This is my last Green Scene post!
I’ll use it to give you, dear readers, one more update on the homestead.
The big news this week was that all six of our goats–two mamas, four kids–escaped their fence and sprinted nearly a quarter mile away into the woods on Tuesday morning. Mr. Green Scene happened to spot them (how’s this for luck?) just after getting out of bed, and thus we knew which way they’d gone. He searched for well over an hour on foot and in the truck before finding one of the kids in our neighbor’s driveway. Then some more searching revealed one mama and the other three kids, standing in a most species-appropriate way on top of an abandoned stone wall. He led them home, looking like the Pied Piper.
We felt pretty good about retrieving five out of six, but of course we still wanted to find the missing mama–especially because she’s still nursing her kids. They are probably old enough to wean if necessary, but this is not the ideal way for that to happen. We searched the woods for two days, banging a feed bucket and calling her name. No luck.
Then, on Thursday, somebody spotted our goat in a nearby neighborhood and called the sheriff. (!) The sheriff called our local grocery store, guessing that as a community hub, it would be the locus of information. Correct! We’d left our phone number there. The store called us, we called the sheriff, and before we knew it Mr. Green Scene was loading up the missing goat. Hallelujah. Or as her hungry kids put it, "Maa-a-a-a-a-a-a [nurse nurse nurse]!"
What else is happening? The strawberries are producing small, delicious berries. The tomato plants will go in this weekend. The pawpaw tree has a cluster of four fruit on it.
And I am saying: Thank you for reading these last three and a half years. And do keep your eye on this space; the conversation here is set to grow.
