Advances in Milking and Cheese making

First, how in the world is it September already!? Can we get about 6 weeks more of mid-August, but without all the fires and smoke this time?

With the beginning of fall harvest upon us, I could talk about all the food stuffs coming out of the garden and all the canning and such I've been doing, but NO! This post is all milk and cheese!

I am a slow hand-milker and Cupid is/was an evil creature, so obviously we needed a milk machine. This season I've been using it to milk Frannie and Margo. It really wasn't much of a surprise after using the machine twice a day for about a year and half on multiple animals, it up and died. I've had another milk machine in mind since I knew this was eventually going to happen, but I had hoped for at least a few more months and was not at all prepared for it's demise.

Turns out that Keith was going to get me my new dream milk machine for my birthday, so I just had to order it a little early!

Say hello to the Segel Milking machine!




Why is this awesome? You mean besides that I don't have to hand milk, like I have been doing very, very slowly every morning for the past week? Well, it doesn't have a motor that can die. Instead, it is a wall mounted, vacuum pump, that is super quiet, fast, and efficient. I freaking loved using it this morning! And it will be so easy to train someone to use it when we're out of town-hopefully!

But what to do with all this milk? This summer I've been making A LOT! of Margochego, but making a double batch has proved kind of hilariously difficult. Trying to press multiple cheese molds with a combination of a cutting board and tupperware containers full of change to weight this down is sadly not very effective! But this is!



Yay for birthday cheese press! The inaugural pressing was none other than a triple batch of beautiful Margochego. It started out looking like this:



And ended up looking like this:



Now they are spending the day in a heavy salt brine. I'll wax them and then try not to eat them for the next 4-6 months.

Not eating them is the hard part. We've cut into a few wheels, and damn they are good! I've got a couple dozen or so wheels of Margochego, pecorino romano, Iberico, and beer infused cheeses that I certainly hope will get us through the winter. Margo (the milk sheep) won't be in milk much longer and soon we'll breed her an wait for her to be in milk again next spring. We will still have Frannie in milk, but with only 2 quarts a day from her, there won't be much cheesemaking after October or so.

But we still have both of them in milk now and I've got to get back to a batch of beer cheese!

Summer Update

I've been meaning to write for a while, but somehow the days always get away from me.

Milking in the morning turns into making cheese, then taking care of garden stuff, then damn it, there's a baby goat/lamb/turkey caught in the fence again, then I milk again, then crap I forgot about dinner and I still have to do evening chores, then it's morning again and we start all over.

But today instead of the unseasonably hot, sunny weather we've been having, it's been thunderstorming for most of the day-I could use a quiet, cool day like this at least once a week!

This crazy hot weather hadn't been kind to the a lot of the garden. Snap peas, most of my greens, even the broccoli seem to just want to be done with growing already, while the green beans are going crazy and I have dozens of sunflowers that haven't bloomed yet but are taller than me!




It's the greenhouse that is exploding, and while we don't have any ripe tomatoes yet, they're not far. We're already getting both hot and sweet peppers, and I wouldn't be surprised it we had ripe tomatillos by next week! <

I can't believe I written since we brought Margo home. It took a while but milking her twice a day is just another part of the routine here. Granted part of that routine is lining Margo up next to the milk stand, then lifting her onto it-twice a day, every single day. One of these days she'll jump up there-or maybe she won't-either way her milk is amazing! I've made a crazy amount of cheese with it, but won't know for 6-12 months, when we finally cut into it, if it's any good! Well that's not competely true, we use her milk in the everyday stuff like yogurt and cottage cheese and those are great, but cutting into an aged wheel of homemade pecorino romanno is a lot more exciting!



Every morning is the same: I hear Margo yelling at me to milk her before my alarm clock goes off. And every day she follows me into the milk stall, knowing full well that she gets milked second. I always milk Frannie first so that I can put her back with her kids as soon as possible in the morning and Margo is usually content to have a little pre-milking snack while I take care of Frannie-but not always!





Oh, and Margo is looking a little different than last time you saw her-she got sheared! I got to help shear her, but thank goodness hired someone who actually knew what she was doing! It is a lot easier to milk her now that she is sheared!



