Monthly Archives: March 2010

On home-grown milk

Posted on March 31, 2010 | 8 Comments

Our first quart JUST FOR US

So, T-bell birthed three babies on 27 February.  I have consumed exactly two cups of the milk since then.

This is not unusual.  There are two big reasons for this:  one, triplets, and two, one rejected baby.  So I have been milking her since the 27th, two times a day…and saving all the milk to give to the little mostly white baby, Number Three.  The other two have all the milk they want from Mama.  Even though Alpines are the Holsteins of the goat world (super milkers in other words) she’s only recently been able to exceed demand.

Any mammal has what’s called a “lactation curve.”  If you plot the actual production on a chart, the top of the curve happens when the nursing babies are the biggest.  This top of the bell in goats should happen when the kids are about two months old.  Kids left with their mamas all the time will milk for many more months, beyond their “need” for the milk.  Their true “need” kind of ends when they’re able to tolerate eating what mama does (and thus get their caloric needs met):  browse (weeds, branches) and pasture-grazing, dried mixed hay, garden stuff, and grains in the form of goat chow.  As of the first week of life, they’re already experimenting with hay.  By week two, they were eating greenhouse goodies with T-bell.  Now, at nearly five weeks, they’re out on the pastures for most of the day with her, eating, playing, pooping and sleeping in the sun.

And Number Three rejected part of the bottle last night.  (Hooray!)

One should wean the babies by weight, not the calendar…especially with triplets.  However, these guys are getting quite big.  They should be able to move to their new home when they’re a little over two months old.  Then, ALL the milk is mine! (rubs hands together greedily).  There’s no telling how much it will be, but it should be somewhere around a gallon a day.  At this two month mark, I will be tricking her lactation hormones that there are two month old babies that still need to be fed, so…she should stay at that top of the bell for a while. Eventually, her production will wane, but by next 27 February, she’ll still be producing.

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Posted in dairy goats

On busy weekends

Posted on March 30, 2010 | 10 Comments

I am not one to take myself overly seriously.  I also gave up a life of stress an eternity ago, it seems, when I left my city job behind.  However, every once in a while I will have a bout of “get it done” farm-related insomnia!  Like, ohgosh wouldn’t it be great if I could take two days off of work to at least get caught up on my to-do list?

And then I have weekends like last weekend.  It was a weekend in which I get so many things crossed off that I realize…my list is probably not long enough!

But, two non-weekend days off does sound nice.

Hard to tell, but the grape vines are pruned:  I always seem to leave more on the ground than on the trellises.  Number One at the top; Number Two at the bottom.

The kids really don’t help much with the trimming pickup, but they think the tractor is cool.  Number Two in the driver’s seat, Number Three (bottle baby) riding sidecar.

Kids are great as dance partners with your own kid, though.  That’s little Number Three.

And there are bunnies to pet.  It’s amazing how quickly they are growing; they’re a month old.  And:  we have six of the things!

Here’s the girl holding a baby and Daddy Dum-Dum to show you how big the babies will eventually get; not big in other words, as they’re Mini-Rex rabbits…and terribly soft.

And Ruby is officially on lock-down under the Chicken Tractor, complete with doghouse and 9 eggs.  Earl is verklempt!

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Posted in sweat

Dark days, Week 19

Posted on March 28, 2010 | 12 Comments

I am a bit confused:  it appears the Challenge ends on 31 March.  I thought it was a by-the-week thing, therefore ending at week 20.  I had big plans (BIG!) for the last week’s meal…the last of the Dark Days Challenge of eating sustainably, organically, locally and/or ethically for one meal per week all winter long.  Maybe I will post the meal next week anyway:  it has a lot of wacky goodness in it.

So I thought for this week’s Week 19 I would simply feature a meal sourced from home ingredients grown JUST this year (2010) but…inspiration hit me.  Literally!  My bag of saved corn husks from our home-grown popcorn dropped on my head from the top shelf when I was adjusting things in the pantry.  Luckily, corn husks aren’t heavy.

