Milk is Seasonal Food

When I began buying fresh milk directly from the farmer I became frustrated with their seeming undependability. Over the years before I could get my own dairy animals I bought from three different sources, and with each of them, there would be times when they would say they didn't have milk, despite the fact that I was extremely careful to be a dependable and consistent customer, always buying on the same day of the week, and buying the same amount of milk each time.

Then I got my own goats. The first year was bliss. I felt that I could FINALLY have my own dependable milk supply. I knew I had to dry my doe off for two months prior to kidding to allow her body to put that energy into supporting the new life growing inside her. I also knew about colostrum, and had been told that you had to wait about a week for the colostrum to clear out before you would have sweet, beautiful milk. I could handle that. I froze milk ahead to get through the nine weeks I expected to be out of milk. Our freezer went out and all that milk was ruined. We were without milk throughout that time.

It was time for me to get a rude awakening. When Perle freshened I didn't take her to the milk stand for the first week, allowing her (three!) kids to have all her colostrum. When I milked her for the first time after she freshened I was shocked and disappointed to discover that her milk was still not in. I gave her a few more days and tried again. It was starting to transition into milk, but still funny looking. Another few days and it looked like her milk was in. Woohoo! I brought it inside, strained it, and poured myself a glass. It had been two and a half months since I'd tasted sweet milk. I took a big drink, and ACK!!! It was nasty! Even though it looked like she was in full milk, it still had a large component of colostrum to it. I continued to milk and try it daily, but it took another week before he milk was fit to drink. This took us to THREE MONTHS without milk! There was also another issue. With three kids on her, she didn't have much milk left to share with us. We were only getting a couple cups a day. Certainly not nearly enough to justify the cost and effort of keeping your own goats! I kept her daughter, Sassy, and also acquired another goat, Twilight. With Perle and Twilight we had plenty of milk to get us through. I thought I finally had it all figured out.

The same year I bought Perle I was given Miracle, a LaMancha doeling. She didn't settle her first year, and so I had her for two full years before she finally freshened last year. I knew what to expect regarding the time it took for colostrum to clear this time. I thought I was finally going to have enough milk to meet all of our dairy needs. (It was our intention to make ALL our own dairy products when we started producing our own milk.) Her due date came and went. Two weeks went by and I gave up any hope of her being pregnant. I was pretty sad because I could not continue feeding an animal who was of no benefit to our homestead. She would have to go. I was coming to grips with this when one day Wayne came flying into the house telling me to get to the barn. She'd given birth to two BEAUTIFUL kids! A buckling and a doeling. We were ecstatic!

I began milking her on the stanchion right away since it was her first freshening. I wanted to lose no time in her training. I froze her colostrum to have on hand in case there was ever an emergency situation that it was needed. When her milk came in it was far more obvious than with the Nigies. Her udder practically exploded! It was very large and full. I began trying the milk, but it didn't taste good. I thought it was just in that transition period, but it didn't improve. After nearly a month of research and trying different things, I learned that she was deficient in cobalt, thanks to my friend, Mrs. Liz. Within just a few days of supplementing with Diamond V Yeast Culture her milk became sweet and lovely. We now supplement all our goats with the Diamond V Yeast Culture.

Miracle didn't kid until June. I am a teacher. I need my goats to have weaned their kids by the time I am out of school in May, so that I can have the summer to make our year's supply of cheese. This obviously did not happen. Baby is just now weaning at six months of age. ( I retained her and sold the buckling at three months of age.) Miracle is (I believe) bred again. This time she is due to kid between March 2-9, 2012. I plan to sell ALL her kids as bottle babies once they've received her colostrum so that we have plenty of milk for all our needs this time!

Who knew homesteading required so much advance planning?! I have to think ahead at least a year in advance in order to accomplish the goal of making our own cheese during the summer while school is out.

Bringing Things Into Focus

When I began writing my blog I intended it to be a combination scrapbook and journal. Sort of like a cyber photo album documenting our life. As I got deeper into the realm of blogging and learned how things worked, I discovered that I fit best in the category of "homestead bloggers." I unconsciously shifted my focus to posts of that sort. I began to further narrow my posts due to my teaching inclination. I felt I should be doing tutorials. Teaching others about this life is my passion. I began posting less and less because I lacked the time to plan ahead to take photographs and do tutorials.  I am not here to impress others, nor to earn an income. It is my intention to get back to where I started. This blog is supposed to be about our life. We are more than simply homesteaders. Not that that isn't enough to occupy a person full time, but there is more. I teach full time. Wayne is a machinist. We live 30-45 minutes from work. As I was contemplating how I was going to make my new lifestyle work, I came to realize that I only have about three waking hours at home a day. No wonder I feel overwhelmed so much of the time!

