Humble Garden

So for the past week, we had been watching Rye VERY closely but she seemed to be taking her own sweet time.

Last night my husband had to go to a school board meeting and I was feeding the kids. When he got home he checked on the goats and found that Rye had given birth to two little guys, with no help at all!

She did a fantastic job!

One – who looks just like his dad Flax – is named Flax, Jr. and the other goatlet is called Frederick (I have no real idea why). They are both just too darn cute.

Enjoy the photos!

Flax, Jr. was being shy, will get more shots of him another day!

Her emergency set the whole herd (8 other goats) on edge. We had just given away one of our two bucks (he was too aggressive and an aggressive horned goat is not a fun thing) so the herd dynamics were already in flux.

The does could tell something was up. One in particular, Millet, seem to miss her friend. She was wandering around and seemed to be looking for something.

Well, this wasn’t so much about missing Wheatie but about Millet being in labor. She was separating herself from the herd (labor sign), getting that 1,000 yard stare (labor sign), and looking restless (labor sign).

My oldest daughter came and got me, saying that Millet was showing the bubble (see this sit for details on goat labor) so I flew out to the goat shed to find Millet scratching at the hay, making a nest (labor sign) and a bubble showing (impending delivery sign).

So I ran around the enclosure to get through the two gates and arrived at the shed just in time to kneel by Millet, smear my hands and arms up to my elbows with betadine solution and get towels arranged as the first kid presented.

A little hoof began to show, then the face (with tiny little tongue sticking out) and then the second hoof – perfect presentation. I tugged on the little hooves as Millet contracted and very soon, the first baby was born. I took the baby into my arms and cleared it’s little tiny mouth (with tiny little teeth!) and tapped it’s sides to help clear the lungs.

I scrubbed the baby to dry and then lay her down next to Millet so that Millet could clean her newborn. Soon, I was doing the same for the second one. It took quite a long time for the placentas to pass but they did with little fanfare on Millet’s part.

My oldest daughter named these newborns Calliope and Felicity.

We had another goat who was showing signs but we were not certain. Her name is Amaranth and she is our smallest goat. We figured she only had one baby on board.

After the Wheatie experience, the exhausting experience of wrestling our buck as the vet castrated him and then the kneeling for Millet, my left leg was is paroxysms of pain and cramps for days.

Needless to say, Amaranth was my next challenge. Because of the pain, we moved Amaranth to the basement so that I could tend her in warmth, instead of the mid teens F outside.

We had Ama in the basement with another doe – Rye – to watch them both. Rye was so bothered by Ama that we took Ama back out to the cold shed and I just KNEW that meant she was going to go soon (I think they HATE the basement).

Sure enough in an hour or so, we heard this REALLY loud blood curdling scream that I am sure must have freaked out the neighbors. I run out without a coat to find Ama with a baby already partly out – one leg and a face (and tiny tongue!). The baby was not coming out easily – Ama is such a petite goat.

With her next contraction, I was able to pull the baby into this world. Wow, what a healthy baby! I repeated the post-delivery process and the rest was uneventful.

This baby was named Luna. She is bigger than Millet’s babies because she was a singleton and wow she is furry.

Obviously, the photo gallery you see at the top of this post shows these three goat babies!

There will be more, no doubt, stay tuned!

Sure spring is a time for cleaning the garden and mucking out the animal housing but this year, for us, spring is all about obstetrical labor, and most definitely NOT mine.

We bred our 8 dairy LaMancha goats last fall and it looks like 7 of the 8 are expecting. Our wonderful goat mentor came to visit us the other day and felt their furry little selves and she thinks that all but one seem to be carrying and one, that you see above named Millet, may be be carrying 3 or 4 kids.

I know EXACTLY how Millet feels. Soon, though, it will be over and then she will be caring for them for a few days as they get their colostrum and then we start milking her (and bottle feeding the infants).

I will be sharing photos of that craziness in coming days and weeks!

When we first moved here 13 years ago the first couple of winters were impressive. We had three or four 3-foot storms that first winter. I just figured that this was par for the course around here.

Since then, the past 10 years or so, winters have not been so impressive. This makes people forgetful of what a proper New England winter is like so that this past week, when we got a snow storm (after the ice storm of some three weeks ago that put out power far and wide here) people truly lost their minds with fretting about the storm.

It was called #snowmageddon on twitter – lots of traffic then.

It wasnt a three foot storm but it did get pretty cold (close to 0 F) which is the part I kevetch about (for the animal’s sake – poor babies!)

The photos in this post share a bit of that time.

Night time fun.

Q tending her chickens

One barred rock chicken that seems to be doing an odd snow dance – first she flies out lopsided from the shed ….

Then she some how manages to go totally sideways.

