goat teat pictures

I posted these pictures so some fellow goatherds could help me with advice on what these bumps are.  If you have any input I'd love to hear.  I'm hearing that they may be plugged pores.  Which would be a great relief.  Thanks all.

New Blog

Hi there, I've started a second blog.  It still deals with farming, but it is more focused on the therapeutic value of a farming/homesteading life.  It is more directly concerned with mental illness and addiction.  It is called, Farm Therapy.  I think it is pretty cool.  I'll continue to post in Novitiate Homesteader, especially items related to Christian spirituality and Homesteading skills.  Thanks and I'll be in touch soon on both blogs.

Blessings,

Home Ec. insomnia...

I've got insomnia. Which is is pretty amazing since I spent the last three days cutting, splitting, and loading firewood in the mountains.  We moved six truckloads of wood.  I'm sore as can be.  Everyone else in the house is fast asleep. 

So, what do you do when you can't sleep?  Fortunately or unfortunately I get busy around the kitchen.  I say unfortunately because this probably keeps me more awake than I was to begin with.  Tonight I've made yogurt, made Feta cheese, emptied the milk fridge of expired milk, and done a ton of dishes. 

I sold the goat kids, so now the mamas are producing a ton of milk.  We are trying to find customers for the goat milk, but I've only had sporadic interest and no takers. I'm getting a gallon and a half per day from the tow does.  Even with the cheese making that is way too much goat milk to deal with. 

We really need to find a new name for our new farm. Our old farm was named the Wandering Moose Farm but there are no wandering moose here. Just wandering elk.

Well, I've got to go work on my cheese.  Cheers, Russ

firewood

We've been up in the mountains cutting firewood for next winter.  We've gone up the last two days and will be going up again tomorrow.

Cutting the cheese...

I've really been picking up on the cheese making.  Due to different laws in Oregon, we are not able to sell cheeses at the farmers market.  It''s turned into a really enjoyable (and edible) hobby.  I've recently made Feta, Guoda, Cheddar, Romano, and Pepper Jack.  I've acquired a "wine refrigerator" to use as a cheese cave.  That is, a place to age my cheeses that I can hold them around 55 degrees and at around 80% humidity. 

I'm so proud of my beautiful cheeses.

We've been settling into our new place.  We had a housewarming potluck after which two of the boys had friends over to sleep over.  We had three 10 year olds and two 12 year olds in the house.  Not to mention our teenager just for good measure.  it was a pretty hectic evening.  I have trouble with "social phobia" so I was pretty burnt out by the time all the kids finally went to sleep. 

We sold two of the goat kids, so now we are going to be swimming in goat's milk.  We will be trying to figure out the new milk laws in Oregon.  It was so great to live in Idaho where I could sell raw milk at the food co-op. 

We've been up in the mountains cutting firewood for next winter.  We will be going back tomorrow and the next day as well.  Hard work, but it is a good family activity.  Joel Salatin writes that there is nothing so good for working out teenage energy as woodcutting.  Getting the kids away from the television and out into the woods is a fantastic way for them to channel their teenage angst.

I'll try to come up with some photographs today of our excursion into the mountains.

Working hard in a natural setting is good for all of us.  It really reminds me of the magic of God's good earth.  We are so truly blessed.

Black Sheep

This is our Suffolk Sheep Bella an her new lamb.  A real Black Sheep. They live in with the goats for company.  The are really enjoying the new place.  We've started separating the goat kids from their dams at night to increase our milk production.  We've been getting about a gallon in the morning between our two that are in milk  The kids are on their mamas all day an we aren't milking at night.

Fancy, our Jersey cow, is still producing a gallon and a half once a day.  We will be breeding her early in May.  We were going to breed her to another Jersey, but I think we've decided to breed her to a small angus instead an to raise the calf for meat.  It's a toss up. 

Things are kind of upside down here with the move, but we'll get through it.  The boys are in transition and adjusting.  Jenny and I are in transition and adjusting.  It seems like the animals are handling the move the best out of all of us. 

neither of us have any idea how to shear a sheep.  I contacted the local FFA to see if they had any students who could teach us.

Well, goodnight and blessed be.