We are preparing to start the Specific Carbohydrate Diet very soon. We had planned to begin on December 26th. However, we were given so much candy and special treats that we agreed to wait a few days until we could finish all those lovely delicacies before we attempted to start. We have finished all the sweets, but there are still quite a few items in the house that aren't allowed on the diet, so we are working our way through them. I think it will help ease the transition by going off sweets but not off other, more complex carbs, before jumping into the diet with both feet.

The diet coincides very well with the cyclical nature of food here. Miracle, my only goat left in milk, is drying off. I'm hoping this means that she settled when I took her to be bred in the fall. Milk is not allowed on the diet, and so the timing of this works out perfectly.

Things are pretty quiet here. Chores that took a couple hours a day in the summer can be completed in about 45 minutes a day now.

We still have seventeen chickens and five ducks. My golden laced Wyandottes and Cochins are laying superbly, despite the short day length and cold temperatures. I'm starting to think the most important factor in winter egg production is simply having ample water. We've been using steaming hot water in the mornings to help keep it from refreezing as quickly. I think it has helped a lot. The ducks are laying machines. I think they are each laying an egg a day without fail. Sadly, I discovered in mid-November that I am allergic to duck eggs. This has prompted us to look for a new home for the ducks. Hopefully they will be blessing someone else's egg basket very soon.

Miracle and Baby have adjusted quite nicely to being a two-goat herd. They are content little puffballs bouncing around in the goat pen, happy to stay out of the cold wind and munch hay most days.

I am not one for resolutions. I think they are just setting oneself up for self-loathing. However, I miss having personal devotions on a daily basis. When I was in my teens and early twenties I used to buy a new devotional book every year. It would be a book with a devotion for every day of the year. I have two such books that I bought several years ago, and I plan to get back into that habit. The books I am using are The One Year Chronological Bible and the One Year Book of Hymns. I timed myself this morning and I did both in under 15 minutes, so I think this is a very reasonable goal.

Thank you for following along on our journey in this life. May you and yours have a very blessed new year!

Desolate

That's how things feel around our homestead. After much deliberation, we decided to downsize our livestock.

First it was chickens. A couple weeks ago I sold some hens to Megan at A Blossoming Homestead. I had thought I would sell even more of our chickens than I did, but just by selling a dozen hens (all less than one year old) our flock seems small now!

I am also looking for a home for our ducks. I was SO tickled to get my hands on the five Khaki Campbell ducklings in June. We raised them with excitement and have been entertained daily by their ducky antics. However, it appears I am allergic to duck eggs. Each time I eat them I get violently ill. After doing some research I am pretty sure that it's an allergy, and I am fearful that trying them again would invoke anaphylactic shock. Our ducks lay white eggs, and they are very hard to discern from the chicken eggs, and so we have agreed that the safest plan is to sell them, too.

Finally, a week ago today I sold my Nigerian Dwarfs all in one fell swoop. I couldn't believe it happened that way. I've listed things on Craig's List several times with mixed success. I expected to sell one here and one there until we were down to a few goats. Instead, a lovely lady came to see them, fell in love with the whole herd, and came back two days later to buy them all! Now I just have my LaMancha doe, Miracle, and her daughter, Baby, who was born in June. Things are feeling rather empty around the place. I'm not emotionally sad like I expected it to be. I thought it would be really hard to sell my very first dairy goat that I worked so long to get, her daughter, their companion, and my favorite, no nonsense milker. Instead my main emotion is relief. They no longer have to endure the constant fighting that goes along with having a herd of mixed sizes of goats. I am able to keep up with deworming, hoof trimming, and other maintenance needs with ease. It is peaceful now. It doesn't hurt that our feed bill just dropped by at least half!

All in all I think things are better. We still have enough chickens and goats to supply our needs for eggs and milk, and their care is much more manageable.