The goats and the llama didnt appreciate the low temps but those low temps made a wonderful thing happen – the llama has started sleeping with the goats! This is good because she can help keep them warm and she bonds more closely with them.

This blonde goat is named Wheat.

Eating hay.

All three species.

Home-hatched chicks – very fluffy. They are a flock of four.

The garden is totally submerged but I have already started planning the plantings as well as thinking about moving the seed starting equipment down next to the wood boiler so that they can be toasty warm.

Will share more about the 2009 garden soon!

Hope all is well out there and that you are weathering this time of transition well.

• We are about to transit through the winter solstice
• The economy is listing and no one knows where it will all land (recession? depression?)
• Seed catalogs are starting to come in and we can dream about this year’s bounty!

I have been extra quiet these days because of being overwhelmed by all the bad news of the world and also my own bad news.

I became a part of the statistics when I was recently laid off. Add this to my husband’s laid off status and things are really stressful here.

To get off this negative and on to why I am writing today, I am going to share some photos from our home last week, of making goat milk yogurt.

Around here, any milk project starts with milking of our goat Torte.

To make this, I used a yogurt starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.

This yogurt starter has several bacterial species, including:

• Lactobacillus acidophilus
• Bifidobacterium species
• Steptococcus thermophilus
• Lactobacillus delbrueckii

I also made a DIY yogurt culture box from a roomy box, a seed warming/starting mat and foil.

The starter directions say one packet per quart. I made 2 quarts that day. You have to bring the milk up to 180 F (not sure why) and then back down to 116 F. I used a water bath to cool the stainless steel pot of milk.

You then add the starter to the 116 F milk and mix well. Once mixed, pour into culturing jars (I used sterilized pint canning jars) and let set up for 9-12 hours or to the thickness desired.

Once set up, cool in the fridge and then enjoy!

I have been so busy doing work related things for some poorly timed double deadlines recently that I have not been able to focus on my garden or this blog and I am sorry about that.

I wrote a bit about that at one of my other blogs Nika’s Culinaria “Rocking My San Diego Trip“.

This has not been the best gardening year. I thought that putting down landscaping paper would control the weeds and that then the garden would be under control. The weeds were under control for certain and I actually didn’t have any major issues with disease, even with my tomatoes, the few times I got to visit them.

One of the big holes in the garden came from dedicating so much space to bell peppers. I had bell pepper lust and they simply REFUSED to produce, period. My sweet peas, they too were not fecund. My cucumbers were relatively vague in their output. My squash, well, I got two hubbard – modest in size.

I commute 400 miles a week, most of my gardening time was spent in my head, pining for actual gardening. Pining and mental anguish do not lead to a better garden, just frustration. When I get home, my 3 kids but especially my 2 year old requires 100% of my time. I have literally spend no small amount of time this year inside comforting a 2 year old who is really suffering my long absences as I look out the window at a directionless garden. I certainly do not blame the child or the garden. I blame having to drive 3-4 hours a day, working a good 9-10 hours a day on top of that to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads.

I have to be honest with you, there has to be a better way but I have not found it yet.

Ok, I will leave you with that rant. There is no solution unless: 1) you want to be our sugar daddy/mommy, 2) give me a winning lottery ticket, or 3) give me a telecommuting job that will replace or boost my current income.

Lets turn to more interesting details! While I am gone at work, things are happening here on the homestead. One of those things is chicken husbandry, which my oldest is fully dedicated to.

The chickens have trained her well (she sees it as her training them but, well…) and she takes care of them with much love.

One chicken, a buff orpinton named Bonnie (who was the victim of a vicious rooster attack and then miraculously survived after home-surgery by my husband) has been broody for some time.

Recently, my daughter noticed the sound of peeping coming from the eggs so she moved the chicken and eggs that Bonnie was brooding on into the house (we had two chicks hatch in the hen house a couple of months ago and they were killed by non-mother hens or roosters). As she is homeschooled, she had the opportunity to watch as the first egg hatched and how the chick recovered from the experience. We now have 4 chicks with more possibly on the way.

Its not a good time of year to have little chicks and I think that we will have chicks and Bonnie with us in the house over the winter until the chicks are big enough to fend for themselves. This adds even more chores to my daughter’s day (she milks one of our goats twice a day and feeds all the animals) because she has to take Bonnie out 5 times a day to let her “do her thing” outside instead of around the chicks in the house. The chicken has been trained somehow to wait for my daughter to hold it until one of those 5 times.

Wild huh?!

Meet one of our Old English Game roosters (we have two) and one of the hens (other types of chickens shown = Rhode Island Red and a Minorca). We adopted these chickens from a teenager my oldest daughter met on a chicken board. He had bred and incubated these chickens himself but the town he lived in caught on to his chicken hobby and so he had to get rid of them. Its been interesting watching them grow because we were not sure what this kid had bred!