An unexpected turn of events

Well, we are no longer at the farm in Idaho.  We've moved to a rental farmhouse in Oregon.  Not at all what I planned or expected.  But then, you never know where Go might take you once you start walking   We are living only three miles from Jenny's parents, which is part of the reason we moved.  There are several pros an cons to this move, but in general I'm happy with it.  We've brought two Jersey cows, our three purebred Saanan goats, and a couple of goat kids.  There is a beautiful spring fed creek running through the pasture and you can see the Eagle Cap mountain range on a clear day.  I can't really complain. 

We also have internet at the house!  Maybe I'll start to revitalize this blog. 

It'll be a challenge for me to meet an make new friends, but I went to a nice potluck breakfast this morning with some new friends in recovery and I'm sure I'll make friends through church. 

I've been  making a lot of cheese lately.  Some of my most recent adventures in cheesemaking have been a Guoda an a Romano.  The temperature is not right to age them correctly, but i'm hoping they turn out.  I need to buy a "wine refrigerator" with good temperature an humidity controls.  Something that woul allow me to age the cheeses at about 50 degrees with 80% humidity.  I'll keep you posted.

Hopefully I can find the time to blog more often now that I have internet at home.

Until next time, blessed be.

a ministry of food

“if you have a yearning in your soul to grow things and minister healthy food to people, to live an agrarian life with your children and grandchildren playing around your feet, then an opportunity exists for you.”  You Can Farm, by Joel Salatin

What a wonderful thought from the introduction to Joel Salatin’s great book.  I especially like the phrase about “minister(ing) healthy food to people.”  It encapsulates my feeling about what we are doing here at Wandering Moose Farm.  We are providing a product but more than that we are performing a service to the people who consume our healthy food and it is a form of ministry.  Americans are sick with consuming deadly food-like substances, and we provide a healthy, local, life giving alternative.  Real milk and real artisan cheeses.  What a blessing to be able to serve in this ministry.  What a blessing to be able to satisfy the yearning in my soul to grow things.  What a blessing to be able to live this life with our children living, working, and home schooling on our farm.  What a blessing it is to eat the food we grow and raise here on the farm.

One of the main thrusts of Salatin’s book, which I haven’t finished reading yet, is that you too can live out your farming dreams.  If you can dream it, you can do it!  We are not where we hope to be yet, but we are a lot farther along the path than we were ten years ago.  Our farm is growing and evolving.  It’s been a rocky, sometimes crazy path, but we are getting there. 

You can’t get here from where I was.  In fact, you can’t even see here from there.  But you can.  It’s possible, and it’s a miracle every day.

Help. Thanks. Wow.

I am reading the new book by Anne Lamott, Help. Thanks.  Wow.:  The Three Essential Prayers.  We began reading it aloud as we drove back from Oregon and got through the introduction.  The book opens, “I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple.  Help.  Thanks.  Wow.”

What a reassuring read.  Our prayer time, whether it is my wife and I or whether it includes the whole family, does in fact mainly consist of these three categories of prayer.  “Help me be a better husband, thanks for this wonderful family, and Wow what an amazing life we have-how did we ever get here.”  I think the category we need to work on most is the Wow category. 

Wow-what a beautiful sunset.  Wow-what a beautiful child we’ve been blessed with.  Wow-we are overwhelmed.  Wow-God has been good to us.  It is good to have our prayer life challenged and enriched by such a splendid author. 

We arrived home yesterday evening after a wonderful visit with family in Oregon.  Tired from the road, we only did a cursory check on the animals.  They are all OK, but I’m looking forward to spending a little more time on them today.  Mostly our farm sitter did a fantastic job.  He’s a great young man.  Anyway, I’ll be doing some animal care this morning.  I’ll be cleaning and filling water troughs, feeding mineral to the goats, inspecting a cut near Whisper’s eye which happened before we left, fixing the lights in the chicken coop, trying to handle the new sheep, and maybe even trimming some hooves.  The list is always long.

There’s always a million things to do, but I need to just pick a few and stick with them in order to keep from getting completely overwhelmed.  I’ll probably try to get some goose hunting in this afternoon. 

Looking forward to another wonderful day on the farm.  Wow, I missed it even though it was nice to have a little break.

