Busy Weekend

Thought I would do a quick post about what's been happening.  It's been a very busy 3 days here.  Friday we did our normal food shopping and chores and cleaned the house.  I also had a delivery of regular grass hay for the the boy goats,  I stacked it all myself.  This will get us through to the next haying season, late spring.  I picked about 18 lbs of beans from the garden and some zucchini, squash, pickling cucumbers and red onions.

Saturday morning we all got up and took a drive to get Alfalfa Hay,  this is the type of hay the girls eat, it helps with the milking.  We got 25 bales and will be picking up another 25 in a few weeks.  The 50 bales should get us through to next haying season, late spring. I'll be happy once we have the rest of the hay as alfalfa is hard to find around here.  Then we won't have to worry about feeding the girls hay for another year.  Hailey and Jamie helped me with cleaning all the beans and getting them ready for canning.  We ended up with 4 quarts and 10 pints of beans.  Jamie also did all the mowing today and got the hedges trimmed up again.

Today, Sunday we have been hanging around and doing chores here and there.  Our great friends the Royalty's are coming in 1 week, we are all so excited to have them visit, so we have been doing lots of preparing for them to come. Jamie got some firewood cut down this morning and I mowed inside and outside the pasture today. Hailey & I also picked some veggies from the garden again.  We got 3 large zucchini's, 3 large yellow squash, 5 red onions and 2 more pickling cucumbers.  The cucumbers don't last though, the kids eat them as soon as they are washed.

All the animals are doing well.  Matilda is getting bigger and will be going to the vet for a checkup this week.  All the girl goats are doing well too.  Priscilla's girls, Abby & Maddie got the CD&T booster on Friday. So thankfully we are all done with vaccinations/shots till next spring.  Brady & Bruschi are doing good too.  All the chickens are growing.  Layer hens are just growing and we are waiting for them to finally lay eggs, still about 2 months to go.  The meat chickens are now 11 weeks old.  They have 1 more week till butcher time.  Hoping to do some with the Royalty's so they can experience where their food comes from.  I just got an email for my new set of meat chicks, they will be here within a day or 2 and of course Lou & Bryce are the spoiled ones living in the house and doing just fine.

Feta Cheese - 2nd Attempt - Successful!!!

 My 2nd attempt of making Feta Cheese worked!!! I got the new dairy thermometer yesterday in the mail and promptly thawed some of my goats milk to try to make Feta Cheese again.

I took pictures of the process along the way.

This is the pot of goats milk with buttermilk added for the culture, heating up to 86 degrees

Once it is heated up you need to let it rest for 1 hour and then you add an ingredient called Rennet, this helps the milk to congeal.  Once added the milk needs to rest again for another hour. Once the hour is up this is what your milk should look like.

Milk is now gel like, you can see the milk pulls away from the pot cleanly (top left corner of pot)

Next you need to cut the curd.

Curds cut in 1/2 inch cubes

Then you need to heat up the curds to 86 degrees again and stir gently for 5 to 10 minutes.

Cheese curds heated up and stirred

Next you pour the cheese curds and whey (liquid) into a cheesecloth lined colander.  I used some fine weaved fabric I had on hand that I sterilized.  I have kept the whey as this is what you make Ricotta cheese from. I'll be trying to make that today.

Cheese curds draining

Next you need to tie up your cloth and hang it over a bowl.  The bowl will catch any remaining whey that will drip out while you hang your cheese.  This part took 5 hours.

Remaining whey draining from the cheese curds

When your cheese curds are finished draining and you open up your cloth this is what you get (see pic below), this is now cheese.

Homemade Feta Cheese

We are now 7 hours into the process but still aren't done.  Next you need to slice the Feta Cheese and place in a clean dish, you have to salt both sides and cover.  It will then stand at room temperature 12 to 24 hours. We let it stand for 12 hours.

Feta Cheese, salted and sliced

You could actually eat it at this point but the recipe says it will taste better if you brine it, soak in salt water, for a few days.  So I decided to go ahead and do that.