Brown paper packages tied up with string:  not pretty, not numerous, but…tasty and mostly home-grown

When I was in college, one of my best friends was a first-generation Mexican American whose people hailed from Oaxaca.  Homesickness for his mother’s Phoenix kitchen had us trolling for chow in the local Mexican restaurants…but he assured me the comida plated up in our Midwestern college town was but a simulacrum of honest food.  Well, I visited him, often, and he was so right!  And once, just once, I was fortunate enough to sample the tamales lovingly (painstakingly) made by his Mama and Abuelita.  “Labor of love” barely describes the ordeal undertaken by these women, both tiny things, in Mama Maria’s small un-airconditioned kitchen.  They would make 250 in a day, some for family, but most for their church…and they did this twice a month!

I can’t begin to scale up to that level, but with home-grown and local ingredients I can make an attempt at making at least a few.  I did have some cinnamon-laced Mexican chocolate brought back from a friend; why not make mole as well?

Menu:

  • Tamales (our homegrown, home-milled Calico popcorn, with Creswick Farms lard, homegrown chicken stock, meat fillings, and wrapped up in homegrown corn husk wrappers) with either
  • Chicken (our chicken breast, poached and dressed with a garlic/Mexican oregano mash) and served with our canned Tomatillo Salsa (tomatoes, tomatillos, green bell and jalapeno peppers, vinegar, garlic, onions) with greenhouse cilantro and green onions or
  • Pork (shoulder roast from Providence Farm, braised in a bit of the above salsa and tomatoes; pulled, chopped) with Mole Sauce (mine didn’t have the usual 25 ingredients, more like 10:  the cinnamon/chocolate, ground/roasted local walnuts, bread crumbs from Wednesday’s bread, onion, garlic, more of our tomatillo salsa, dried homegrown paprika and jalapeno peppers, greenhouse thyme, oregano, and nonlocal cloves, salt, and pepper)
  • Greenhouse salad (of course)
  • Vanilla souffle (our eggs, someone else’s milk :( with Michigan sugar and nonlocal vanilla…no pics because my camera battery ran out

Okay.  That WAS a bit of a labor of love.  But:  I made the mole last weekend, the pork was leftovers from Wednesday night, and the chicken is terribly easy to cook.  With able small hands to help stuff and wrap, this was a fun meal to make and eat.

Viva!

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On family converts

Posted on March 25, 2010 | 9 Comments

Little hills of dirt marked with headstones:  graves of life, not death

Nothing like a deadline to get one motivated, eh?  Actually, this spring has been nothing BUT deadlines for me, professionally, personally, and garden-wise; throw a new hobby in there (goat milking and husbandry) and guess what?  The blog suffers!  I am sure you’ll forgive me.

Here’s the deadline.  As of two days ago, I finally planted the heat-loving crops (tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, husk cherries, okra) under lights in the basement.  If these were all just for ME, then I could’ve continued my seed-slacker ways, but no.  Many of them are for other people.  I have the school gardens to grow for, and then there’s my mother to consider.

Mom was out this weekend, and when inspecting the greenhouses’ contents, she said to me:  “You’re going to think I am completely crazy.  Please consider what I have to say before you say anything.

I want my own greenhouse.“

To which I of course said HOORAY!  So I ordered her up a 10′x12′ kit from the same outfit where I got both of mine.  I ordered a couple of other things for it over and above the kit, but…come Easter weekend, I should be pounding stakes in the ground in the back yard of her house in the dunes.  I will of course document it to show you how easy it is, even considering how she has no real soil to speak of (maybe 3″ deep).

This woman wants her homegrown tomatoes, tout suite!  Thus, my “rush” to planting.

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Posted in greenhouses, sweat

On sex and the barnyard

Posted on March 22, 2010 | 22 Comments

Let’s face it, people.  The male sex is not valued in the world of the farm.

