but need to get the kidding stalls cleaned out. Maybe this weekend. We have 19 "does in waiting." It will be lively arounhd here soon!

October 10, 2010 (10-10-10!) We had an exhausting weekend at Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival, September 25th and 26th. We took 10 goats to the event for show and display and we entered the skein of cashmere yarn that didn't get finished in time for Black Sheep Gathering. Maybe I'll make something out of it to enter next year at Black Sheep. The goats did well--see below and the yarn won the skein competition--see below. Now that all that excitement is over, we can settle down to putting the girls (does and ewes) in their breeding groups and getting ready for our winter Holiday Fairs in November.


Paul with Grand Champion Doe GK Kaylar.	This is a 3-ply cashmere skein that took a few awards.

Our doe GK Feather. She won Champion Junior Doe and Reserve Grand Champion Doe. She's a sweetie.	This is part of the doe kid show at OFFF. I'm in front with GK Lukara. She didn't place, but she had a good time.

GK O'Brien. He won 2nd in the kid wether class.	GK Nora. She placed third in the Senior Doe Division.

June 21, 2010- We attended Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, Oregon. Had a great time! We took classes in cottom spinning and inkle weaving. I bought a Charkha - a beautiful 2001 Bosworth attache. It makes cotton spinning fast and very portable. We took it on our recent vacation to Lake Chelan. We also have hopes that it will enable faster spinning of cashmere. I was working on a 3-ply skein of cashmere yarn in May to enter at Black Sheep, but I couldn't finish it in time. Mickey likes to "help" spin cashmere. It puts his people at ground level where he can get an occasional pat.

Mickey and his new Bosworth Charkha.

May 22, 2010- It hasn't even been a month and we're listing news. See, we can improve. We weaned the kids today, so it is a little noisy outside right now. The mothers didn't seem to care; they headed down the field towards the pond. The babies seem to be enjoying their new pasture without "big goat" competition:


This is The Queen. She's getting her first hoof trim. The Queen now lives in Alaska with 3 other kids from this year.	The weaned kids out on their own. Look stressed to you?

April 30, 2010 - Now, if this was a real blog, we would have updated it daily and maybe "tweetered" you in between with the latest (boring) news, but it's not...so...

We've had a fun and busy spring: The farm has 22 new kids and 8 new lambs. We've harvested our cashmere and sheared our sheep. We put in a new fence line so our big boys have access to brushy areas further from the buck shed. Our greenhouse is full and we have a good start on the garden. Other than that we have't done much. Here are new photos (and we'll try to update this thing a little more often):


Jenny Galvin, sheared our 16 adult sheep. The sheep were grateful as they've had to endure our shearing in past years. We are much slower and not nearly as neat. This is our ram, Black Prince. He's not entirely happy here.	Sheared sheep, looking grateful--or maybe just hungry.

This is Rona, our last lamb born.	Eight new Shetland lambs

Stephanie and her new kids enjoying the sunshine.	Hana takes her youngsters out for a browse.

November 11, 2009 - A Labor Day surprise: We had just returned from a friend's house visiting their new cashmere goat kids. They had used one of our bucks to breed their does in July for early kids. We came home in a hailstorm to find a new little surprise of our own in the pasture. We had made a note that one of our doe kids had escaped briefly from her weaning group into the pasture next door with the buck and the "visiting ladies". We weren't worried as our doe kid was only 3-1/2 months old. Apparently, Penny had visited the next pasture for a reason. After a rough start, little Hailey and young mother Penny are doing well. Like my brother, Jerry, said, "If you don't talk to your kids about sex, who will?!"


Hailey	"Are you sure this is mine?!"

September 28, 2009 - We just got back from Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival in Canby, Oregon. We took goats for pen display and for the Cashmere Goat Show. Our promising young lad GK Raider was awarded Grand Champion Buck. See his (and Paul's) smiling face on our opening page. Raider is a young buck, born February 2009, son of SWC Mithril, one of main breeding bucks. Photos from the show:


Penmates at OFFF - Jaws and her daughters.	Two young Goat Knoll bucks - GK Raider GK Bond.	The Prisoner - GK12 "I am not a number!"

February 28, 2009 - The kids are here! Finally! Stop us if you've heard this before. Just goes to show you we don't tell you what's happening often enough. We have 11 kids so far (the last was born this afternoon). We have one doe (Mini-Me) left to kid. All the kids are silver so far just like last year. SWC Mithril has been an awesome herd sire for us and produced a nice crop of kids this year and last. Due to the timing of kidding this year, we are combing the pregnant does to harvest their cashmere, but we sheared the rest of the herd at the end of January. Blah...Blah...Blah...you don't want to hear all this, you just want to see photos of the kids. Right? Here they are:


Nora and new kids Feather and Freddie	Kern	Lersa and Grilka

April 15, 2008 - The kids are all here! Finally! The last kid and last lamb were born last Tuesday. Our final count for the year is 11 kids and 7 lambs. All are thriving and enjoying the sunshine outside (between the frequent rain showers). The book Shear Spirit was released today. We quickly read our advance copy last weekend. It is a wonderful book full of fascinating stories of fiber farms, beautiful photographs and intriguing knitting patterns - and we're not just saying this because we're in it. If you have an interest in such things, you will definitely want to check it out! Effective March 27, 2011, you can now buy this book (at a very good price) from our Farm Store.