Morning milking is my favorite time of day. There are so many animals in that little stall and they all so loud, and goofy and itching to get outside and start their day.





The duck, oh man the ducks. We had three straight weeks of rain in May and the back of the pasture flooded and it was so deep by the pond that we stopped putting the ducks up at night, I just couldn't get back there. Of course a predator took notice (don't know what) and killed a couple ducks and the surviving ducks seem to disappear into nooks and crannies in the pasture. Then 4 emerged, then another, then another. Then another, but trailing behind her were 6 ducklings! yay! She was cautious of me and I haven't been able to close her up at night to try to keep her and her brood safe, so it's not surprising that only one has survived.

Then today I saw our grey duck that I have seen maybe 3 times in the last month. She was swimming at the edge of the pond when I walked over and I was a bit surprised to see what she had with her!



Hopefully more from this bunch survive!

Time for evening chores!

Milking Margo

The suggested traditional 9 year anniversary gift is willow/wicker or leather. If I got, say, a wicker laundry basket with leather handles, I'd probably smack Keith over the head with such a crappy gift. Instead, I got a combo of the traditional 7th (wool) and 14th (animals) anniversary gifts all wrapped in a sheep named Margo.

An extremely enjoyable wine tasting weekend in Walla Walla was mostly just a ruse to get us mostly to the tiny town of Irrigon. A family there is moving soon and is looking to re-home a number of their farm animals, including a few East Friesian milk sheep. It took awhile to convince Keith that getting a yearling milk sheep was the best idea ever, but finally he came around!

They had 2 yearling sheep (that just means they are in-between 1-2 years old), one was all white and the other (the cuter one) was brown and black. I was leaning towards getting the black one, based solely on looks, but a few things changed my mind. One is that we are kinda giving up on the Snowy having kids this year. Yes, she's fat and acting strange, but we really only have about a week left to be expecting kids and we just don't have the confidence that she is actually pregnant. I was planning on milking 2 animals and producing cheese for what was hopefully a nice amount of milk, but now it seems that we have just Frannie.

Then I got an email from the woman selling the sheep that one of the yearlings was in milk-not giving very much because it's her first freshening-but still! That changed my mind! Having someone else do the work of breeding and milk stand training this animal is priceless. We also didn't have to take her lamb home-thankfully! Her lamb is already 2 1/2 months old and ready to be weaned-but that also means that we don't have much more time to milk her, as milk sheep are only in milk for about 5 months-and that is if we do everything right.

Say hello, Margo!



Nope, she's not the cutest creature, but hey, who's judging! We had to start milking her twice a day as soon as we got her home. She had been milked once a day at her old home, but was also nursing her lamb. Even though Margo is a very tolerant sheep, it is taking both of us to milk her. We have a different milk stand set up and she is just not digging it.

The first time milking her we did get her on the stand, but this is what she did.



So, that didn't work. We ended up working together to hold her on the floor and milk her that way both that night and the next morning. I've been working with her, to get her less skittish and more comfortable around us and the stand and it seems to be working, but it still takes the both of us. Hopefully we figured out a different plan soon!

And I already made some cottage cheese!



I asked the kid on the farm what her name was and she responded that only little kids name animals...I have to disagree! I decided on Margo because Manchego cheese is my favorite sheeps milk cheese and I aspire to make it, but that just didn't fit. I think Margo is a nice, kind of abbreviated version of Manchego. And now I'm hungry for cheese!

Frannie's babies are still the cutest ever. I milked Frannie for the first time this morning and while I only got about a quart and half, I still count it as a success.



If anything changes with Snowy, I'll let you know!

Frannie: First time momma

It has been obvious for a few months now that our little goat Frannie was going to have her kids well before Snowy. While Snowy only looks a little fat, Frannie has been as wide as she is tall for the past month or so.



This past Friday, Frannie was acting a little funny and her udder seemed a LOT bigger than it had been in the past couple weeks, so I'm thinking today could be the day! Of course I have plans I can't cancel. All day I'm quietly freaking out in my head, hoping Frannie will just wait until I get home. And she does.