Feta Cheese in Brine (salted water)

Now that I got it right it should be easier to make the next time.  This is a very small batch since I am still not getting much milk from Priscilla, most is still going to her babies.  This recipe was made with a quart of goat's milk.  I'm hoping once we start getting more milk I can make this recipe with 1 gallon of goat's milk, that way I won't need to be making it as often.

Feta Cheese is a favorite in this house.  We eat alot of salad here and usually always have Feta Cheese on it.  It will be nice to have Homemade Feta Cheese for our salads now.  I have calculated that we spend approximately $30 a month just on Feta Cheese.  That's a lot once I thought about it.  Now we won't have to.

Be sure to check back in 4 to 7 days,  I'll let you know how it tastes.

My 1st attempt at Feta Cheese -Unsuccessful

When we decided to get dairy goats I started researching what I can do with the milk.  One of the first things that interested me was making cheese.  My family is a BIG cheese eater.  So when I finally had enough milk saved up in the freezer I decided to make Feta cheese since we eat Feta every week on salads.

First you need to heat up the milk to a certain temperature, this is where I think I went wrong because I had the wrong type of thermometer.  I think I overcooked the milk.  I went ahead and added the other ingredient, rennet which helps congeal the cheese curds.

This is what I got.

It was not suppose to look anything like this. So down the drain it went. There are many more steps to making cheese but I will explain those the next time I try to make cheese and it works.  Knowing that my thermometer was the wrong kind I then went ahead and ordered a dairy thermometer from a Cheese Making Company for the next time I try to make cheese.

Garden Fresh Beans

Hailey with Yellow Beans

The garden is growing great and we have picked our first set of beans. Hailey and I picked the ones that were ready.  It was probably around 8lbs of beans.  Then all of us helped wash, dry and snap of the ends.

I kept out a pound to have for dinner this week and then decided to freeze the rest of this batch. I blanched them for 4 minutes in boiling water and then put directly into ice water to stop the cooking process.  We then went ahead and separated them into family size servings.  Jamie used his vacuum sealer and bagged them all up.

Now we will have fresh beans in the winter.  I'm hoping to can the next batch so we will have both ways of preserving and can decide which one we like better and do just that way next year.

 

6lbs of Yellow Beans

2lbs of Green Beans

Beans all packaged for freezing

Hailey's Room is Done!!

Hailey's room

Hailey's room is finally finished, it seems like it has taken me forever to get it done.  We also got Hailey a new comforter before we moved.  She picked out the comforter which has circles on it in light & dark turquoise, brown & lime green.

We went and picked out light turquoise to do 3 walls and then got the other colors for her accent wall.  I painted her three walls and got the ceiling touched up in a few days.  Next was the accent wall which was way more time consuming than I anticipated.  I first put 3 coats of white paint on the wall.  I then traced circles from the comforter and cut them out of card stock.  I needed two sizes, one for the full circles and a smaller size to do the open circles.  I then traced them all over the accent wall.  Next with a small paint brush and alot of patience I painted all the circles.  They are not all perfect but as good as I could get.  The circles took me two days to trace and paint.

Next came the shelves, we put up her old white shelves and some new ones that we painted brown.  Hailey then helped paint her bookcase to match the room also. She also helped to sew a new throw pillow for her bed.  We found her curtains as Lowe's, they match perfect and have silver sparkly circles on them.

Finally she wanted her Justin Bieber posters put up and we are done.

I'm really hoping she isn't going to want to change it for awhile. It took alot of time but I think it came out great.  Hailey says she loves it. :)

Hailey's shelves and posters

Hailey's Desk and Barbie House

Hailey's  Room

The Garden is Growing!!

Garden 6-15-11

Just wanted to give an update on how well the garden is growing.  All the vegetables are growing well!!! I did pull out all of the old watermelon plantings and planted radishes and carrots in its place.  The radishes have already sprouted and have been thinned to promote larger growing.  We are still waiting for the carrot tops to show themselves.

We have now started getting some produce from the garden for us to eat.  We got quiet a quite a few cherry tomatoes but then the plants ended up dying.  I have also started cutting mixed salad greens and lettuce for our salads.