The book is out!	New kids - 3 days old

March 26, 2008 - We've been lambing! There are six lambs so far with one ewe left to lamb at any moment. We are hoping the lambs will finish up before the goat kids start to arrive. The lambs are cute, healthy and bouncy. We have only 7 bred cashmere does this year, so the kid crop will be small. We expect that there will be 10 - 15 kids born during the first part of April.

June 2, 2007- You'd think as little as we update this that we don't do much. NOT! We had 27 cashmere kids this year with the first arriving on January 31st. All but two of the rest of them were born in the two weeks following. One straggler was born mid-March (Friday, a silver doe) and the last (Luna, a spunky light brown doe) was born mid-April. All kids except the last two have been weaned. We've received our 2006 cashmere harvest back from the processing mills and now have a full color line of cashmere rovings available for sale again. Our 2007 harvest has been sent to a new mill in Montana to be made into laceweight yarn. We had 5 new lambs (4 of them ewes!) to add to our Shetland lamb flock. Our newfound weaving "habit" consumes a lot of yarn, so an added supply of wool for yarn will be nice. Our biggest event of the spring was the completion of a new greenhouse. Just goes to prove, you don't need carpentry skills if you have good instructions (and lots of persistence!) We are getting ready to attend Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene where we will share a vendor booth with Foxmoor Farm.

April 2007 - The highlight of April (besides the birth of Luna) was the visit of photographer Gale Zucker and her son Leo. Gale is the photographer for a new book, Shear Spirit that will be coming out in April 2008. The author is Joan Tapper and the book will feature 10 fiber farms including Goat Knoll. The book is a collection of stories about fiber farms and knitting patterns created by the fiber producers using their fiber.

September 16, 2006 - It's been a busy summer, but we are finally starting to wind down for the winter. We had our first garden in years and spent time weeding, watering, harvesting and canning/freezing the bounty. You might wonder what a garden has to do with goats. Our soil is clay here and it is an effort to get any plant to survive, let alone thrive. When we cleaned our our barn last fall, we hauled it all to our designated garden spot. We dug the "barn produce" into our soil this spring and planted a garden. It thrived! We realize now that our goats were not just making a mess in the barn all winter, they were manufacturing garden soil. We put our breeding groups together September 2nd, a month earlier than usual. We decided to try kidding earlier in the year so our kids would be available for sale earlier in the spring. It eems that customers always want kids before they are available. Not wanting to make impatient customers wait any longer than necessary, we've decided to move things up a month. We've read articles on lambing that suggest an advantage of early lambing is to encourage ewes to lamb in the barn (to avoid the nasty weather) rather than in the far corner of the back 40. We are breeding a total of 22 does, using 3 different bucks, so we expect around 40 kids in February 2007. Two of the bucks used are silver and one is red. We are anxious to see the results of these matings We are still waiting for our 2006 harvest to be returned from two different processing mills. We are anxious to see the quality produced by these new mills.

Thunderbolt and Ronin - the two "main men" for 2006. Thunderbolt got 6 does and Ronin got 15 (but who's counting?). We used our older buck Quinn for one more breeding before he leaves for Tennessee. That dark shadow in the lower left is the professional photographer.

June 20, 2006 - We've been busy since the last entry. The kids are all here and due to be weaned this week and next. Our final count was 41 kids and 2 lambs. Of the 41 kids, only 13 were doe kids. We wethered all but two of the buck kids. Needless to say, we have lots of wethers for sale. :-) We've sent off this year's fiber harvest to two different processing mills to be made into rovings for spinning.

March 13, 2006 - The kids are here! The kids are here! Finally, our first kids have arrived. So far we have four. Spirit, a black doe, had two strapping boys early Monday morning. Mini Pearl also had twins late Monday evening. All kids are thriving under the care of good mothers. We eagerly await more...Most should be here by the end of March.

Cashmere doe cleaning new kid Cashmere doe with 2 new kids Mini Pearls' brand new twins.

January 15-16, 2006 - We sheared the goats! This was a couple of weeks earlier than normal, but they were shedding. Before we sheared, we took "before" photographs of the goats and graded their cashmere. They also got a hoof trim and a visual appraisal. This is a time we make notes of who we want to keep, who we want to sell, and who needs to be culled. We put down more straw in the barn for them to snuggle in to. They will be cold for a couple of weeks, but we will give them extra food and make sure they have plenty of barn space to hang out in. We have a nice stack of fleeces that will need to be sorted, the grading checked and shipped off for processing into rovings and yarn.


Toosh before shearing	Buffy gets a haircut	Wonnut looking bald and spiffy

November 20, 2005 - We disbanded our breeding groups and settled everyone in their designated spots for the winter. It's good to have the bucks back in their winter pasture - less pressure on our fences.

October 22-23, 2005 - We put together the last of our breeding groups this weekend. We have two breeding groups this year. 17 does are with Quinn, an awesome silver buck we have used in past years. The other group (8 does) have "dates" with Martok, a promising younger buck. We used him once last year with good results so we are anxious to see what the results will be with a larger group of does. Our kids in 2006 will arrive during the month of March, some possibly as early as the first of the month, with most near the end of March.