Saturday she tucked herself in the corner of the barn and spent the whole day there. I would peak in and check on her from every hour or so, hoping this wouldn't last through the night. At 3:30 pm she was just quietly sitting there, by 4:45 she had already had one kid and the other was on it's way out. Both Keith and I had been outside almost that whole time and I swear she didn't make a peep! And thankfully no babies born in the pasture this time!

Frannie had two girls! A clone and a little white and black one. I talked to my friend Kate who I got both Frannie and Snowy from and she said that Frannie comes from a long line of clones, so I guess we can expect more in the future!



Names. Names are so hard. When I first saw these too I immediately thought of the movie Bambi, watching the tiny brown goat kid trying to find her feet, then falling to the ground, just like Bambi-but using that name is just too obvious-so maybe Faline and Flower, that would be cute right? But it just didn't feel completely right.

I was thinking of Kate and when took Frannie and Snowy home and it finally came to me: Ruby. Ruby Peak Farms is the name of Kate's farm! That's perfect!

So meet Ruby!



And her sister Pearl. Little Pearl has wattles. Wattles are just kind of big, hairy skin tags that are common in dairy goats, but that sounds like they're gross. They look more like an extra accessory, maybe even little white pearls.



I've said it before and I'll say it again: Goat kids are superior in cuteness to all other baby animals! Yes, even that pasture full of lambs cannot compete!




I love this shot: Frannie, I'm pretty sure she's yours!



Yesterday was their first day out in the pasture. It started well, but Frannie was not the most attentive mom, to the point where I think she may have forgotten that she even had babies. Thankfully my friend Andie was over and together we put the new little family in back in their own stall, where they spent the rest of the afternoon until this early afternoon. It seems to have done the trick as Frannie has been a calm, but attentive mom all afternoon.

Of course bouncing little goats call for video instead of just pictures! I have been taking way too much video!



As predicted, Snowy will be the last one to have kids. I think we have a few weeks before her kids will be here. There are these great kidding calculators on-line that help you figure out when to expect kids. For Frannie I plugged in the earliest day we put them in with Randy-Thanksgiving. For Snowy, I put in one of the last days of their stretch of time with Randy-Chistmas. I think we should expect kids around May 22-a full 20 days after Frannie had her girls.

The sheep and lambs are doing great. The lambs are growing like weeds and are still super cute!



I feel so lucky that all the births have gone so well this year! I hope I'm not jinxing it with only one left! Now we have a couple weeks to enjoy spring, get to work in the greenhouse and garden before our last round of babies!

Coco, Lulu, Ginger

And just like that, lambing is over. My prediction of Ginger lambing first, then Coco, then Lulu...with maybe Frannie having kids before Lulu had lambs was completely wrong. No surprise there!

It was Coco who had lambs first, this past Sunday. I'm sure she was enjoying the warm, sunny day as much as we were. I'm guessing she was thinking: what the hell, I'll go out to the furthest corner of pasture and go into labor while Keith and Ellen think they're going to have dinner, which is exactly what she did. Thanks Coco!

Pretty much as a soon as it was clear she was in labor-a sheep having contractions is really, really obvious and loud-she was delivering her lambs. First was her female little clone, then an all white boy, and thankfully that was it! After both lambs we cleaned off and had nursed from Coco, we cleaned their umbilical chords and carried the sweet little lambs into the family stall in the barn, with three ewes following us in. This was by far the easiest lambing this year! Coco is such a good mom that we are thinking we're going to keep her little girl to breed next year-I'm thinking of naming her Chanel-but names have a habit of evolving around here, so we'll see!




Ginger was so huge and was acting kinda funny on Monday that I stayed up to keep an eye on her Monday night. She refused to go into the barn and Lulu was steadfastly by her side-again in the far corner of the pasture, I just sat out there and watched them for a while, but nothing was happening, so I finally came inside to get some sleep. I fully expected Keith to wake me up with news that Ginger had lambed in the middle of the night. But nope!

Yesterday, Tuesday, I let Coco and her lambs out of the barn and I just hung around to keep an eye on the two preggos and watch the lambs jump around all over the place. All day yesterday Lulu was scratching at the ground (a sign of labor) but there was no goo....so I just kept watching. Lulu tactfully waited until we were finished with dinner to start lambing, but really I think it would have been better to have a little daylight!!

