milking
sastyk | April 18, 2012So you had babies, or are about to, right? Now you have to milk. It really, really helps to see it:
We're on baby goat watch here, and looking forward to the run of milk!
Sharon
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 | 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…
sastyk | March 28, 2010Chores sounds like such a dreary word, and until I moved to a farm, I would never have believed that I'd have anything positive to say about it. As a kid, I did chores around the house, and while I may have groused less about the dishes and cleaning gutters as an adult, I certainly didn't (and don't) love the jobs.
But on a farm, chores are something else - they are bookends to each day, a formal structure like the forms of a sonnet or musical scales that shape the day. They can be speeded up, slowed down, slightly elided and occasionally contracted out, but for the most part, they are…