I’ve always said that I like all the seasons. Yes, winter too. I like skiing, the snow, pot roast, watching Father Brown in the evening with Rachel and some hot tea… I like just about all of it. That said, lately I’m reminded about how much I also like it NOT being winter any more. Our little homestead is out of dormancy: we have more eggs than we know what to do with, and the goats are making enough milk…
I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about waiting for our cream separator to come in the mail. Goat milk doesn’t separate like cow’s milk, so you need a separator to get cream and make things like butter. The person responded, impressed “Wow, you guys really are the real deal!” I hear that often whenever I talk about what we do. And whenever I hear that I think to myself yeah, right. We’re not the real deal….
Sometimes, I wonder why we bother with animals. Today was one of those days. This was the day I did our semi-annual deep clean of the barn. It’s long, stinky, dirty, back-breaking work. Not fun. The other times are the early, cold mornings when milking time comes. Tomorrow is the First of May, yet it’s still only in the 30s before 7 am still. Last week we had freezing rain in the mornings while I was out biking and milking….
I have struggled to get this post up since Flora’s kids were born. Anybody who has children knows how difficult it is to get a picture of more than one of them where they are all smiling, all looking at the camera and preferably all have clean faces. Now add two goat kids in the mix and, well, you can imagine the difficulty. So, here are some of my haphazard attempts at putting these 5 kids onto the blog: …
Somehow, I knew I’d be back on here today. For the second year in a row Flora delivered on Good Friday morning. And no, I was not up all night like I had said I might be yesterday. At my last check at quarter to 11 I could tell that Flora was ‘off,’ but certainly nowhere close. So, I went to bed and set my alarm for 2 am to look in on her just in case. Nothing was happening…