Happy December friends!
It’s our first holiday season here at Hidden Meadow and we’re feeling truly thankful, and exhausted, and overwhelmed, and happy, and… and… and. You get the idea. We have a lot going on, but it’s been a good couple of weeks.
Last weekend, we were unable to attend my family’s thanksgiving feast because of Tim’s teaching schedule, so to cheer myself up, I made a spontaneous decision to drive 4 hours to the coast and stop in to meet our puppy in Chesapeake. Now friends, if the ocean and being covered in puppies doesn’t bring you joy, we can never be friends. I’m sort of kidding here, but not really.
The puppies were amazing, we were planning to stay two hours and ended up staying four! The owners fed us a delicious breakfast, (biscuits from scratch!) took some of their dogs through their agility course – incredible. And we chatted about our mutual love of Scotland. Bonus, his wife is a choral director and has a show coming up next weekend complete with bagpipes and a 200 person choir, so of course we have to go. I also was able to help her out with a new business card design as she (not knowing I was a designer) was sharing about how difficult it was to get a new design that should be so simple.
Don’t you love when things line up and you connect with people? I sure do. Yes the majority of our new friends and acquaintances here in VA are in their 50s and 60s, but something about that feels good too, I love having mentors and wise friends who’ve walked through more years than we have. As farm ownership, let alone home ownership, is all new to us, it’s been fantastic to have the support and advice of our new community.
As Tim had the whole week off from teaching, we dubbed it chore week, faithfully wrote out lists on our snazzy new chalkboard, and on the count of three we set off to tackle our impossibly long to-dos. On day one we realized rather quickly, we were not going to get the break in the weather to tackle painting and staining the exterior of the house. This was pretty devastating to me as I can’t stand the current palette of depressingly dark stain, terra-cotta stucco, and red doors. Yes. Not my jam.
I have a beautiful palette already picked out. We’ll test out the colors to see which we like best in person, but I’m leaning to the snowbound, carolina gull, and black beauty. We had to choose tones that work well with brown, because unfortunately, the brown shingle roof is fairly new so it won’t be switched to my dream metal roof anytime soon. (White is the wood panelling, the majority of the house, green is the stucco on the bottom 1/4 of the house, and the black will be the doors and window trim). Modern farmhouse meets European cottage. Sort of, thats the goal anyway.
We’ll tackle the exterior in the spring and I cannot wait. Tim took on a quick remodel of the downstairs bathroom also this past week as it will become our main bathroom once our upstairs bath gets demoed. What started as a simple repainting job turned into a lot more as we discovered there were large gaps in the walls in each corner and at the ceiling that they covered with trim. I’m sure that bugs were able to get through that way, so we needed to seal everything up. Tim did a great job with that, and as soon as we swap the taps out I’ll post a pic of the complete transformation.
The chickens have been dealing with the colder temperatures okay so far. They compensate for the loss of bugs by shamelessly begging for scraps every time they see me. I give in most of the time and give them oatmeal or leftovers as I’ve learned that more scraps means more eggs. Beth and Jo have been laying nearly every day. Meg is clearly not a fan of cold weather and have given me 0 eggs the past week. It’s a good thing she so cute with her fluffy feathered legs.
Now on to Gus. Don’t worry, he’s alive and well. So the routine with the goats these days is that each morning I bring the four of them out and tether Gilbert and Geoffrey to the fence line or tree line I want them to clear that day. I have to tether these two because they are super friendly and would spend all their time trying to find a way inside the house if I let them. George and Gus stick close to their friends so I usually let them free graze.
Now the day before Thanksgiving we decided to explore more of the back 20 acres of our property. From older satellite views it looked like there was a trail going through the the woods, but as it was so overgrown in the summer, we needed to wait for winter to make our way through. We headed out with our wellies on our feet and our bear spray in hand and discovered, that after wrestling through a couple maddening little rose thickets, the path opened up to the loveliest little trail snaking along the creek and through the wooded valley. The creek splashes down small waterfalls and into bewitching little pools. Large rocks frame its course through woodland ferns and evergreens. It’s all together delightful and beyond shocking that we own it all.