She also had her clone first-but her clone is male!-and an all white lamb that is a girl. Again, we waited for her to clean them up and for both of them to nurse before cleaning them up and taking them to the barn. It was the taking them to the barn that proved most difficult!

While Coco just followed us while we carried her lambs to the barn-becuase she could see us!-Lulu could not see us in the dark and freaked out! It took multiple back ad forths to finally get her to follow us, with a lot of Lulu screaming and frantically searching for her babies, but at last they we were all finally cuddled up in their stall. Coco and her babies were cuddled up in their stall and Ginger was STILL staked out in the far corner of the pasture-you're killing me Ginger!




This morning, all I wanted to do was sleep in after our late night running around the pasture-but no! Almost immediately after my alarm clock went off, Keith walked into the bedroom to announce that Ginger was lambing...ugh, can't she have waited until the afternoon, or tomorrow!

So, here we go again. Ginger in the far corner of the pasture and is going through the motions of lambing...but she isn't. Every time Ginger lays down and pushes, nothing really happens. We could only see little hooves poking out and but no head-this is not going well! Giant Ginger is, of course, the most skittish of all the ewes, and she's the only one that clearly needs help.

We somehow get her in the barn, so one of us can hold her down and the other can pull the lamb out-did I mention that Keith randomly is off work today, absolutely perfect timing!-I wanted to hold her down and make Keith pull out the lamb, but that didn't work.

So, I reach in and pull out first the two hooves that are peaking out and then it's head. All of this has taken so long, that I expect the lamb to be dead and am really freaked out at this point. But I pull a little more and and it's obvious that he is actually alive-yay!! I pulled and pulled and was so scared of hurting the lamb. We ended up switching places and Keith pulled the rest of the lamb out-all the while Ginger is contracting and screaming...and we haven't even had breakfast yet!



Even though it was clear that Ginger was going to have another lamb, we all needed a break from each other, so Keith and I headed in to eat and Ginger had her other lamb in peace. Instead of having one clone lamb and one all white lamb, Ginger's lambs look like identical twins that are perfect mix of Ginger and Sam.



One constant theme of lambing this year has been the location...the corner of the pasture. And I'm pretty sure I know exactly why they are gravitating there-our neighbors flock of sheep. I'm guessing that our girls think they are part of that bigger flock, even though our lambs are cuter!

Only Coco and her lams are out in the pasture at the moment. Tomorrow we'll probably let Lulu and her lambs out to play...and maybe Ginger's too. No triplets! YAY!! I've been keeping Cupid in milk, just in case we had triplets or lost a ewe...just to be prepared. Finally I get to dry her off completely and get a little break from milking...until Frannie and Snowy have kids!

Up next (but hopefully not for a week, at least!!), goat kids!!

Hoping for Easter lambs

Our ewes are due to lamb any day now, and Easter seems to me to be the perfect day for lambs to enter the world. But so far today-no lambs. And while, in theory, this would be super cute, it is also a cold snowy day here, so I would be ok with them waiting until slightly warmer weather!

So the waiting game continues. This is one of the hardest parts of breeding animals-you can't talk to them! You don't know how they are feeling or if they are in pain. I just watch and listen and hope to be there when they need me.

Another hard part is figuring out if they are pregnant. Yes, you can buy pregnancy tests for a stupid amount of money and if you just wait, it should be obvious pretty quickly! But still, sometimes it's not.



Take our goats Frannie and Snowy. I already told the tale of Frannie being very obviously in heat, while if Snowy was, she was covert about it. It seems fitting that their pregnancies are similar. Frannie is SO obviously pregnant. She is so short and so wide and has been just getting wider every day and her little teats are getting bigger-this girl is kidding this year! Then there's Snowy. She's always been a little chub and most of the time, to me at least, she doesn't look pregnant at all. When she lays down, yes, I do think she is prego...but maybe not.



