After delivering bread this morning, I was coming down the driveway running my to-do list through my head, must can tomatoes, pickles need to be done, garden picked... and then spotted several loose goats in the barn area. I drove straight down to the barn with a feeling of dread just in time to see my yearling filly emerge from the milking parlor/ feed room and 11 goats wandering around. Great. Grand. I knew this was going to be ugly. Ugly was an understatement. Apparently they had been out for quite a while and it looked like a giant poo-pee bomb had gone off. They had turned over feed bins, ripped open almost every sealed bag of feed, destroyed hay and straw bales and they themselves looked like they too might explode at any minute. After finally getting everyone back in the pasture which required a lot of dragging and threatening,( being that no one was interested in grain!) I surveyed the damage. Bad. Just plain bad. I decided that it was unlikely a barn fairy would appear to clean up this mess and it was not going anywhere. My tomatoes on the other hand, were going to rot if I did not get them canned.
I headed to the house and got the tomatoes peeled and chopped. Once on simmering I headed down to the barn. The animals were all fine but will certainly be on a hay diet for the next couple of days. The next 2 hours were spent cleaning up the catastrophe. That done, I finished feeding the sheep and checking on everyone again. I got all of the goats milked, just a little late, but I reminded the girls it was their own fault. One doe needed deworming and her feet trimmed, so I went ahead and took care of that. Finally I made it back to the house and got my roasted garlic marinara sauce canned (yum!) . I did make it to the garden and get more tomatoes picked along with out first really large harvest of okra. Peppers, eggplant and squash finished filling a bushel basket. Pickles did not get made today. Oh well, move that to tomorrow's list!
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