This weekend we played a chaotic game of goat musical chairs. Or is it musical goats. Perhaps both, because a doe in season is quite musical…she never stops yelling. Singing would be preferred. Today we decided to take Kissy to Trinket to see about the mating stuff yet again…she’s been acting funky with a lowered amount of milk for 3 days now but today she was so bad on the milk stand that I couldn’t take it any more. “Take her to Trinket!”
However, in the end we decided to just put Trinket in with all the breedable “large breed” (that is, not Nigerian Dwarf goats, but all our goats are minis so none are very large) does. He got excited for a bit but Kissy had no interest in him whatsoever and he didn’t seem to mount her. So I finally said, whatever, we can try one of the other goats with her. In came our blue eyed Chaplin. It was love at first sight between the two of them. I swear hearts were coming out of their eyes. They walked around together. He bought her dinner. And then, he mounted her. Only…he couldn’t reach still.
The morning was actually super long and lots of things happened. Things happened that I never wanted to see. Things happened that I can’t get out of my brain. I’m pretty sure I’m permanently traumatized. In the end, with the help of a platform (a pallet with cardboard on top and a board nailed to that) we had a winner. Was it Chaplin or was it Burrito? Yes, Burrito also got invited into the pen because, well, Chaplin was in love but he just couldn’t get it all to work out. We may not know the father, but in the end, we’re about 90% sure it was a successful breeding. And in the end our fear turned from “the babies will have ugly ears if we use a Nigerian Dwarf buck” to “we won’t have a doe in milk if we don’t breed in the next two months! No milk for a year!” which caused a major panic. She’ll be due March 7th or thereabouts. (And by the way, the boys were zero percent interested in the four other does.)
This chaos of moving boy goats and moving doelings and moving Felicia who is too small to have any oops litters with Trinket and then the breeding which required two humans to help guide and hold…ugh…the trauma…took the whole morning and mid afternoon. Luckily I had woken up super early to start cheese making. Cheese making is basically heating milk til it reaches a certain temperature, adding the culture, allowing it to sit 12 hours, then strain the curds from the whey and hang up the curds to get more of the whey out. It’s an 18 hour process for chevre, which means at 2:30am my cheese will be done and I’ll be waking up to move it from hanging up to the fridge. It’s all worth it because tomorrow I’ll be making more chocolate peanut butter cheesecake truffles.
This evening after separating curds from whey I decided to make blueberry soda which is lacto-fermented. Yay for saving the whey and making good use of it; I haven’t used it before other than feeding it to the dogs and chickens. I know people pay lots for whey protein powder and here I have it “free” but I don’t actually want it in a smoothie…it just doesn’t sound tasty to me. We’ll see how the soda turns out (give me 5-10 days).
I did pull my sauerkraut after 4 days and really I should have left it alone for another week or so. I had read somewhere 3+ days is good, but as soon as I put it in the fridge I read this article about why you should leave it over ten days. And now that I’ve tasted it cold, it really could benefit from sitting longer. Oh well…next time.
The kombucha doesn’t seem to be doing much. I’m not sure if that’s normal or not. It does smell kind of kombucha like but the tea is so dark it’s impossible to see if a baby SCOBY has formed. That has another 3 days anyway until it may or may not be ready to move along to it’s second ferment (another process involved).
I’ve still been rocking the housewife/homesteader role this week and keeping up with good food; last night I made chocolate cupcakes that had chocolate chip cookie dough baked into the middle and a nice maple buttercream frosting on the top. I mean…does it get better than that? Not really.
This coming week I plan on starting a second batch of kombucha, this time with green tea instead of black. I’ll also be making more sauerkraut, this time hot pink jalapeno garlic kraut and turmeric sauerkraut. Also pickled onions, fermented carrots, and fire cider. I’ll do a post another time about fire cider, but just know it’s like a flu shot in a bottle. I still plan on making bread but had to postpone that this week after receiving ten pounds from Azure Standard and realizing that will not be enough for anything! The little “creature” similar to sourdough that I purchased from them has to be fed 1/3 cup of flour per day for the first week and then I think it gets a whole cup a day…that thing is literally going to eat the world! I feel like I’m living with the Little Shop of Horrors plant. Eep! We had a family meeting yesterday to name the little creature and decided on Francesca. Okay, my teenager thought I was dumb to call a family meeting over something like that and she refused to give any input. But the name I chose is a good one I think! 🙂
That’s it for now. Goodnight!
