Farmers Market

The Carrollton farmers market, Cotton Mill Farmers Market, began its 9th season a couple of weeks ago, and Jeff and I participated for the first time, selling eggs and soap. We are sharing a booth with Paul and Terra, who are selling eggs, produce, and crafts. Opening Day was rainy, so we set up under the awning in front of some shops near the usual site. Luckily, the rainy weather didn't keep folks away. Jeff and I sold all of the liquid soap we brought, and Paul and Terra sold all of their produce. We sold out of eggs too! Last weekend was not as successful, but we still did well. In the photo, Terra is holding one of the puppets she made using a gourd for the head. How creative! At the market tomorrow, Terra, Ellen, and Myra will be putting on a puppet show.

Jeff and I are planning to make some goat milk soaps soon as well as other natural body care products such as shampoo and lotion. Developing new products involves a bit of trial and error, though. We've been experimenting with ways of thickening liquid soaps, and we're trying to figure out how to make different liquid soaps. Our first attempt to make a liquid soap with softer oils was a bust. I'm also excited about making transparent soap containing luffa sponges. We still have some luffa left over from last season, and I just planted some luffa seedlings by an arbor that we constructed near Paul's garden at The Haven. Another dream I have is to produce our own natural colorants for the soap.

In other news, one of Paul and Terra's game hens hatched out 7 of our Partridge Rock eggs. We put 8 eggs underneath the hen when she went broody, but she seemed somewhat uncommitted to the task after she was moved to private quarters in a separate tractor. Every morning and periodically throughout the day, she was up and squawking before she resigned herself to setting on the clutch of eggs some more. She eventually added 5 of her own eggs to the nest, which is somewhat unusual. However, she set more consistently after that and managed to hatch out most of the PR eggs. Hooray! Our PRs don't lay very big eggs, but they lay pretty consistently. Right now we have 2 New Hampshire Red eggs under Wanda, another game hen, who prefers to wander around the farm instead of staying in the chicken coop. Our 2 NHR hens lay really consistently, and their eggs are bigger than the PRs' eggs.

It's been a rough past few days for our goats. We have separated the mommas from the babies, such that the milkers are at The Haven, while the babies are at Full Life Farm. Poor little Joanie has lost her voice, crying for Zella. However, the babies are old enough to be weaned, and now we can milk twice a day. With the extra milk we are making more yogurt and ice cream, and, hopefully, we'll make cheese again soon. We celebrated Paul's birthday last night with peppermint ice cream and a strawberry rhubarb pie, made with delicious fresh strawberries from the farm. Yum!!

Yesterday, more progress was made on the barn at The Haven. We put up 6 big posts and braced them. Unfortunately, the chain saw is having issues and needs some work done on it before we can put up more posts.

Rural life continues to be good. :-)

-Annie

Remus and Romulus

Yes, we have even more baby goats now. We adopted 2 one week old male kids from a local dairy. Typically, they kill the males at birth there, but they keep some to sell. These 2 guys were going to be sold as breeders if another of their (slightly better) does did not have boys. That doe did have boys, so the dairy gave us the slighlty less desirable ones. These guys still have great breeding and are pure Nubian. So we plan to raise one for meat and keep the other as our breeder for next season. Lily is mostly Nubian (her dad was pure), and Zella has some Nubian in her. Having more pure stock makes selling kids easier. We just placed an ad to sell Hoppy and her kids. Hoppy is friendly, but otherwise she is not a vey good goat. Hopefully, someone will be interested in a doe currently in milk. Anyway, the new babies will need to be bottle fed several times a day for the next 7 or so weeks. We are considering taking even more to raise for meat and help clear some of our land. We might have to come up with some system of feeding them, if we get a lot more.

In other farm news, someone else has responded to our ad to take down old barns in exchange for the materials. With the help of some wwoofers we were able to take down a small barn all in one day a couple of weeks ago. Now, we have signed up to take down about half of a 300 foot chicken house. This one will take us quite awhile, but we should be able to get a lot of great material for building our new barn at The Haven in addition to other uses.

-Annie

And Then There Were Ten

We now have 10 baby goats total at Full Life Farm and The Haven. Paul and Terra's goat, Duya, had twins last week: Savannah and Charleston. Vannah was tiny, weighing in at only 5.4 lbs. Both of them have the short La Mancha ears. Both kids are fine, but, unfortunately, Duya's milk is not. Duya was born with 4 teats, 2 of which were removed shortly after birth, but it appears that her udder did not develop normally, leading to bad tasting milk. Duya's sister, Vida, also has a birth defect: parrot mouth, a type of overbite. Therefore, it has been decided that neither of them will be bred anymore. The birth defects were the reason that Paul and Terra acquired the new buck, Pete Townsend, last fall, which has produced much better results. Now we will likely keep 2 of the female kids - probably Lily's girls, Sugar and Cocoa. Zella produces a little more milk than Lily, but Lily has the best disposition of all our does, and she has big teats for easy milking.

Most of the kids have been disbudded, like the 4 who posed so nicely for the above photo . A hot iron is used to prevent horns from growing. The kids cry while it is being done, but they seem to recover very quickly. I have mixed emotions about doing it, but it makes goats more sellable and makes them less dangerous to people and each other. Cocoa, on the right is our big acrobat. Below is a nice family portrait.

My father and sister and her 3 kids came to visit us last week, and the kids really loved the baby goats.