In the next few weeks the green and yellow beans should be ready to start picking and then the yellow squash and zucchini.  I'm hoping the get enough for us to eat some now but also to freeze/can some for the winter.

Below are some close up shots of the veggies growing.  All pictures were taken on 6-13-11.

Tomatoes

Pickling Cucumber

Banana Peppers

Green Bell Pepper

Mixed Salad Greens

Lettuce

Yellow Squash

Zucchini

Yellow Beans

Green Beans

Milking Priscilla

Priscilla

When we decided to make our move and have a farm, I wanted to have animals that had a purpose, not just pets that we would put our money into and not get anything back.  With the goats we got them to help maintain our pasture but I also wanted them for milk.  You can have goats for meat too.  Maybe we will one day but just dairy goats for now.

Priscilla, who just turned 2 in May was offered to us with her two baby girls. Pat & Katie, the breeders knew my intent for getting dairy goats and they were trying to reduce their herd a little bit.  Priscilla was not part of their original herd so she was low in the pecking order.  Jamie and I decided to get Priscilla and her baby girls.  Now with Priscilla being the oldest one in our herd, she is and will be the herd queen for the rest of her life.  In one day she moved from the bottom of the totem pole to the tippity top.  I'm quite happy to know that I had a hand in making her life a little happier.

Well onto the milking.  Priscilla is currently nursing her baby girls still, who will be 2 months old on June 18th. 

Priscilla's girls - Abby & Maddie

Although Priscilla is still nursing her babies, we are currently milking her once a day in the morning.  This will help with milk production down the line.  The more she is milked by us and nursed by the babies, the more milk she will continue to produce.  In a month or so when the girls are almost 3 months old and eating more grain and hay I will start to milk Priscilla 2x a day and the babies will be weaned.

Since Priscilla has been being milked for quite some time, she knows the routine.  Which is very nice for me not to have to struggle with her and train her.  I go into the barn with a scoop of grain and she just follows me out into the milking area. She hops up on the milking stand and I put the grain in the bucket.  Once she starts to eat we lock the head gate.  The head gate does NOT hurt her, just keeps her in place.

Priscilla eating her grain on the milking stand

Once Priscilla is comfortably on the stand and eating, I have to go through a strict process for cleaning her first to make sure that the milk will be the cleanest we can possibly get.  I wash her bag (where all the milk is) and her udders with a soft face cloth that was dipped in a bleach water solution.  Then we use special antibacterial wipes especially made for milking to wipe off her udders.  We then take a couple of squirts of milk from each udder into what is called a strip cup.  A strip cup is a fine mesh wire cover over a cup that you milk into to make sure there is not lumps or blood in the milk.  If lumps or blood were evident she may have what is called mastitis, which we would then need to give her medicine for and not use any of her milk for consumption until she is all better.  I'm glad to say she has no clumps, lumps or blood.

Now we get to milk

Me milking Priscilla for the first time at home

Hailey milking Priscilla too

Milking Priscilla is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it.  Most people do not use such a large pail for one goat but until I get the hang of it I need a wide opening to squirt her milk into.

Hailey also loves to milk Priscilla and has every morning since she got here.  I actually sit on the grain bucket on one side and Hailey kneels on the other side and we usually milk her together.  Drew also has tried and did pretty well. He was surprised at how warm the milk was.

Priscilla's milk from the first day, very little

Priscilla has given us more milk each day. The first day she gave us not even 1/4 cup. We think this has to do with us not having the feeder for the grain set up for the babies to eat from.  We just got rid of the little bit.  Day 2 was great, we got 1/2 pint and Day 3 was even better with us getting a full pint.

Once we finish milking, we bring it into the house and filter it through an extremely fine filter especially for filtering raw milk into a glass canning jar.  The jar then goes into the freezer for an hour to rapidly cool it.  Once cool we put it in the fridge.

Day 2's milk was not very much as I said so we decided to all try drinking it.  I tried first and have to say that it tastes quite like cow's milk.  Hailey tried and agreed. Jamie tried and he said it tasted different but okay.  Drew of course wouldn't try it.