It came as a shock to me.   A very parallel universe to the one I knew:  being of the female persuasion is actually highly valued if one is a farm animal.  All males are either quickly eaten or dispatched at birth/hatching.  This is NOT a hard and fast rule, of course:  being male won’t hurt your chances of growing to maturity if you’re a cloven-hooved creature, or a turkey.  You just most likely won’t get there with your scrotum intact (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats) or once you hit sexual maturity (turkeys).

I am not blind to the reason that female creatures are welcomed:  We desire the products of their reproductive organs (eggs, milk, more babies).  And even as a vegetarian I harbored no illusions that I wasn’t killing animals in my quest to have milk and eggs:  you need to get pregnant to have milk (duh!) and, the chicken DOES come before the egg…and the ratio of males to females in almost every animal grouping is 50/50, thus, for each egg-producing hen, one potential rooster chick was snuffed out.  The fact that you don’t even need male poultry to produce eggs further reduces their chances.

So it was with some sadness that I learned all three of our goats turned out to be boys.  Sigh.  And in my readings of goat-rearing handbooks, most dairy manuals were clear-eyed about this–a lot more clear-eyed than my usual gimlet-eyed self, too–that the most humane thing to do with newborn bucklings is to drown them in a water bucket.  “For every 500 males born, only 5 will find productive service as stud, and it most likely is not the one born in your barn,” is the way one manual put it.  Other suggestions were to skin them for their downy-furred pelts, or tan their hides for kid gloves.  (Eeps.  I am so not there yet, people.)

But in my usual take on the world, I knew the most responsible thing to do would be to do the responsible thing:  get them disbudded, castrated, and shot up with necessary injections, pronto.  Within their first week of life, then, they had their horns burned off, their immunizations, and their male parts disarmed.  They will all three find lives as either dinner or as cart-pulling bellwethers.  This is what is required if I want home-grown milk.

Likewise, one male turkey and one male chicken is all I require to have a self-sustaining (closed) poultry flock.  This is the first year we will not get chicks/poults from the store or in the mail, the first year then that we will have truly homegrown poultry (Thanksgiving Dinner and last year’s goslings excepted).

I harbor no illusions about what it is I am doing and what has been required of me to do it.  I am simply a lot closer to the reality of it than many meat-, dairy- and egg-eating people are; the choices pluck a touch harder on my heart-strings because I know and in most cases love these creatures.  But please don’t kid yourselves:  you’re subcontracting the killing if your hands aren’t physically wielding the knife.  And that is okay, as long as you know the animals have been well treated (for whatever their lifespan) in life and through death.  And if you don’t know, then you are, at the very least, being willfully blind.

Don’t be blind.  Support small ethically-committed farmers if you choose to eat meat, dairy and eggs.

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Posted in death, soapbox

On produce imperfection

Posted on March 20, 2010 | 11 Comments

Breakfast:  5 types of potatoes and blue and white eggs

Retrieving some weeny-looking potatoes from the depths of the chilly root cellar this morning, it occurred to me how few of my spuds were grocery store- or Martha Stewart-perfect.  I usually have to peel off a spot or two from the smaller ones before eating them.  This is not terribly unusual:  our clay soils are “heavy” and not the best for potatoes.  The very same potatoes were grown in the sandy soils of the school’s garden and they achieved monster, spot-free proportions…it made me momentarily wistful for a looser growing medium.  Momentarily, that is.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere.  Not all you grow looks perfect.  This is beyond okay:  the taste is reason enough to do it.  Taste, and a small smirk of satisfaction.

The school’s potatoes went mushy and sprouty at about twice the rate as the home-grown ones did:  a lesson learned for the children (eat them quickly) and a lesson learned for me (stop whining about your clay).

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Posted in food

Dark days, Week 18

Posted on March 18, 2010 | 9 Comments

With a nip in the air but a Spring jig in my steps, I prepared a rib-sticking meal for St. Patrick’s Day on Wednesday.  Slainte!

