When you’re a mom there’s an ongoing battle over food. Those little rascals quite often will only eat what they want to. Sometimes great struggles will ensue. Sometimes a mom will hearken back to her days raising puppies and will remind herself they will eat when they get hungry – that’s a nice idea if you can get it to work.
I was the mom who catered to the whims and whiles of my three children. You wouldn’t catch me giving into the Great Dane, but by hell if they all wanted different fast food there would be stops at Jack in the Crack, Taco Smell, and Micky D’s. All in the same night.
One of them didn’t like tomatoes, so she got taco salad set aside before the tomatoes went in. One only liked cottage cheese and canned green beans for the first five years of life. The man-child was fond of dill pickles at 5 a.m. That or he could be found with a chair pushed up next to the cupboard, sitting on the shelf eating the stick of butter.
And now I have goats. There’s a general stereotype out there that goats will eat anything. Not true. They were getting fancy timothy hay for quite a while, but recently they seem fairly happy with number 2 alfalfa.
But sometimes they escape their lovely little pen and go on walk-about tearing through the yard. You would think right now they would be so happy with all the weeds, but not so. They went straight for the kale and then they found the hydrangea.
For those of you who may remember the saga of the hydrangea from last spring – that bush has quite a back story. It belonged to my grandmother and then my mom. My whole life I’ve always wanted hydrangea so when mom moved south, she left it to me with extensive instructions for proper plant preservation. It was December 2021 and I brought it to Fallon in a bucket and set it by the garage to plant the next weekend and winter it over. And then I promptly forgot about it.
Along about March, tearing around the corner of the shop I ran straight into the bucket of dried out sticks and my heart sank to my toes. Surely the hydrangea was dead. Thus began the mighty resurrection of the heritage bush, careful potting, watering, fertilizing, and coaxing. Imagine the day I spied little specks of green popping out of the dead sticks. That glorious plant bloomed ALL summer last year. It was a thing of beauty. And this morning I caught those little goats eating it.
In a huff (actually, I was way madder than that) I carefully wrapped her in chicken wire and then coaxed and led and then drug the goats over to this lush little meadow I had planted just for them. Clover and grass and grain, a virtual cornucopia of restorative agriculture in practice, green and tasty.
But no, they simply sniffed a little and turned up their noses, heading straight back to the hydrangea. Forget it mom, we want this fast-food. So, while I put the rabbits in the meadow, tighten the goat fences, and practice the age-old “fence out” theory of gardening, I’ll be right here…
…Keeping you Posted.
Rach
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