Day 3, full pint canning jar of goat's milk

Day 3's milk was much more and I decided to freeze it.  Once I have at least a gallon of it I am going to try to make cheese.  One type of cheese is called Chevre. It's a soft spreadable cheese you flavor with herbs or just about anything else you can think of and spread on crackers and eat.  The next cheese I'm going to try is Feta,  traditional Feta is actually made with goat's milk. We love feta in our house and use it on our salads all the time.

I'm hoping in time to teach myself to make other cheeses like Cheddar, but those take longer as they need time to age.  I also can use the milk in anything you would use cow's milk in and you can make soap with it too.

The uses for goat's milk are endless and I hope the experiment with all of them. Just think about how much milk I will have when all 5 girls are in milk in a few years!!!

Miss Matilda

MEET MATILDA

Matilda, 3 1/2 months old

I have to start off saying that we never thought we would get another dog BUT now I believe Matilda was meant for us.

The story of Matilda begins when we first went to Salem Farms to pick up our boy goats Brady & Bruschi.  The kids were off playing with the baby goats and as Jamie & I are talking to the owners, out of the barn comes a little puff ball of white fur.  I immediately looked at Jamie and said where is Hailey?  Pat, the owner, told us Matilda was spoken for which was a good thing because she would have probably been Hailey's if she wasn't.  I called Hailey over and told her that she already had a family but she can hold her.  So for the next hour Hailey held Matilda and carried her around.  Below is a picture of what Matilda looked like that day.

Hailey with Matilda, 5 weeks old

We went home and got a call from Katie, owner of Matilda, a few days later saying that Matilda was now available.  I told her to go ahead and contact the next person interested in her because I thought Jamie would not want Matilda.  He was afraid she would scare deer off the property.  Later on that night I told Jamie about Matilda being available again and how I told Katie no.  Surprisingly he started talking about the benefits of having her here.  We decided to go ahead and get her if the 2nd person who was now coming to look at her decided no.

Matilda at 5 weeks old with her mom, Moonshine

We got an email a few days later letting us know that she was ours.  Jamie & I decided to keep it a secret.  We wanted to surprise the kids.

Hailey with Matilda, 3 months old

We got to see Matilda again at 3 months old, see picture above.  We went to the farm to pick up some hay.  Hailey still didn't know at this point Matilda was ours.  It was so nice to see them together.  I'm not sure if Matilda remembered Hailey or if Hailey is a dog whisperer too, she's also a goat whisperer. But Matilda came right up to her and sat down and spent quite a bit of time with Hailey becoming fast friends.

Friday, June 10th. Pat & Katie delivered our 5 girl goats to us along with Matilda and the secret was reveiled.  Hailey almost cried and then gave everyone hugs and continues to say thank you for Matilda even now, days later.  Drew said thank you also but I really think Matilda is going to be Hailey's dog.

Hailey, Matilda & Drew

Matilda is a new member of the family now but she is a working dog.  Her breed is a Great Pyrenees.  Most people down here call her a LGD.  This means Livestock Guardian Dog.  Matilda will live with the goats 24/7.  She will always be with the girls and babies to help protect and guard them from any dangerous predators like coyotes.  She is already doing her job well,  I have witnessed her walking the perimeter of the pasture.  She will also get up and move closer to the girl goats if they start grazing too far from her.  Where the goats go, she goes.

Matilda with all the girl goat babies

It's only been 3 days now and Matilda is doing well.  We did have a little set back with Matilda killing 2 of our chickens.  She was raised around chickens but not as many as we have.  We were told that she will protect the coop also so we had connected the chicken yard with the goat pasture.  Some of the chickens were in the goat pasture with Matilda and we think she thought of them as a toy.  She wanted to play with them but with her not knowing her own strength ended up killing it. This one was a meat chicken. Then her instinct kicked in to eat it as she will clean up anything that would attract a predator.  We closed up the opening and unfortunately somehow the next day she got another chicken, this one a layer.  The layer chickens are older and are able to fly, we think the layer flew over the fence and Matilda got it.  Last night Jamie & I put up some extra fencing and are keeping a close watch on Matilda today.  Soon the meat chickens will be butchered and we will only have the 5 layers left for over the fall and winter. The biggest thing we keep trying to remember is she IS a baby and as we all know ANY kinda baby gets itself into trouble  We are hoping with less temptation with the fewer birds and maturing over the fall and winter that she will eventually leave the chickens alone and we will be able to open the connector again.  Only time will tell.

