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own chores and hopefully not working himself into a heart attack trying to keep up with a 43 year old so yesterday i went to marlboro 1 1 4 hours away to pick up hazel goatie girl who was being bred ew she smells awful buck smell is terrible i got some on my hands and even after three washings with various soaps they still smelled then i remembered fels naptha and the smell is gone great stuff i ve been making laundry detergent out of it with washing soda and borax makes great laundry detergent and is way cheaper and probably ecologically better and gets the clothes very clean without a bunch of perfumy smells works for me today i am going to cami and lisa s to look at a buck if i should decide to buy him i will keep him at kassy s she would feed him in exchange for using him and i would bring my girls there to be serviced sounds like a deal to me she has other bucks so it wouldn t be adding any smell to her place he will have to be spectacular however for me to sink money into a buck at 50 a pop to be serviced i could do a lot of breeding without having to deal with a buck the sheep are all well and happy moving into cold and winter as their fleeces get longer and longer the layers are beginning to lay well the ones who were new in june so eggs are starting to stack up in the frig time to take them to church and sell them again john and i granddaughter laura and her friend christina went to a square dance on friday night at the weathersfield meeting house it was fun i hope they do it regularly sonjohn and peter opted out apparently it wasn t cool enough to do or maybe it s just because i wanted sonjohn to go that he didn t never know with him he s as contrary as i am if not more so it snowed last night just a bit there are patches of white stuff here and there on the meadow nothing more than a squall really but exciting nevertheless when i took lizzie out for her nighttime toilette to see snow coming down and some sticking the wind is nasty though i look forward to real snow soon though i m somewhat conflicted because it would be nice to have sunny warmish weather for another month so sonjohn can get his house framed in today is the feast of christ the king which means next sunday advent starts the road to christmas i guess i should start to think about shopping though i ll do none until after advent starts bit of a purist that way i hope your thanksgiving was a blessed and happy time stay warm posted in uncategorized leave a comment post sandy november 1 2012 well though sandy wreaked havoc on the jersey shore and the coast of connecticut and gave new york city a thorough power washing it was pretty much a non event in this corner of vermont at least there were some gusts that sounded brisk and about an inch of rain or possibly a bit less but not so much as a branch down around here there was an old tree fallen on lines about 10 miles from here and my internet and phone were down for several hours so there must have been some issues to the west where the phone company is located halloween was also as usual pretty much a non event other than a few kids going with my son john and his kids to the roller rink in enfield for a halloween party and not getting in til 10 when they proceeded to eat dinner being an old traditional lady feeding 10 year olds dinner at 10 p m on a school night horrifies me but every day i am made aware that we live in different times many of today s 40 year olds even having been brought up civilized just don t seem to enjoy civilization as in reasonable bedtimes for kids changing beds cleaning keeping cat boxes attended to picking up and taking care of possessions we old biddies sitting around spinning group often bemoan the fact that we don t really know where our children came from or where the disconnect is in my case it certainly was not a reaction to cleaning police sort of bringing up maybe they just absorbed that i did it though i didn t enjoy doing it and decided life s too short to do stuff you don t enjoy no idea in any case enforcing house rules around here is sometimes difficult but i just can t get used to dirty clothes and wet towels in a pile molding and rooms that smell like cat boxes and dinners at 10 p m on schoolnights so the challenge is when to keep one s mouth shut and when to assert oneself geez i sound like an old lady don t i i think it s better to move on and talk about sheep and chickens the turkeys were done in a couple of weeks ago and i couldn t wait for thanksgiving so i thawed one out and it was the best tasting and tenderest ever i think it has made an enormous difference to raise them organically they were bigger at 4 months so i didn t wait to have them butchered til later 16 18 pounds is plenty big for turkeys for me and i didn t lose even one unheard of around here in years past i don t know if it was a fluke or the organic food but you can be sure i m sticking with the new regimen to see the meat birds seem huge to me this year again organic food they have apparently eaten a lot less since organic food is 25 a bag and regular is closer to 14 a bag and so far at 11 weeks it has cost me less to raise these boys organically than with normal food in the past and again no losses since the few lost in the first few days after arrival which i can t be sure had anything to do with food or here there are 64 of them and mark and company come on monday to do them in it s a good deal i don t mind raising them and have the time to do so but i m not keen on killing anything except flies mark has the kind of life where he s away on business trips often enough to make raising them next to impossible and certainly very inconvenient but he is good with the killing and processing so i raise he processes we spend one whole day together a year with my preparing soups for lunch for his crew and us and both cone away with chickens for the freezer for the year it s a good plan again i am so pleased with the organic food i know there have been recent studies suggesting there s no more nutrition in organic than non organic so i m not sure why with my sheep goats chickens and turkeys they grow better on less maybe it s that there s some elusive element in organic food that makes what nutrients there are in it more available to the eater which element is not in non organic food whatever it is it is now true that for my sheep goats chickens and turkeys it is cheaper to feed them organic grain than non organic despite the scary price tag on the bags and being lazy i really don t mind hefting half the bags of feed this weekend is the new england fiber festival at the big e in w springfield mass it is my least favorite show there seem to be very few vendors there that actually have sheep and a superfluity of people who buy in tons of wool yarn from somewhere and hand paint it etc some of it is very beautiful bt the venue is hence more a commercial one than an agricultural one they do try to have some sheep and goats there and the alpaca people marketers to the core are out in numbers at least they are people who own the animals they are peddling the fiber from i ll give them that though i personally would rather not knit than knit with alpaca i find it greasy and unpleasant feeling dull and lifeless and has no body doesn t hold it s shape not to mention i m allergic to alpacas and llamas both of which can give me a bad headache in a very short time so i avoid them like the plague besides i have a problem