When we got back to the farm, we saw rather quickly upon walking into the pasture that the goats who had been happily free grazing and eating all sorts of annoying weeds and brush, had tired of that useful endeavor, and were instead entertaining themselves by dancing a little jig on the TOP of our deck railings. Yes.
Now this is where I give you a little more back story about goats. First I need to tell you that I have pretty strong background in training horses and a little training of dogs. In both cases, there is a progression, a learning of what I want them to do, and what I do not. They learn to do what I want because it results in a treat or praise. Now I have to confess to you, that I’ve seen not even a flicker of proof of this learning progression in goats. They are motivated, purely and unashamedly by food, and by mischief. They have an uncanny ability to pursue mischief in new and shockingly inventive ways.
So we saw them doing their devilish dance on our deck, only pausing slightly to blanket the railings with their bouncy round poop. We began to yell things about how tasty goat curry would be and jogged quickly toward the house so we could shoo them down from their lofty perch. The goats remained unmoved by our clear expressions of anger and strong gesticulating that they remove themselves at once from the deck railing.
It was at this moment that I realized I didn’t see Gus the goat up on the rail with the others. Now a quick backstory on Gus. When he arrived, I couldn’t get within 10 feet of him as he was so shy and retiring. BUT remember the food motivation? I slowly convinced him that head rubs came with a handful of grain and he quickly become one of the sweetest of the goats and arguably my favorite. He’s the smallest of the four, has adorable stumpy legs, and shivers when he’s cold or scared, he’s just the cutest.
When I didn’t see Gus on the deck, my heart sank. Now, back in October we winterized our pool and discovered that our pool cover was about 10 years past its best by date. We will definitely need to get a new one in the spring which we were flabbergasted to learn will set us back around $2400. They have to custom make the covers and it takes several months. Which meant we have to suffer through the season with a severely compromised piece of tarp. It has gaping holes in several spots, and looks as if it’s only a couple stiff breezes or a few stern words away from disintegrating completely. Once we saw the state of this “safety cover” I knew I could NOT trust our little hairy demons around it. They would plunge in head first, off the diving board no less, probably trailing a stream of bouncy poop as they went. So my first panicked thought was that poor sweet Gus, had fallen into the pool and to his horrible watery grave.
I rushed over to the largest hole and braced myself as I looked in.
No Gus. Well then, now what?? My mind jumped to coyotes. I’d seen a cheeky coyote who was abnormally large, sitting at the edge of our back pasture a few weeks ago, trying not to lick his lips as he stared down our chickens. I chased him away and haven’t seen him since, but maybe now he had returned. And I mean, if he was going to take down a goat, it would definitely be the smallest one with stumpy legs who stood there shivering as the mangy mutt approached.
Further searching revealed no Gus, or signs of coyote struggle, anywhere. I went to their feed bin and reached inside for the scoop, if this didn’t work, nothing would. I rattled the lid and rustled the bag and the three deck goats came bounding over the bridge. It was then I saw it, and I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Across the driveway, in the side pasture, something brown and white squeezed out of the 12″ square door into the chicken coop. Now folks, there is no way the laws of physics would allow this goat inside this hole, but there it was, I had seen it with my own two eyes. Gus had no doubt smelled the yummy chicken feed inside and decided to squeeze his fluffy butt through so he could enjoy a bite or 10.
The impossibility of this feat just has me further convinced that there is a very good reason goats have historically been linked with pentagrams and all things supernatural and evil. Yes our goats are adorable and sweet. But I look at them with a little more suspicion and respect than I used to.
Otherwise here in Hidden Meadow, Christmas is coming in slowly with a tree and some homemade wreaths and garlands from the bounty of Hemlock, Cedar, and Pine trees in the forest. I’ll be finishing all our decor by Sunday as we’re hosting the first of two VMI Christmas parties!
One last note, tomorrow is the day life changes here at Hidden Meadow as we bring home our puppy. Stay tuned for an introduction post and send up all the prayers that the cats don’t mutiny and kill us in our sleep.
I bought a bed for puppy and quickly found out that it is Atticus’ favorite thing EVER. I’ll be destroying his world enough as it is tomorrow, so the bed he can keep and I went and bought two more. (Oh yeah Oscar thinks its pretty great too) You can no longer walk across our living room but that’s fine right?
Until next time friends.
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