The greenhouse side of the meal:  clockwise from bottom, thyme, parsley, turnips, leek, carrot, and some gorgeous chives

Menu:

  • Irish Beef Stew with Parsley/Chive Dumplings: Stew meat (Providence Farms), our Purple Top and Gilfeather turnips, Mokum carrots, russet potatoes, Bleu de Solaize leek, wine vinegar and herbs; dumplings of Ferris Organics wheat berries, Creswick Farms lard, our milk, our parsley/chives
  • Colcannon: our potatoes, Des Vertus savoy cabbage, lacinato kale, fresh onion greens, garlic and goose fat
  • Greenhouse salad (mache/spinach/Brune d’Hiver lettuce) with buttermilk/herb dressing, Mokum carrots and Golden Self-Blanching celery
  • Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout beer for me!

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On messing with seed-starting

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 16 Comments

So.  Every year, in the broad quest to simplify (HAH!) my life, I try to jigger the seed-starting routine.  I abhor planting things under lights indoors; it makes me tense!  It needs to be done, though…but if I could shorten the season, it would stand to reason it would shorten my stress level.  To wit, Exhibit One:

Onion seedlings sprouting in the greenhouse!   These were planted on Feb. 22nd, so…the germination rate I have found is both better and about the same, speed-wise.  These guys are interplanting a garlic bed.  The whole 3′x6′ bed is full of little sprouts from the onion family.

So now I am asking myself:  how important is it I have my first tomato in mid-July?  Because if I can direct-seed them…

Oh: and here’s a friend I found today amongst a weedy carrot bed:All Hail Bufo Americanus

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Posted in greenhouses, nature, seeds

Dark days, week 17

Posted on March 14, 2010 | 7 Comments

All that’s left is soup for today

Two more weeks in the Challenge!  And I am beginning to see the end of the Dark Days, myself; harbingers of spring are everywhere around me now.  There’s no denying it (and Daylight Savings helps).

This week’s meal was fairly boring, but:  if my husband and daughter had their way, we would have this every. single. day. and not just every week.  And excepting the flour in the bread, everything else was grown and raised on this little piece of land of ours.  We had a friend over and there was much wine involved so no photos were taken of the spread itself; luckily, dinner tonight is soup from last night’s carcass…all the better to cure the hangover I truly have right now.  Ay.

Menu:

  • Butternut squash soup (one squash, one onion, our herbs)
  • Garlic-roasted chicken (our bird, garlic, and herbs)
  • Roasted root vegetables (carrots, turnips, beets, leeks from the greenhouses)
  • Mashed potatoes with chives and pan gravy (Burbank potatoes, garlic and regular chives, our milk(!); our cider vinegar to deglaze the pan; flour from Ferris Organics)
  • Whole-wheat sourdough bread (Ferris Organics hard red spring flour, my starter)

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

On spring busy-ness

Posted on March 10, 2010 | 24 Comments

Entirely too busy to post, so…thought I would show you the kids:  all four of them!

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Posted in dairy goats

On spring cleaning

Posted on March 8, 2010 | 20 Comments

We had an internet- and television-free weekend this weekend, intentionally.  This was the first warm weekend so there was plenty of spring cleaning to tackle, including cleaning out the bunny hutch.

You remember the bunnies, right?  Two BOY bunnies?  So yeah, rabbits to me are either salad-poaching varmints or, well, dinner.  So it was with some shock that Tom pounded on the back door with a “geddout here you HAVE to see this,” cupping a squirming little black thing in his hand.  “I thought it was a mouse!”  Five squirmy bundles later, and here we are.  Six little kits.  (Unfortunately, Tom had completely pulled out their nest in his rush to clean.  He had wondered why the rabbits hadn’t been peeing in their nest box.)

I am glad our daughter was with her Grandma and thus missed me cursing a blue streak.

One breeder, one vet  (and three vet techs), one middleman seller, and one “Oh I know rabbits, and yeah, these are both boys” friend later, but…DumDum knew all along that Wrinkles was a she.

(Incidentally, these bunnies won’t be dinner.)