We've Decided

Russell's Ridge will be our name for our Farm.

We weren't going to call ourselves anything BUT with purchasing dairy goats with such great milking lines, our buck and girls come registered.  I have the registration papers for our buck, Brady and for the girls we have, Priscilla, Whimsey and Windy. 

Priscilla's two baby girls are also here and we've decided to name them Abigail, Abby for short and Madeline, Maddy for short. We will be getting their registrations within a few weeks.

So what does this mean?

It means that when any of our girls have babies with our buck and we decide to sell them the buyer has a choice to either not register them or to register them.  Registered Nubian's are highly desired, so that's a good thing.  The buyer will pick the name of their new goat and we, as the breeder will register the baby's name.  On it's registration papers it will read Russell's Ridge ................

Hopefully down the line, years from now, people will be talking about my goats, Russell's Ridges' with great admiration.

Only time will tell.

Lovely Hydrangea Bush

I can remember growing up and loving my neighbors Hydrangea Bush, it was blue and it smelled heavenly.  I loved to see all the blue flowers, which happens to be my favorite color.  I also knew that I wanted to have one someday at my home.  We never did get one when we lived in Palmer.  I do not do very well with plants, normally I kill them so when we bought plants we would hardy plants that I didn't need to nurture.

When we moved in we did notice that we had one but didn't know what color it would be.

Well it is now in full bloom and to our delight it is BLUE!!

The flowers actually go through numerous color changes as you can see in the pictures.

1st color - green

2nd color - pink

3rd color - purple

Final color - blue

Bush in full bloom

I'm so happy we have one now and hopefully I won't kill it, LOL.

Meet the Girls!!!

Whimsey

This is Whimsey, she was born on March 3rd, 2011.  She is a full Nubian. She is mostly black with white ears and a big patch of white on her side.  We hope to breed her to Brady when she is big enough and old enough, which is likely to be in the fall of 2012. I'm hoping between the spots on her and the spots that Brady's mom has we will get spotted babies. We'll just have to wait and see. I liked her name so we decided to keep it.

Windy

Meet Windy, she is sister to Whimsey, also born on March 3rd, 2011.  She is a full Nubian. She is a light brown in color with her white ears.  She will also be bred to Brady when so is old enough and big enough, likely in the fall of 2012.  We also decided to keep her name.

Priscilla & her baby girls

We are lucky enough to be offered Priscilla and both of her baby girls.  Priscilla is a full Nubian and we are told she is around 2 1/2 years old. She is a darker red color with white ears. She gave birth to these beautiful baby girls in April.  Once she is here I will start milking her.  I am hoping to teach myself how to make cheese, yogurt and even maybe soap with her milk.  She will also be bred to Brady hopefully in the fall and then her babies will be the first babies we will have here at our home!! Which I think is just wonderful and very excited about.

The little girls do not have names yet. We are still thinking of some. They are both full Nubian.  Their color is called Strawberry Roan.  They are a very light brownish red color with white ears.  They also have spots on them too, which I hope will help produce spotted babies.  They were born on April 18th, 2011 and are doing well.  We are able to have them come live with us so young because the mama will be coming with them to be able to continue to nurse them until it is time to be weaned. 

These darling girls will also be bred to Brady when they are old enough and big enough, which will likely be in the fall of 2012.

If all the breeding's work out, we will have a very busy spring of 2013 and I will have 4 does in milk to make lots of goodies.

The girls, as I call them, should be here within the next couple of weeks.  We will be giving them time to get accustomed to their new home and us, their new family.  I will be spending lots of time in the pasture with them to help them get to know me and be comfortable.  Once they have been here for a while I will post on their personalities like I did for the boys.

Check back in a couple of weeks to meet our OTHER new family member,  it's a surprise!!