Yesterday was the Capoeira Batizado event on our ranch! The Batizado is the day when everyone in the martial art gets a little higher in the cord color. About half of the family goes to this Brazilian martial art, and, like in kung-fu, you get higher with belts. But in the case with Capoeira you get into a higher rank with cords. All the people from the Maculele group gather somewhere to get their cords. Now an event like that is pretty big....

Rudi’s final day is here. After months of free range living, eating what he wants, tipping over water buckets everywhere, it’s finally his time to be slaughtered. He’s a little more than half a year old, and we had him since he was no bigger than a small chihuahua. Now, this very afternoon, he will be slaughtered and roasted. All that fat on him will be put to a use soon! Why are we slaughtering Rudi today? Because tomorrow...

Our quarter horse foals Twitch, Kix, and Stumbles are now all 4 months old and older. Time for them to be weaned. The first foals of our ranch are turning into fine little boys. So away from there mothers they went, into the neighboring pasture, along with the small yearling Bambi and Kitty, another foal we bought recently. They’ll be there for a couple months, till they are ready to mingle with their old friends again and once their...

Mary and Mertha, our 2 milking goats, have now gone dry. We probably didn’t milk them regularly and we also let the babies drink from them too long. Their kids, born in February, are still on them. We were planning to separate them earlier, but we couldn’t find an appropriate place to put the 3 youngsters. Therefore, Rosie, Jessie and Wendy are now nicely tame, big, plump, and their fur is shiny and sleek. Staying with their moms for...

With so many horses on our pastures we need lots of big stock tanks. During the summer, a horse will drink about 10 to 20 gallons water a day. An automatic waterer solves the problem of having to refill the water all the time, and it also makes sure that someday when you forget to give your horse water that it won’t die of heat stroke. Now the problem with stock tanks is algae. So much algae! It would be pretty disgusting drinking from...