I am still here.

I've been away from the computer world for a long time and work just keeps piling up and leaving me with no time for blogging. Tonight I am going to take a few minutes off and instead of weeding strawberries I'll blog.
Today I drove tractor all day and was bored almost all day doing it, there's just nothing to do while driving the thing other than turn around at the end of the field, the tractor has auto steer so tomorrow I have decided to bring a book to keep my mind busy at least. The computer beeps when I get to the end of the field so I would know when to look up and turn around, otherwise it does all of the work.
I've been doing hay, more hay and even more hay now that we have decent haying weather, the gardens are doing great and I'll have several pickup loads of corn to do something with, I'll be caretaking the neighbors house (living there) soon so I have stopped all work on my house until next spring so I can concentrate recources and time to other things that I really need or want to do. I have been spending a large portion of my time helping my new neighbors get their house liveable and things are going well, at the moment we are putting a new roof on the house, at least when Aaron is home from work in the evenings, you will usually find both of us on the roof until a while past dark, sliding from one end to the other and I really do mean sliding, it's a 11-12 pitch which is similar to climbing a wall rather than a roof in my opinion, hanging on is interesting.
I was asked to post about how we raised our sheep and goats naturally so I will, in a nutshell, we tried to give them as close of a natural life as we could, which is a lousy explanation so I'll go into more detail. Sheep and goats need about the same treatment other than sheep are suited to grass pasture and goats are suited to rocks and trees and brush. The biggest problem I have seen with raising both is parasites which is really a result of locking them up on small pastures or in barns all the time, the solution is to give them a huge area or rotate pastures faithfully, one thing I liked to do was (I'll still do it) to plow up worn down pastures (they shouldn't be allowed to wear down but sometimes we mismanage things or inherit other's mismanagement) and plant them to something like mustard which is then worked in and reseeded to pasture, that will clear up diseases, parasites and give the grass a boost. For goats we always made sure they had brush and branches to eat even if we had to go to the woods and cut it for them, they need that stuff, grass pasture is not enough for goats though sheep do fine on it. Salt with no copper for sheep, a little copper for goats, selenium if that is deficient in your area and my absolute two favorite supplements for all animals, kelp free choice and flax seeds, that was kind of our secret formula for healthy and beautiful looking animals, along with garlic, often and lots of it. Our sheep won every show they were entered into and it was partially because they looked so alive I think, not drugged. Everybody wants to know how much garlic, how often and how given, so I'll give my way, which would probably be considered the wrong way by most, I feed several whole (squeezed in my fingers and peeled) cloves of garlic per animal whenever I think about it which is usually whenever I handle them like shearing, moving pens, clipping hooves, walking pastures etc, probably once a month or less, a balling gun works best to get it down their throats as they rarely eat it willingly, you can get one of those at any good farm store and you don't need a fancy one, a couple dollar plastic one has always worked for me. For those unfamilliar with a balling gun it's just a tube with a loose plunger, you put a clove of garlic in the appropriate end and you stick it in the animals mouth and off to the side quite a way down, you then press the plunger which pushes the garlic out and they have to swallow it, you will know if you didn't get it in their mouth far enough if they can spit the garlic out, which they will unless you put it in quite a way, just use common sense and you will be fine. If you do all that I have mentioned and you don't start out with wormy animals or weak animals they should be fine, if you start with poor stock you might have to commercial worm once to clean them out good.
I guess we rarely had any other problems, animals are really receptive to good natural care and if you start with good stock things should go well.
Got to go roof, it is supposed to rain.