dairying
sastyk | February 24, 2011
(Rubeus the cat meets Nigerian Dwarf Baby Meadowsweet last summer)
Tuesday's New York Times has an article on the expansion of miniature dairy goats in urban areas. It is an interesting article, and has some good points - among them it rightly points out that dairy goats are a bigger deal than chickens. That said, however, it is also pretty clear that the reporter is fairly ignorant about goats in general (this is probably not surpring, I'm guessing the Times Goat beat is pretty small ;-)), and I'd hate for people to get all their information about small scale dairy goats from this.…
sastyk | August 9, 2010Wendell Berry has an essay in which he argues that the greatest single evidence for the merits of British culture is that they developed sixty-five breeds of sheep:
What does it mean that an island not much bigger than Kansas or more than twice the size of Kentucky should have developed sixty or so breeds of sheep? It means that many thousands of farmers were paying the most discriminating attention, not only to their sheep, but also to the nature of their local landscapes and economies, for a long time. They were responding intelligently to the requirement of local adaptation. The result…
sastyk | May 25, 2010For those of us with dairy critters, now is the time of milk overflow, but even if you aren't ever going to get a cute little goat, you might have milk around. And boy is this yummy. We'll get more complicated eventually, but this is pretty simple, and if you've never made any kind of cheese, this is a great start!
sastyk | May 24, 2010
(Our new buckling, Cadfael, bred by our friends Jamey and Carol at Weathertop Farm (who are a great place to start if you are looking for little goats.) We arrived at their place recently about three minutes after he was born!
Note: This is a repeat from last year, since we've got visitors and family coming and the spring planting rush upon us. The baby goats in question are now bred teenagers, we own our own buck, Selene is no longer herd queen and Mina has mostly stopped driving Eric insane...mostly. But otherwise, all is much the same.
I've had many people email and tell me that my…