Turned out looking pretty good.

This is another one, a Bantam Old English Spangled Game Hen, we call her Quailie (you may have seen her in a previous post)

Chickens and chicken breeding is fun stuff!

Old English Game Bantam Club of America

Meet Flax, our new boy LaMancha goat and the new sire to our future kid goats. He looks a bit odd because he was shorn, shampoo’d, trimmed, powdered, and I am not sure what else!

He is a really sweet little boy and is in his own area right now as all the girls sniff him through the fence. He has a big job ahead of him!

Arriving

(This was cross-posted to Nika’s Culinaria and Peaknix)

We are enjoying our independence from the food chain. We get our eggs and our milk (and now cheese) from our backyard. We eat our salads from our backyard.

If you don’t now, what are you waiting for?!

If you think food prices are high now, you will be pale with shock soon enough. Think oil-based fertilizers, oil-based pesticides, oil-run tractors and trucks, think floods, think drought, think 2008.

The seed companies are reporting a 40% rise in seed sales this year (they were shocked, didn’t see it coming, these people need to get on the web more often).

Now that the baby goats are not such babies and are fully weaned, we have more goat milk to work with. We go through less than 1 gallon of fluid goat milk a day for Baby O (who adores goat milk and is sensitive to lactose in pasteurized cow milk).

Our milking doe, Torte, gives us about one and 1/2 gallons of milk a day. Over two days, we then have one extra gallon of milk, works out nicely.

You may or may not know that it is hard to make cream or butter from goat milk because the fat doesn’t separate out (because the fat globules are smaller and stay spread out, like its been homogenized). We could make it if we bought a $400.00 cream separator but thats not going to happen! I love goat cheese just fine.

We will be getting a jersey cow/calf to have super high quality milk, cream, and butter. I can wait for that.

Back to the topic for today.

It is VERY easy to make chevre but it takes a few days, you simply have to be patient.

We are using milk we pasteurized for this batch, we may go raw with he next batch.

We used a chevre starter from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, I can not recommend them highly enough.

This little packet is enough for one gallon of milk. This could not be easier, you just bring your milk up to (or down to as the case may be) to 86 F and sprinkle the starter in. Mix well and let culture at room temperature for 12-20 hours.

The curd sets up and excludes the whey.

You then slice it up a bit so that the mass of curd is broken up and more whey is excluded.

Remember that all of the equipment being used must be sterilized.

We bought the plastic chevre molds from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company which I cleaned very well.

These are well worth the cost and will last a long time.

Using a sterilized slotted spoon, you scoop out the curds and begin to fill the molds.

One gallon of milk yielded three molds worth of cheese.

Once they are filled they go on a wire rack over a pan or bucket to catch the dripping whey, cover the tops and let sit at room temperature or in the fridge for 2 days. They will shrink a lot.

After the two days, the cups were no longer dripping and the cheese was quite firm and much dryer.

This cheese tastes unbelievably fresh and, I think, uniquely ours. Its a fantastic feeling to sit down to a salad that we grew topped with chevre we made from our own goat. I watched Torte munching on tree bark in our backyard as I nibbled on the cheese.

Resources:

• New England Cheesemaking Supply Company
• Chevre Starter
• Plastic cheese molds
• Books on making cheese
• Classes on making cheese

Our goats now have a much more substantial fence and area to roam in. I estimate that they have about 20,000 square feet for their pen. Their area is filled with wild blueberry bushes (which we are awash in).

We have also adopted 5 more kids bringing the total goat herd size up to 8. This is sort of scary to me but its something the family seemed to want. Deep Breaths. Why scary? We have to feed these girls and then I will have to be the midwife sometime next spring. I have midwifed cats and dogs in the past but goats kidding out twins, yikes.

Gonna have to read up.

Torte is our only milking doe at the moment but she has a really good output right now (over a gallon a day).

Sometimes Torte will headbutt twerpy kids who get in her way but she is very calm and patient. Sometimes, they will all break into a leapy gallop and fly from one far flung end of the pen to another.

The kids and doe will walk about, nibble leaves, branches, bushes.

This kid is called Millet.

All the kids have grain names, including:

• Wheat
• Millet
• Amaranth
• Maize
• Oat
• Spelt
• Rye

Some of them are Torte’s babies, some come from a goat called “America”, some from another goat called “Midnight”.

Feeding 7 kids is chaos incarnate. Ed, Q and KD have to corral and manage the various kids and Torte (who wants to get in on whatever is happening) so that each kid is fed for certain.

They are noisy kids but every single one of them is as sweet as they can be!