It's a Snow Day! Plus New Lamb

It's started snowing on Saturday, and we woke  on Sunday morning to a winter wonderland, we got about 4 inchs!

This is the new lamb, one huge boy, infact he is the only ram lamb from this year! 4 girls and 1 boy!!

Today I decided to go on a walk and take pictures  before the snow melted, because it was going fast.

Bo, of course had to come along.

This picture some how got turned on its side, but what kind of print is this??

 

Poor Little Lamb...

On Wednesday one of our new lambs broke its leg, either it was injured by a very hard butt, by Tess, or Jacques accidentally stepped on her foot while investigating the new babies.

The poor little girl's leg was completely snapped in half, and serves no use to her at all. But she is nursing and manages to keep up with her mother and her sister.



We decide to wrap up her leg, we also gave her banamine.

                     Vet wrap, pain killer and a needle to inject the pain killer.

While we were doing up her leg we noticed that she was grinding her teeth, which means they are in pain, we gave her the pain killer . That should help.

                                             Her finished look!

                        She CAN get around!!
                

As soon as we set her down she ran to her mother screaming "Mama, Mama, they almost KILLED me!

First 2012 Lambs

On the 27th of January Honey our Katahdin ewe delivered two twin girls! They were large and healthy and were up to nurse quickly. They are now 2 weeks old and are doing great!

Here are our girls!

Doing a bit of jumping!

This is Rose-mary

This is Lily, we might keep her!

I really love this picture of Rose-mary!

It's finally winter!

Last night we had the first snow of the season! Though during this morning's chores, all the animals were definately feeling the cold.

Everyone is out in the snow waiting to be fed! Brrr

The chickens are cold.

Even the geese are cold!

Oh and here comes Mr. Grumpy

"I'm cold!" "Feed me!"

It's time to get out Jacque's donkey coat ;) he's so cute in it!

Putting it on.........

And there we go!! He hasn't worn his coat since we got him :)

2010-2011 Overview

This is the first post in a long, long time! So I'm going to try to put a picture and a story for every month.



December 2010

As a Christmas present for my Father, we buy Jacques, a 3 year old standard gelded donkey.

Isn't he cute? Here he is!




January 2011

Just after introducing Jacques to the farm, Tess our Nigerian Dwarf Doe kids, and had twins, a boy and a girl.  Cricket on the left, Romeo on the right.
This picture was taken when they were a month old.




Febuary 2011

We decided we need a ram to breed the ewes this fall, so after checking around we find someone with a newborn "ramling" he can sell us. That's how we got "Hugo".



March 2011

March is our typical kidding season month , so I'll just post as many cute pics as I can.

This is Wesley, a 3 week old Alpine buckling.




This is Wesley just born.



Below is Daria, Wesley's twin sister.






Ben, and behind him his twin sister Bella.



Above is a picture of Daria



And ANOTHER picture of Daria,but this is her as a newborn.






April 2011

April is the month when most of our sheep lamb, so here's Honey, with her twin girls.



Here is a better picture of them, I am holding them. Note Honey is behind me making sure no harm comes to her lambs.





Okay and here's the story part of this month. We had three ewes due, Honey , Beatrice and Violet.
So honey lambed, no problem, Beatrice lambed, she was fine. So now it was Violet's turn, she was a yearling and she would be a first time mother. So one morning we go outside and check on every body, we see that Violet had lambed! One little boy it was so cute! She's up and caring for it, so we get her some water, and we back and there's another one!! We go omigosh! She had two!! Her first time, wow! So we got back into the house. A little later we come back out to check on her, we count the babies, one, two....three. Wait  a minute.. Three??? She had THREE babies? A first time mother having THREE is very rare, so we decided that it would be too much for her and decided to bottle feed one. So of course we decided on the runt. We weighed him and he only weighed ONE pound. He was a VERY needy baby.

Here's his picture!



I'm going to put a couple just 'cause he's adorable!!









Okay thats it for April!


May 2011

Okay, did I mention we had geese? Well we do and they decided to do some hatching! Nine little peeps!!



June 2011


Remeber how I said all our does usually kidded in March? Oh well I forgot Scarlett, Scarlett was bred in January of this year, right around when Tess kidded.  So this the story of her kidding.

Scarlet had a very hard birth this year. She had her first baby, Storm a buckling at around noon, he was born slightly breeched. 4 hours later Scarlett was still kidding and had not delivered her 2nd baby, finally after another hour she had it. Unfortunatly it was stillborn. And it was horribly breeched. Then minutes later she had Simone, a French Alpine Doeling.

Simone is in my lap, and Storm is contented eating my hair




Here I am holding Simone.




July 2011

So in July we went to france to vist family, here are some pictures I toom while was there.




 above:A castle








Above: Do you see all those dots in the right hand corner? Those are sheep!



August 2011

Home at last!! Now we have to get back to milking!!



September 2011

So now we have bucks to think about, we usually breed our does in October.

Ordered our broiler chicks, 100 this year!


October 2011

Okay, so Scarlett was bred first, followed by Delaine, then Bijou. I guess Scarlett isn't up to her usual January tricks lol.


Heres the buck we used!

He's one stinky guy!!





November 2011

With the help of some of our friends we butchered the broilers.




December 2011

On December 24th , 2011 our  Great Pyrenees, Belle, passed away due to cancer.



And also for Christmas I recieved an incubator, so I have two dozen eggs due hatch in January. Peep Peep!



Okay that's it! Happy New Year!!!

Test Results!

I had very exciting news today.  My entire herd tested negative for CAE and brucellosis for the second year in a row!  Yeah!

Goat's Milk Cheddar

This new cheese making saga commenced when I had a lot of milk and the kids were at Nama's for the week in August.  As anyone with children knows, following recipes, especially detailed, temperature critical ones, can be difficult when you're a mother.  I assume I am not the only one who has forgotten the sugar in the cake!

The instructions were from Ricki Carrol's book, Home Cheese Making.  The milk from my goats of course!  It was absolutely imperative that I try out my new cheese molds that I acquired from L'Alliance Pastorale.  My SIL, Lea, so gracious that girl, loaded them into her suitcase for the flight over the Atlantic!  Merci Lele. 

Little did I realize that the huge amount of milk utilized would only give me enough for one small mold:  again I can thank my french family who has supplied me with their leftover molds from commercial fromage blanc.  Pretty handy to have them and they're free!

Above is the curd that will soon be ladled into the mold and pressed at various pounds of pressure in my fabulous, last minute cheese press.

Call it your cheap man's press, or really, a press for those who don't have the time to build one and won't buy one when she has a garage full of perfectly good fir!  At any rate, what a fun evening trying to keep it stable.  Kind of like building a  card castle.  Yet, it worked.  Below is the pressed cheese.

Looks beautiful, but here comes the tricky part!  It must be aged in a cave at around 50-55 degrees with a relative humidity of about 90% for a minimum of 3 months.  This is where the dorm fridge comes into play.

And yesterday, after weeks of just about forgetting about this nice specimen of bacterial action and transformation, I finally cut it open.   The results were pleasing:  smooth, a bit dry, but with good flavor.  I, of course, had no cheese wax, so had used butter as a covering.  It probably wouldn't have dried out so much.  It was still good though!  It even had a tiny hole of blue mold; wonder where that came from.

I was so happy to enjoy this with my friend, Anna, from Seitview Farm!  I thank her tremendously for the photo above.  Yum!