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Posted in nature

Greenhouse update, early spring edition

Posted on March 5, 2010 | 7 Comments

Early March outside in SW Michigan, late April inside the greenhouses:  once the outdoor temps stay above +35F I will need to vent them during the day

It’s not all goatsgoatsgoats here all the time, though I have to admit that, like starting anything new, there’s quite a learning curve.  Every day I shave time off the milking routine, every day I have more time to shave!  The kids were born at a good time for me to learn, and improve:  it’s getting to be serious gardening season here, and I don’t want to miss too many windows of vegetative opportunity.

Water, water everywhere:  perennial condensation on the inside of the greenhouse plastic

We’re not hurting for water here in my corner of the globe.  Combine normal wet conditions, a shallow water table and clay soil, I hardly ever need to water either outdoors or indoors.  I have notions of hooking up a proper water catchment system one day; it’s fairly low on the priority list, though.  However, at this time of the year with these baking indoor temperatures, I do find the atmospheric moisture is not enough, especially with small seedlings.  Anything with root systems shallower than 5″ will be toast.

The platoon says “we could use more snow in here.”  Oh, and my arugula (behind, right)  is blooming, a sure sign that it’s getting too hot indoors.

So, I resort to my usual hee-haw method of water saving:  melting snow in buckets.  I also recycle the goat’s drinking water.  And, I am quite adept at catching the melting runoff from the gutters of the adjacent buildings.  For all the above, I employ my army of 5-gallon used paint buckets.  I am able to spread around about 10-15 gallons a day on the greenhouse beds if it’s sunny and hot.  It’s a pleasant task during my lunchtime “t-shirt light therapy” sessions!

10 of 12 beds in the “new” greenhouse:  all empty-looking beds have either seedlings, unsprouted seeds, or garlic in them.  Some nights I forget to put the covers back on, but everyone comes through okay the next day.

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Posted in greenhouses

Dark Days, Week 16

Posted on March 3, 2010 | 12 Comments

Monster leek, lacinato kale, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme…

Busy life tending busy lifeforms:  one still needs to eat!

Menu:

  • Savory Bread Pudding (ends of two homemade loaves from berries ground from Ferris Organics wheat; our eggs, the last of the milk share milk (hooray!); Bleu de Solaize leeks, garlic, thyme, sage, parsley, salt and pepper)
  • Herb-encrusted roast chicken pieces (our bird, our herbs) with pan gravy
  • Crunchy Kale Salad based loosely on this recipe (greenhouse Toscano/lacinato kale, mashed garlic, toasted bread crumbs from the above loaves; nonlocal EVOO and lemon from our lemon binge)
  • Vanilla pouring custards (milk share milk, Michigan sugar, our eggs, nonlocal vanilla bean)

Forgot to take a pic of the custards!  So quickly eaten…

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Posted in Eat Local Challenge

Are you kidding? or, The babies are coming!

Posted on March 1, 2010 | 19 Comments

The girl giving half-hour old #2 a bit of a hug.  That’s #3 to the left and #1 behind her.

Our goat girl’s due date was 26 Feb., but they can be born five days either side of that date.  I wouldn’t say I was a terribly nervous goat midwife*:  there are signs, I kept telling myself, and she’s done this before. So I knew we’d just have to watch and wait.

And wait.  After a while, I felt like a goat stalker!  Every two hours I would come through the door.  Every two hours she would just be as she always is, standing there looking out her window at the garden, chewing her cud, and looking quizzically at me:  “You, again?  What, is it snack time already?”

Her udder CAN’T get bigger, I said, when it hit bowling-ball size.  Then it got to be basketball-sized.  Then bigger.

Labor took about six hours.  Of course the first one was born when I had dashed into the house for yet another towel.  Our daughter was on duty, though: “Hi baby!  What a cute little thing!  Mama, I saw it come out!” and she had.

Birth is a messy business, but this was not nearly as messy as I had been led to believe.  And quick.  Exciting, and fun.   Miraculous, and so very mundane.

“Mama, I want to be a vet,” she said, as she gave #1 a bit of a bottle last night

*My duties were simply to wipe the babies off when they arrived, and get them pointed in the direction of dinner.  And call the vet if something went awry.

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Posted in dairy goats