Caper says, The grass in the pasture is brown.
But, the goatmaid did some raking, and look what’s growing! Goat candy!
I love, love, love prickly briar runners with the big leaves. The big leaves are better than the smaller ones. Totally different flavor. Trust me. These things matter to goats. We are gourmands, after all.
The next best thing to goat candy is having the goatmaid give me a good scratch. A little more to the left, please.
I love spring.
Whew! No goat pricks, I see. I’m sure they’re glad it was the chickens and not them!
Good heavens- 65 degrees and sunshine!! No wonder everyone is so active today- what a well deserved treat for all of you!
These goats posts are feeling like another children’s book in the works!
There must be an illustration of the “goatmaid” in this one!
I’m working on one :) My favorite line so far is, “the goats help.” Of course, it’s in their own goaty way.
We have a whole bunch of that prickly runner stuff in our field. Do the goats do a good enough job to get rid of it, or just enough to keep the leaves down but the prickly part always around? Would love to find a way to eliminate it without using a lot of my own physical labor and especially without using chemicals.
Give me a few more months of the goats out there and I’ll let you know if their browsing eradicates or just controls the runners. So far, they’ve done a really good job on the mature brambles. They ate every single leaf and shoot, so that a huge tangle of briars became more accessible to me and I was able to get in with loppers and cut it down. They’re fussy eaters, but they seem to be enjoying the runners as well as the leaves. But, these pet goats are full and lazy. Whether they’d clean the whole pasture out is another story! I do have a moveable electric goat fence, so that they concentrate on one area at a time and that helps. The bottom line is that they are at least partially effective and very cute. Get a couple!
Well it’s good to hear they ate the mature brambles because I’ve got a lot of that here too! Hmmm, I can see that I may be able to “sell” the goat idea to hubby as “necessary garden equipment”! ha ha