Greatest Cookbook Ever

One of my top three all time favorite bloggers has published a cookbook. Months ago she did a survey of her readers asking if they thought anyone would buy it if she took on this massive project compiling all her favorite recipes into a cookbook. I responded to her survey and said, "Why would anyone buy what you have already provided us for free on your blog? I think you'd be wasting a lot of time and effort." However, I am THRILLED to announce that she did not listen to (or, at least heed) my advice. After nine months of hard labor she has given birth to her fourth "baby." She has managed to keep the price very reasonable at just $15.99. This is an extraordinarily good value! I have never, ever tried one of her recipes without thoroughly enjoying it. Her recipes are made with wholesome, nutritious ingredients, not the, "open a can of this an a box of that, dump them together, bake for 20 minutes and pretend you cooked" that is typical of the cookbooks I see in the retail market today. I sincerely hope you will head on over to Jane's Blog and see for yourself. You can try some of her recipes for free before committing to the cookbook, but I am certain you will love it! I can not wait for my copy to arrive!

Micro-Garden

This summer I planted a "micro-garden." We have not been able to fence our garden and do our chicken rotation like we plan to, and I refused to engage in the battle against weeds and renegade chickens another year. However, I was also unwilling to go completely without some of our favorite fresh produce. Instead, I turned the flower bed around our back patio into my garden. I think that in a normal summer this would have been a doomed plan, but this year it worked out perfectly. The patio is on the north side of the house. Strike one for a vegetable garden. There is a large, mature cedar tree immediately to the west of the garden. Strike two. This year, though, we experienced a drought like I've never endured. The extra shade seemed to help my plants survive. Also, there is no way we could have afforded to water a full sized garden, but I was able to mulch and keep my little garden alive quite well. I REALLY wish I had taken more pictures. On Wednesday I pulled up all the plants that are not cold hardy. I thought about taking pictures, but knew I'd taken some a couple months ago and didn't realize how much it had grown and thrived in the fall! The plants had really filled out and you could not see the ground at all by the time I had to rip them out. It was pretty sad to do, but I knew they would be a rotten mess if I didn't, because a hard freeze was on it's way. Sure enough, I awakened to a morning temperature of 27* today. This way I can freeze all those lovely peppers to enjoy in cooked dishes over the winter, and I plan to make pickled green tomatoes this afternoon. My final stripping of the plants yielded almost 9 gallons of tomatoes and peppers!

I planted this eggplant, which had been growing in my classroom since the previous August, in May. Unfortunately Wayne doesn't like them, and they don't agree with my stomach. They made a nice ornamental for us, though. The peppers along the top of the picture produced huge Greek type peppers that were lovely in salads and sauteed in scrambled eggs. You can barely see the ~7' long tomato vine that runs from the eggplant to the peppers. It had also grown in my classroom window all school year. I planted it's roots, laid the vine along the ground, and hollowed out little pockets of soil about every 18" placing the soil on top of the vine. It took root along all those places and it appeared to be several plants instead of one long one. It bore some really nice cherry tomatoes. All the plants mentioned above were from a Miracle Gro greenhouse kit I bought on clearance for my students to enjoy.

My friend, Diana, gave me starts of Egyptian walking onions. They seem to have gotten themselves established pretty well in my little micro-garden. You can see one peeking out from the lemon balm with it's head of "babies" over the concrete near the top of the picture. Under the lemon balm is some lettuce. I had several varieties of lettuce which I mixed together in a cup and sowed in hopes of having a living ground cover. The germination rate of the lettuces wasn't that great, though.The ones that did come up tasted like burnt rubber. I really wish I knew what variety it was so I don't buy it again! LOL!

At the NE corner of the patio I placed several potted plants. The largest pot contains rhubarb. Unfortunately, it didn't' make it. Diana gave it to me as well. She has tried for several years to grow it and it wouldn't thrive. She told me she was ripping it all out and I begged for some. I guess my skills were even worse. I planted zinnias and cock's comb in the black pots, which did grow, but looked rather scraggly. The yellow pot contains more lemon balm. The large terra cotta pot contains a miniature rose given to me by my friend Jenifer two years ago. It has the most precious yellow roses! Hens and chicks are flourishing in the center plastic terra cotta looking pot, and the small pot had a lone Egyptian walking onion that I was nursing along until Diana gave me the new starts.

Here is a view of the entire micro-garden and patio. The whiskey barrel contains more tomato plants. Now it's all bare except for the perennials and I am preparing to mulch it this afternoon.

P.S. The garden also included several varieties of large tomatoes for canning and eating fresh. bell peppers, and Anaheim chili peppers. I planted cilantro and basil, but they didn't do very well. I think they may have been choked out by the tomatoes. The micro-garden also includes abundant peppermint and spearmint. I would love to see it completely filled in with mint-family herbs and abuzz with honey bees in the future!