with animals that spit on me if they re unhappy i also have a problem with males who pee on their beards to make themselves attractive to females finding it repulsive so i won t be keeping any goat bucks on campus any time soon the girls go out to be bred and generally come back needing a long shower with sonething like murphy s oil soap which i m not about to give them so i just hope they get caught in the rain soon after getting back which is difficult since goats don t like rain or water in any form they tend to stay in the shed if it s raining or if their feet will get wet to go out for hay in the morning sheep on the other hand come out in rain snow sleet or hail for food and prefer sleeping out to sleeping in unless it s sleeting or hailing so anyway the agricultural busy tine is winding down after the meat birds go in the freezer and i pick up our beef next week there will just be the ruminants sheep and goats and the layer hens for the winter time to catch up on spinning knitting and reading by the way i m reading a spiritual autobiography for lack of a better term by phyllis tickle very enjoyable and thought provoking she has a marvelous turn of phrase i m guessing partly from having been brought up in the deep south in the 40 s and 50 s and partly because of her extensive education in the classics and a lifetime practically of being religion editor of publishers weekly one line i loved was that pollyanna was the saint of annoying compliance okay time to go feed the sheep and all the other critters how do i know that because lizzie my loyal companion and resident high energy border collie is whining that i m not on schedule we are supposed to go out at 7 10 and it s 7 19 how dare i her sheep need feeding posted in uncategorized leave a comment okay so it s been forever october 23 2012 what a crazy couple of months it s been first my son and grandkids moved in temporarily while he builds his house which hasn t really started yet i can see that it s not going to be three months but rather til the end of the school year at least it means we are living in three rooms instead of six have boxes of stuff piled all over the place for there s no room for them have lost some boxes like the one full of computer paper paraphernalia etc somewhere in the house or barn and there s not much in the way of privacy since the way to their part of the house is through ours then there was the coyote attack in early september or was it the last days of august it s all a blur at this point responsible coyote parents teaching their young the skills they would need when they went out on their own as in how to hunt attacked my sheep i lost 11 of the 15 ewes i had it was a shock we never heard them despite being up with all the windows open they and the sheep they were chasing all over 4 acres of pasture were totally quiet the silence of the lambs extends toward mature sheep it seems so i ve been restocking slowly and carefully and locking them in the shed each night then there were the turkeys to raise in the freezer this week and the meat birds hopefully in the freezer nwxt week the pigs to harvest and take stuff to smoker for smoking and curing and all the extra stuff required when you have children living in your house who have soccer practice games forget their trumpets need clothes for a funeral etc and there were are the winter shows and preparing for them finally i am down to one show left first week in nov new england fiber fest or whatever they call it at the big e in springfield mass and then i can settle down to a winter of spinning and knitting without the need to hurry up and get so many pairs of mittens done or so many pairs of socks etc i am thinking of making myself a grey aran sweater meanwhile john and i are beginning to think about our trip to england in june hoping to find at least one sheep show to attend and hoping to be able to afford to see billy elliiot in london i ve not done anything else with goat cheese making since the goat milk from the alpines or whatever kind of goats they were was just too goaty for any of us to be willing to eat none of us like that smell this weekend i take the two goatie girls nigerian dwarf to be bred hopefully it will be true that their milk which i ve tasted twice and find non goaty comparatively will make cheese that doesn t have that aftertaste that reminds me of goat smell there are and never will be any bucks on campus which i know cuts down on the nasty aftertaste smell that others find appealing and not nasty we shall see son and grandkids speak occasionally used to be a lot before they moved up here of farming and learning about animals but so far they ve had zero interest in anything but their own chickens we shall see about that as well two of the little goatie girls i bought for them but if they aren t going to learn how to care for them provide some housing and have a plan to buy food and other necessities they aren t getting the goats i d rather someone had them who would take care of them posted in uncategorized leave a comment the long hot summer july 17 2012 okay you re right i ve been absent from the blog for weeks it s been a very busy summer with the addition fo the goatie girls there are more animals to feed this summer putting up fencing and moving animals around takes a bit of time the pigs bless their pea picking little hearts have pulled apart their long term waterer so we ve been hauling water to them several times a day we finally got a new pig nipple and have repaired the waterer which will help enormously and i ve been busily making cheese and taking an oil painting class which takes up every saturday morning into the afternoon and this year we have a seasonal site at island pond so sometimes it s side out rotate as farm sitters move in and we head up morth it is marvelous up there where it is 10 degrees cooler and there s always a breeze off the lake i wish we could go up more often but between obligations appointments activities and animals we don t make it up as often as we otherwise would i love the oil painting even though it s outside often in the hot sun i am learning a lot though it is a bit frustrating as my style isn t the same as the teacher s style i am trying to learn his way of doing the paintings even though i don t like the result as much as i like the result when i do it the way i want to i m not giving up on the way i do it but think it is a good discipline to learn another way to do something and it will make my style when i return to it better in some way meanwhile i struggle with representing trees with smears of color it seems to me that he oil paints the way many water color paint and i mostly don t like water color paintings however i know i ve already learned a lot about color and balance and value and composition and a great process to arrive at a composition one of my weaknesses so it s been a worthwhile venture as to the cheesmaking i took a course while we were up at island pond at a local historical venue old stone village in brownington it was an all day workshop we made four kinds of cheeses and it gave me confidence to try it on my own at home so i ve made some mozzarella some queso blanco and out of some goat milk more queso blanco and chevre i really don t like goat milk or goat milk cheese though i am looking forward to trying it with my goats i have tasted the milk from nigerian dwarf goats and it doesn t taste goatie as other goat milk does the chevre was good except after swallo...