Cracklin's

Merry Christmas!  We were in Oregon at my wife's family's home.  We needed some last minute lard to cook our turkey with, and we didn't have any.  We did have 25 pounds of unrendered pork fat and decided to make lard.  We chopped the fat and put it in a crockpot overnight.  Not only did it make us some great lard, but it left us with a whole mess of cracklin's.  Cracklin's are the by product of lard making. They are a crispy, salty treat.

What a wonderful visit.  We are headed off home tomorrow and back to our farm.  It'll be nice to get back to the animals, but it was also nice to have a break from the daily animal chores.  Our wonderful farm sitter handled all the chores for the few days we were out of town.

Whisper, one of our goats and one of our best milkers, injured her face right before we left.  Apparently she is fine, but I would like to see her for myself.

I hope this season finds you blessed with family, friends, and good food.  I know we enjoyed our cracklin's Christmas morning.

envisioning your homestead

Wow!  Jenny and I discovered a really amazing new e-book recently. It's called, “Your Custom Homestead:  Awakening a Fresh Vision ofHomesteading”  by Jill Winger.   It is a great tool for refining your vision and the direction you’d like your homestead to be going.  Whether you are homesteading in an urban setting, dreaming of your own piece of land, or have been doing this for a while it is a really fun and productive way to spend a few hours.

The book goes through a series of exercises to help you create a mission statement, a five year plan, and long term goals for your homestead adventure.  I’ve been at this for a few years now, and I’ve always had dreams and goals, but I’ve never, until now, sat down and tried to answer questions about WHY I am doing this and what I hope to accomplish.

I’d recently been becoming frustrated with the fact that I’m not making money homesteading.  While working though this book, it became clear that I was asking the wrong questions.  I wasn’t in homesteading to make a living, at least not a financial living, but I was in it to make a life worth living.  The plan had always been to teach part time to support my homesteading vision.  When teaching became too difficult for health reasons, I tried harder and harder to make money at the farm.  In the process I just became more and more frustrated.  Reading this book and working on the exercises helped me let go of the frustration.

Jenny and I sat down and created a vision and a mission statement.  The brainstorming and mission statement didn’t involve anything about making money on the farm.  The mission statement had to do with spiritual growth, raising kids in an atmosphere of love and joy, being good stewards of our land and our animals, and growing and eating healthy natural foods.   What a freeing experience.

After reading this e-book, I started to think about writing my own e-books.  I was, after all, an English teacher for 20 years.  I know a little about writing.  I’ve been a little brainstorming about what topics I might want to write about.  I’m having fun with it.  I hope you are having fun on whatever your personal adventure in life is.

Blessings,

Salami

I made some venison salami over the weekend.  It turned out well.  It looks amazing and tastes great.  The texture is not quite perfect, but I can’t quite think of what might make it better.  Maybe it’s simply the use of venison instead of beef that makes it not quite like good deli salami.  I use about ½ venison and ½ fatty pork butt.  I adapt a recipe from Rytek Kutas’s book Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing.  It is sort of the sausage maker’s bible. 

I’m going goose hunting in the pasture in a little bit.  It’s 4:00 am now and I’ll probably go out there at about dawn.  It’s just so peaceful to sit in my blind and watch the sun rise.  The goose don’t really begin flying until an hour or more after the sun rises, but I just enjoy sitting out there.  There’s a little snow on the ground and the temperature has warmed up to about 30 degrees.  The last time I went out goose hunting the beef cow decided to get all friendly and cuddly with me.  Not actually such a good thing.  Cuddling with a 900 pound beef cow is kind of scary.  I eventually had to fire the shotgun into the air to get her to give me some space.  She was definitely invading my space.  I’ll make sure to feed the cows before I walk to the back of the pasture.

My wife read Psalm 139 to me last night before bed.  “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.”  The context of our conversation was that God knows us and loves us anyway.  I liked the verse, “I praise you , for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  We are indeed wonderfully made.  I need to remember that.  I was feeling a little down on myself because I didn’t spend my time alone, while Jenny and the kids were gone, as productively as I would have liked.  I had imagined that I might spend my time in work and contemplation.  It didn’t really turn out that way.

Maybe I’ll take my camera out with me this morning.  I’ve been meaning to take some pictures of the farm in winter.  I’ve been a little remiss in the photograph department.