Breeding and Thanksgiving Chicks: November update

There's a whole lotta love going on at the farm.

Don’t forget to order some Goat Milk Soap for you & your loved ones for holiday gifts this year! Reach out today so you don’t miss out!

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Hello farm friends 🙂

Happy last few weeks of the year! 

Time just flew by for us at the farm this month.  

(Like, how is it ALREADY Thanksgiving?)

We wanted to send a quick email update with the happenings of the farm this month, so here goes:

Breeding season 🫶🏼

November starts the breeding season for our goats and sheep! 

During the last week of October we started preparing pens for the shuffle of animals between pens, and ultimately got things ready to go so that we can have lots of happy & healthy goat kids for Spring 2024. 

Here’s the breakdown of our breeding pens: 

• Percy is with Cookie, Penelope & Sweet Pea for the 2nd year in a row for registered Nigerian Dwarf Goat babies (last year all 3 of these girls gave us a set of triplets from him for their first time breeding, so who knows what we’ll get this Spring!!)

• Willard got introduced to Astra, Daisy & Izzy.  Astra & Izzy are the best of friends and actually spent the summer at Camp Sonshine with a couple of our wether goats (fixed males) and this would be their first kids so we’re excited to see the results with Willard!  Daisy is a registered LaMancha and gave us twin “Mini Manchas” last year from Bucky - and they were so sweet and wonderful that we actually retained them, so now we get to see how she does with Willard and if any of his babies give us #waddles

• Our Blackbelly’s are also in the middle of their breeding season, but we’ll update you on that a little more below…

We sold an aggressive ram... 👋🏼

When we first started our registered American Blackbelly Sheep flock here in Lincoln, NE, we purchased 3 ewes (Leilani, Ohana & Kai) from our friend Leah at Storybook Farm in MN plus a completely unrelated ram (Makoa) from Tennessee.  

We decided to name them Hawaiian names, because why not(!) plus it’s a great way for us to reminisce about our time in Maui back in 2019.

Last spring all 3 of our girls had a lamb from Makoa and we absolutely LOVE those 3 little lambs!

Momma Kai with baby Ash.

Cut to about a month or two ago… Makoa started acting very aggressively towards Jeff and I, to the point that I totally refused to go into the sheep pen. 

We could handle him being aggressive towards us, because we’re bigger and we could somewhat fight back, if required, but once we saw him be aggressive towards the girls - THAT. WAS. IT.  

The culprit, Makoa.

We sent him on the first train to Sale Barn Town and found the next closest registered Blackbelly ram that we could, (see below for notes on our OK trip), and our new ram gets to meet Lani, Hana and KaiKai this weekend  🥰

…then drove round trip to Oklahoma (in one day!) to get a new ram 🐏

Our new ram Valentino “Val” with his new girlfriends Ash and Aspen.

I don’t want to bore you with the details on this, but we found Valentino (he was born on Valentines day!!) from a farm in Rose Oklahoma, and reached out to see when we could get him. 

He seems to have a super sweet demeanor and we’re excited for him to warm up more to us (rather than just shying away from us).

We woke up at 4am, completed chores on the quick, and were loaded up in the truck by 5:15am. 

Picked him up from Devine Pickins at approx 1:45pm, then were back on the road at 2:30 and arrived back home at 10pm to check on the animals and fill waters.

Let me just say it was a really loooooong day and we were glad to be back home!

We’ve hatched MORE baby chicks #ThanksgivingChicks 🐣

Back in October we incubated our first set of baby chicks from our own flock, and on November 1st we incubated our 2nd set! 

They had a scheduled hatch date of 10pm last night, so we’re just calling them our “Thanksgiving chicks”. 

Our Thanksgiving chicks hatched Nov 22-23!

They're super cute and friendly already!

These will be the first brood we have up for sale so if you or someone you know wants some recently hatched baby chicks, let us know!

Website Redesign 💻

Am I a web designer?  Yes. 

Do I also have a full time job + a full time farm + any other number of responsibilities on my plate at any given moment?  Yes. 

So don’t judge me when you see our original farm website that was literally put up in a couple of hours, never maintained or updated (because I never made it a priority), and now has some weird spacing issues that I don’t even want to deal with right now. 

Hey, nobody’s perfect!  Right? 😅

But since you’re on our email list, I’m going to give you a sneak peek of our almost finished and completely redesigned website for Penner Mini Farms HERE. 

There’s still a few pages I’m working on, and the final rounds of making sure everything looks good on mobile before it’s completely done, but wanted to give y’all the first look at the redesign. 

Let me know what you think!

Researching local craft fairs to sell our Handmade Goat Milk Soaps 🫧

So as you all know by now, we started making Goat Milk Soaps sourced from our own dairy goats (Cookie, Penelope, Sweet Pea & Daisy). 

But with our limited experience selling handmade products locally, we decided it would be smart to look into local craft fairs to sell our products! 

So we’re super excited to announce that we’ll be selling the Best Goat Milk Soap bars (extremely biased opinion) at the Cooper YMCA Craft fair on Saturday, December 2nd!  

We would love to see you there and would totally welcome any friendly & familiar smiling faces that we see!

Aaaaand it’s dark by 5:30pm these days 😑

Ugh. 

But the good news is that since we’re in for chores so early, we’re ACTUALLY eating supper (oh no, I’ve officially started calling dinner “supper” 🙄) at a reasonable hour, plus we’ve finally got built in time after dark to work on things like redesigning the website, planning for future pens and fencing projects, and building out more automations to help the farm basically run on it’s own.

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All that to say, we just wanted to keep you posted on what farm life looks like for us in this chilly November.

Someday, maybe later this winter (who knows!), we’ll be able to reach out more so you can see more of the ins and outs of daily life on the farm, but for now we’ll settle for monthly updates from yours truly.

Deal?  Deal!

🤜🏼 🤛🏼

So tell me.  How have you been doing lately?  

What do you find yourself thankful for this week?

Hope to hear back :) 

Lo