Cider Bend-July

We're learning that summer on the farm is just as much work as winter on the farm. 😄 At the beginning of July, Mark decided to clean up all of the cottonwood trees. They had never been trimmed or maintained, and they were a huge mess. He went to work with his tree saw, and soon accumulated a huge pile of branches. Originally, we were just thinking we'd make a burn pile, and then we realized there were way to many branches for that. We had to rent a chipper to take care of everything.

I wish I would have filmed a before video of what the trees looked like. It looks so much better!

This is the pile of branches we had to chip. 😮

This wood chipper!

My job was to drag all of the branches over to Mark, and he would run them through the chipper. We were all scratched up by the time we were done.

We are going to use this big pile of wood chips to make a little path leading from the corrals to the poop dumping spot.

It took us about 5-6 hours of chipping, but it looks so much better!

We lit the barn up for the 4th of July!

Of course not all of the branches got shredded. 😆

Here are some random goat things from the month.

Here is a cute Roxie video to brighten your day. She's the happiest little thing! 😊

The goats and Reeses are good buddies now. It's so funny how they play with her. They don't understand that Reeses can't hear, so they sneak up on her, try to get her attention, and then run like crazy when she notices them. Reeses just wanders around without a clue. 😂 Here is a picture of Roxie trying to get her attention, and Reese oblivious to everything around her.

I was finding a bucket in random places in the corral. I finally figured out how it was getting moved around. 😂

Mat's kids came over to visit the animals. Carter loved the goats.

The goats love having friends over. 

Watch Roxie in the next video. She's the one closest to the gate.

Here are a couple goat bloopers.

It's still so fun watching them play on their playground.

Curious little cuties! 

This next video was the inspiration behind Mark building the goats a teeter totter. He was adding a section to the goat playground, and the goats we all over everything. This ended up being so fun to watch, that the construction of their real teeter totter started shortly after.

The donks love when we hand them weeds over the fence. Mark pulled these big yellow flower weeds up and handed them over. They loved them, and we so cute eating them.

Clover and her cute teefers! 😊

We've finally hit a hot patch this summer. The heat is hard on Reeses, and she had so much extra hair on her. I took her outside and brushed a whole other dog's worth of hair off of her. The pile of hair was nuts. Then Mark and I tagged teamed to give her a bath. She has a hard time standing in the same place for too long now, and she can't really sit at all. She either needs to be walking around or lying down. If we both give her a bath together, it goes by a lot faster. She loved it and felt so much better when we were done.

Our washing station is the best!

Sweetest pup! I just love her!

She was so happy, and felt so much better.

We were cleaning out the stalls, so Mark had the deck brush out. The goats were extremely underfoot (like usual), so Mark started brushing them with the deck brush. They loved it! When he started brushing Dolly or Roxie, Ginger would come up and start tapping on his leg with her hoof, because she wanted another turn. So funny!

The donkeys needed a turn too!

Willow loves to have her back scratched, and she doesn't care what we use. She often will stand on whatever pile I'm trying to pick up, until I scratch her back with the rake, so she really loved the deck brush. 😄

I gave the donkeys some corn husks for the first time, and they loved them. Clover had a whole pile of her own, but wanted to share the one Willow was eating. They are the cutest little besties. 😊

When we clean the stall, we lock the donkeys out while the floor is drying. The last time we did it, Willow stood outside her locked stall door extremely put out that she couldn't go in. 😂

Mad Willow was locked out.

She was happy again once we opened up her door.

We got home from church and had to head out pretty quick to go to Sawyer and Amanda's house for dinner. I still had to do the chores, so here are some pictures and videos Mark took of me. 😅

Sometimes you just do what ya gotta do.

We have some big projects coming up at Cider Bend, so keep an eye on our social media!