Goat milk

Look at this -- two posts in one month! Crazy, eh? Perhaps I can chalk it up to trying to "take it a little easy" i.e. staying home on occasion without weeding... Also, Mike and I switched from a satellite internet connection to a cell-phone-tower internet connection, which seems to be a bit faster. (Note that this also means that if all goes well, you're more likely to get upcoming baby pictures despite the fact that I won't have much access to the faster connection at work that I sometimes use to upload photos now.)

Anyway, what's new here? First of all, Wenatchee made it onto the AARP (American Association of Retired People)'s list of 10 best affordable cities to retire to for 2011, so if anyone needs a place to relocate to, apparently we're a good bet.

Second, Mike got to take a basic photography class at the community college for his job -- he's been practicing overexposing and underexposing and light and dark and this and that, so you might get some more-than-point-and-shoot photos here eventually.

Third, potential babyface seems to be doing well. Doc gave him/her permission to go ahead and come out anytime now, so we're suggesting earlier (but planning for later) :) It's funny because he/she squirms so much more strongly than he/she used that it makes me think of him/her as super buff now... although that's in-utero buff, I'm guessing that out-of-utero buff is a whole different ballgame.

And fourth, speaking of ballgames, Mike and I have been trying to decrease our time spent working and increase our time spent funning. So a couple of weekends ago we went to an Applesox baseball game



and this past weekend we went to see the Sound of Music on the ski hill in Leavenworth. Trip still pending to the Rocky Reach Dam where you can see salmon swim-jump up a fish ladder to get through the dam. Will keep you posted.

Despite the reduced proportion of weeding to sightseeing, I still have a lot of garden pictures for you. Here is Mike weeding, farmer-john-esque style.



and the goats liking the output.



And here are a few more shots of the garden,





plus some harvested arugula and watermelon-shaped zucchini





and potato and sweet potato plants





(we've also had a lot of sugar snap peas and kale and strawberries and a few raspberries and garlic starting, and I see green beans and broccoli/cauliflower and tomatillos on the horizon -- exciting).

This year our garden output is way more manageable than it was last year, when we were swimming in chard and couldn't keep up with it despite regular trips to deliver to the food bank and jars and jars of green tomato salsa. I have to admit that it's not because we were smarter about it this year, but primarily because we let the weeds take over in June, and so we're left now with just the strongest survivors (and it's been a cooler summer, and we didn't set up the drip irrigation quite as effectively as we did the sprinklers last year -- modifications pending, though). I do think that next year we'll manage to trim down the scale of planting and eventually find the right size space for what we can use. But in any case it's nice to see (and eat) stuff growing.

And the newest news from here is twofold -- first, we (i.e. Mike) almost finished putting up a fence around the little yard with our willow tree in it so that we can let the goats graze without having to lift them up over the temporary electric fence (there's a trap door from the main fence). Once that's done and we try it out, we can see how it works and how to perhaps down the line hook up the electric fences in other parts of the yard to get a more thorough goat grazing system going...



And second, we starting milking Frosty and Gigi. We had been planning to do this for a while now, but kept putting it off. We decided to milk only in the mornings, which means only separating the mamas from the babies at night and letting them nurse during the day. So one evening when I was out at a meeting, Mike went ahead and put all the babies into the kennel. And apparently they did great for about 4 hours. And then just before I got home they all started bleating and yelling and crying. And I'm a bit of softie when it comes to sad goats anyway, but apparently biologically speaking, baby goat bleats are close enough to baby human cries that they're known to be especially torturous for pregnant women and in some cases (but not this one) can even bring on lactation. So we put them all back together again.

We decided next time we'd try again once it was already dark and they were already in bed (i.e. in barn) for the night. So after the Leavenworth Sound of Music outing, we put Frosty and Gigi into the kennel. And it was totally fine. No problem. A little yelling in the morning, but nothing intolerable. Now, if you recall, Frosty hated being milked when we did it a year or two ago. And at first, she seemed to be a little better this time. By now, though, she has decided she can just outsmart us, and rather than spend a whole lot of time kicking the milking bucket, she just sits down on the milking stand. And she's heavy enough at this point that it's pretty hard to milk with 50+ lbs of goat sitting on your arms. Gigi had never been milked before, and while she kicked a lot the first couple of times, she might be getting a little better with time (?).

And perhaps because we started earlier this time (babies are 3 months rather than 5 like they were the last time), and because there are two goats being milked, and maybe we're a little better at it (?), production is up. Our high seems to be 2 cups a day with just one milking, way way way higher than we ever got with two milkings a day last time. So production is good, even if behavior still has a ways to go. Mike decided to check our dairy goat book to see if it said anything about milking problems, and apparently there's a tiny paragraph that says "occasionally some goats will kick a little, but usually it's not a problem." So either we're doing something seriously wrong with this whole system (which is totally possible) or we have ourselves some stubborn goats (also totally possible). Hard to know whether to use more negative or positive reinforcement, as neither seems to work all that well, at least superficially... we'll have to see how it evolves.

But meanwhile, goat ice cream is on the agenda, and at the very least Frosty and Gigi (and babies) have definitely learned that if they go happily into the kennel at night, they get hay all to themselves, and if they wait while everyone else gets fed in the morning and go into the barn when we let them, they get grain. And that they are totally on board with -- now it's just the standing patiently to be milked we have to work on.