My sister and I celebrated our birthdays together - on a day during the 3 weeks inbetween our birthdays - just like when we were kids. :-)

On my actual birthday, two of our wwoofers, Sara and Violet, put on a lovely water dance performance at nearby Tanner Lake. They didn't exactly do the dance because of my birthday, but it turned out to be a good day to do it, which made the day more special. Jeff also cooked a fabulous dinner on my birthday. He made home made ravioli pasta filled with ricotta cheese made from our goats' milk. He also made chocolate mousse for dessert. It was fabulous! Below, Violet and Sara are posing for the camera in their aries/ram costumes (left), and they are in the middle of their dance on the right.

-Annie

Milk - it does a body good!!!

Well, the time has come to start getting milk from our girls. That has been pretty exciting, and we now are getting around 1/2 gallon of milk each day.

Something odd is going on with the girls' udders, however. Each of them seems to have one high performing side, and one under-performing side. It seems possible that if they were both working at full capacity we would be getting 1 gallon of milk each day.

The udders also appear uneven, which is a warning sign of mastitis - a bacterial infection of the udder and teats. So we used our mastitis test on them today, and it seemed to come back negative. Which was a good thing, except it left us without an explanation for the unevenness. (Lily had tested positive earlier in this cycle, but it was good to see she tested negative today.)

We are going to treat them with garlic balls. Which is to say raw garlic (which reportedly has the capacity to fight infection) mixed with molasses (which reportedly has the capacity to get goats to eat raw garlic) and ground oats (along with molasses helps hold the whole thing together).

We already did that some with Lilly, which presumably is part of her improved status.

Also, we counted up our eggs for the past month (ours plus Paul and Terra's so we don't have to try to keep them separate). Our count steadily increased, and for the last two weeks we gathered 181 eggs per week. That's an average of over 2 dozen per day.

So those are the goings on here, we're also applying for a building permit to build a barn over at this place, and Paul made another garden bed over here yesterday.

Jeff

Brief update

So here is some of the latest info. Now sitting here in The Haven (we're trying really hard not to call it "The Trailer" these days) I can hear the braying of goats outside. We have completed our first pasture, and two of Terra and Paul's goats are now living here and beginning the process of clearing our land for us.

Also, for anyone who cares Hoppy's triplets now have names. The boys names are (drum roll please) Big Boy and Andre, while the girl is Alanis. Their father was also a musician (Pete Townsend) in case you were wondering. (Just to make sure we avoid libel/slander their father is a goat named Pete Townsend, not the guitarist for the popular rock band The Who).

Jeff

ps. to learn more about Terra and Paul's place you can visit their website at:

http://www.full-life-farm.com

Baby Goats Galore!

Over the past week and a half, 8 baby goats were born, which brings the Davis and Feather/Currie combined herd up to 14 goats. Lily had twin girls last Tuesday: a chocolatey brown one named Cocoa and a white one named Sugar. They both have long floppy Nubian ears like their mother and wattles like their father, Pete Townsend, who is an Alpine goat.

Hoppy delivered triplets 2 days later: two boys and a girl. We haven't decided what to name them yet. Peter, Paul, and Mary is one of our ideas for names. Please, feel free to give us suggestions! One of Hoppy's boys is dark brown and weighed 2 lbs more than his siblings at birth. The other boy is medium brown with a cream-colored face. The girl is dark brown and polka dotted with black spots all over and a big white spot on her head, which is just adorable.

Hoppy wasn't cleaning her babies very well, so we had poopy butt issues just like last year. I guess Hoppy just isn't a butt-licker. So, Terra, Ellen, and I decided to shave their backsides (with Jeff's razor - don't tell him, though). Luckily, the kids were very tolerant of this process. And no more poopy butts to clean!
This morning, Zella also gave birth to triplets: 2 girls and a boy. The boy is white and the girls are brown. One of the girls has weak hind legs, which is probably the result of a selenium deficiency. We live in a selenium-deficient area, so all the kids have been given a supplement. Hopefully, the weak kid will get stronger soon.

We have started putting up fences at The Haven, and we are working on plans for a barn, so we can have more space for our expanding herd. We are fencing out a section in front of the house first, so we can clear more land there for gardening. Also, we can't wait to be able to look out our windows and watch baby goats frolicking. Someday, we will have a front porch, where we can sit and watch our animals. :-)

-Annie

Our new home - The Haven

Well, it has been some time since we posted anything here on The Deerfield Follies - whose title will probably have changed by the time this gets posted.

Since last we wrote, our living situation has changed dramatically. When last we wrote we had just graded the land at our new abode. After that it was brought out in two pieces, that were then put back together. Once they were both in place we spoke to Tracey, who moved it, and he told us that about 4 feet away from being in place the hitch broke off of one of the halves. We were lucky that didn't happen when the house was on the interstate or, in Tracey's words, "There would have been a mess."

So this is a pretty good shot of our new place. It is a doublewide, and as you can see we have put block around under it (as required by Carroll County Zoning) Our first night in our new abode Annie and I had just returned from DC, where Annie's friend Kimberly gave us a very nice bottle of Dom Perignon. It seemed like a great way to christen our new home. Here you see our new roommates/co-owners Paul and Terra and I enjoying some Dom.

Another useful gift we have gotten is our livingroom furniture, which was a gift from The Davis family who replaced it with something new. Here are Paul and Terra soaking up the luxury.

Finally, during the cold of January we used up perhaps half of our propane tank. We needed a cheaper way to stay warm, especially given Annie's need for tropical temperatures. We are now enjoying the warmth for which we are thankful to Bert who helped us with the cost of it as a (very literal) housewarming gift. The feds are also chipping in considerably as we got a "high efficiency" model which qualifies us for a tax credit for 2010.

We are now in the midst of painting, which is the last barrier to us having the interior all set up and moved-in feeling. After that we have plenty to do around the outside (barn, fences, and a porch.)

Keep on the look-out for updates as the work continues here at the Haven.

Jeff (& Annie giving her approval)