But while Snowy is not physically showing, her behavior has changed. Both the girls refused to spend the night in a stall with the evil Cupid months ago-I took this as them instinctively protecting their bellies-smart girls. And Snowy has always been one to jump up on everyone-she hasn't done that in months. She has always been super affectionate, but now she is ever more so, which I really didn't think was possible. When I'm out in the pasture, she is on me like velcro. When I sit down out in the pasture, this 130 lb goat does everything in her power to sit on my lap with her head on my shoulder. And I just hold her. I don't know what else to do. I wonder how she feels, how can we know what being pregnant feels like to an animal? It's both Frannie and Snowy's first time expecting and Frannie seems just fine about whatever is going on in her body, Snowy just doesn't. So I'll hold her. I guess long story short, I do think Snowy is going to kid this year.

Then there are our sheep: Coco, Lulu, and Ginger. Holy smokes, these girls are giant. They are like stuffed sausages walking around on tiny legs that look like they are going to pop at any moment. I had a scary moment a few days ago when I looked outside and saw Coco on her back with all 4 legs stiffly pointing towards the sky-I thought she was dead. I hadn't been outside for about a half hour-had she been like that the whole time? I ran out the pasture with my bucket of birthing supplies, not knowing what to expect. She wasn't dead, she wasn't in labor, I think she just couldn't get up because she is so huge. I rolled her over and helped her get on her legs again. As soon as she was up, she made walked straight to the hay and stared chowing-she was fine! But I was spooked and have been stalking them like crazy since.


The order in which I think these pregos will pop: Ginger, Coco, Lulu, then Frannie and Snowy-and from what I've heard, whatever you think is going to happen will be the last thing that actually happens-so we'll see!

The only baby animals that we have right now are a new batch of chicks. They are now in their awkward, goofy looking, kinda feathery stage, but still they are pretty cute. They're starting to fly a little, so I need to make the walls of their space in the garage a little higher. They still have a few weeks until they join the rest of the flock.


I don't think we'll be delivering any lambs tonight, but I could be wrong! Hope everyone is having a nice Easter!

Adventures in Cheese Making

I realized this morning when I was tending to the cheeses upstairs that I had not really talked about any of the cheeses I've been making-the successes and the failures. At least there have been more success than failures!

The fantastic wine fridge that I got a little before Christmas has been refitted with wooden shelves that are now full of assorted cheeses in various stages of aging.



We've got the farmstead cheese, that I made right before we left for Thailand. I waxed it and it should be ready to eat any time. It should be good-I hope it's good! Waiting to actually taste to the cheese is killing me! Even if the cheese looks right, doesn't mean it will taste right, so rationally I would wait to taste a cheese before making it again....but of course I don't!



I have made two beer infused cheeses so far. The first one is about half eaten and turned out pretty good! I soaked the curds in our IPA, and man can you taste it! But of course I made another one before we even tried the first one-this one with a Stone Belgian Ale. Nope, no idea if this one is any good!



Finally a cheese I've made more than once! This is the second time I've made it to be exact. Drunken Goat cheese is one of my favorite cheeses I've made and as soon as it was gone, I had to make it again! This second time around, I'm going to soak it in wine a little longer than I did last time, and it should be ready to eat in a month or so-and this time I KNOW it's gonna be good! Plus, it's really pretty!



On to a new experiment-Camembert! I'm pretty sure I made this right. For now, I'm just keeping my eye on it. I have to flip the cheeses so the white mold grows evenly-assuming it grows at all. Mold should start growing in about a week-hopefully only white mold grows on these!



The other day I made a cheese that I have been wanting to make for a while. I don't know why it's taken me so long to make it-either fear that I wouldn't do a good job or fear that I would do a great job and I would eat it EVERY day! Well damn, I had it today and it's pretty freaking great! Halloumi cheese-how I love you!



What makes this little cheese so special? It doesn't melt! Fry it up and it get crispy and delicious, without actually melting. Kind of like eating a mozzarella cheese stick-but better! If I was on a deserted island, I would need this cheese...and a frying pan! It is trouble that I can make this is less than a day, with only a gallon of milk!





I should write a post about how I actually make cheese, instead of just reporting about what I've done, and I will someday soon. It's pretty obvious how I'm spending my winter-making loads of cheese! With Frannie and Snowy both hopefully in milk this summer (it's too soon to tell if they are pregnant but I have my fingers crossed!) I'll have more milk to deal with, so experimenting this winter should hopefully really help me out this summer!

Time to go fry up a little more Halloumi!