farm update

The main reason I didn't breed most of my goats last fall was that we didn't have an unrelated buck and I couldn't find one I liked enough to buy. A buck is 50% of your herds genetics, so it pays to be picky. I finally bought my first adult buck this spring, a lovely amicable fellow with striking blue eyes.

Three of my girls stayed in the brand new buck pen with him for a month, and I'm pretty sure all three are pregnant. They should be over 2 months along now, almost to the halfway point, due Sept 30 - Oct 4. They are just starting to look rounder to me, and I'm hoping to be able to feel the babies by the end of this month.

I was so excited after breeding them that I made a quick kidding schedule. I'm already planning ahead for my fall breedings this year - I bought a second blue-eyed nigerian dwarf buckling to use in the fall, this handsome boy from Sunny Daze Farm:

He is mostly cream, but I think he has some pale gold moonspots. It's hard to tell since he could also just be dirty, but they should darken over time and become more visible. I'm going to try to breed the pygoras this fall as well. I should have a bunch of kids for sale in the spring, and a few for sale this fall. Lily's kids went to their new home last month. I was sad to see them go, but I'm glad they went together, and they're going to be pets for a family of excited kids.

                     


bye, babies!  I also have quite a few broody hens right now. I was planning on ordering chicks this summer, but I ended up letting them sit on their eggs and I now have 18 chicks! They are mostly heritage breed mutts, since I have a mixed flock, but they're all 50% barred rock and look like my rooster. I don't mind that they're not purebred, since all my chickens are good egg laying breeds.



  

It seems a little bit like magic, hatching chicks. If I have the time in the next few weeks, I'd like to try and build a separate area for a few broody hens so I can buy some rare breed eggs for them to sit on.

I've been working on a large batch of handspun yarns, and I will either have one huge update or two medium sized updates very soon. 

I will post here either before or right after I update my shop, since there will be at least one new product available, possibly two.

New baby goats!

I'm starting to think that every spring might start off with a surprise from the goats. No sooner were the words "I meant to breed for spring kids, but I'm kind of glad I didn't" out of my mouth than I realized that Cowalily was not only pregnant but due at any moment! I did breed her in the fall, once, on a complete whim, but I didn't think it 'took'. She was with the buck for maybe all of 2 minutes. I was trying to breed the pygoras around the same time, and they were with the buck for days and no one is bred so far. I think my pygora buck is more slow-maturing than the nigerian dwarves, though, so I'm going to try again soon. Anyway, Lily hasn't been looking or acting pregnant so I assumed she wasn't, as she was with a buck for 3 weeks along with the other girls last year and she was the only one who turned up not pregnant in the spring. On thursday when I was worming the goats, I noticed that she seemed oddly subdued so while I had her cornered I checked her udder. It was definitely squishy and more prominent! I ran to the house to check my calender for her due date, and I had it written down as March 6-11th. It was the 8th! I immediately separated her from the other goats and got ready for the official babywatch. I started doing barn checks every 1-2 hours, even through the night, an exhausting process. Thankfully she didn't hold out for too long, and on the saturday evening she went into labor around 10pm and produced two beautiful kids, one buck and one doe.



It was a textbook perfect kidding, and Lily was a great mom, immediately getting to work cleaning off the kids and encouraging them to nurse. Even with me helping her clean the kids off, they started to get chilled before we could get them completely dry. The doeling was too cold to even try to nurse, so I brought everyone - Lily, too - into the house to get warm. It wasn't that cold out, but I knew that the doeling needed to get warm and dry before her body could handle a night outside. We didn't have anywhere to confine them in the house, so I just had goats loose in the living room. It's a good thing we have hardwood floors! I moved everyone back out the barn once it warmed up in the morning, and they've now spent a night out on their own just fine. The doeling likes to crawl under the milk stand and make herself little nests in the hay to sleep in, and she has a handknit wool sweater to help keep her warm.





The buckling is very dark black, a surprise as neither of his parents are! He's vigorous and alert and already taking a few experimental hops here and there.





Their sire is one of our kids from last year! Hard to believe one of those little fuzzballs is already a proud papa.

I'm pretty thrilled that I'll have fresh milk again soon. And having ridiculously cute little goats to cuddle isn't too bad either.

In early december, my dog* suddenly and unexpected got really very sick. Sick to the point that I thought I might lose her. Long story short: she ended up having to be hospitalized for nearly a week, no one ever figured out what originally caused her to get sick, she got pneumonia on top of whatever it was she had first, and I'm now paying off huge vet bills. She's fine now, as far as I can tell, but since what she had seemed to be at least partly gastronomic in nature, I'm being super extra careful about what she eats.



The vets bills mean that I have to find a way to make more money this year, but I'm trying to see that as a good thing. I have tons of ideas for ways to expand my fiber business and for actually making some money from farming, so hopefully this is just the kick in the pants I need to make things happen this year!



I've been dutifully updating my etsy shop about every two weeks on the dot since December. I plan on continuing to update as often as possible, at least until craft show season starts. If you're dreaming of a particular patchwork colorway and haven't been able to grab it, let me know and I'll reserve it for you the next time I spin it. There have been new colorways & rare breed farm wools in the past few updates. I'm mostly putting up patchwork yarns, but there are more novelty yarns & striping yarns to come. And I'm busy sourcing millspun yarns made from small farm wool (and considering having a mill custom spin yarn for me) so that I can add hand-dyed breed-specific farm wool yarns to my lineup. I'd like to mix some sewing and felting in with my spinning and dyeing too, but I'm still working on dreaming up prototypes.



I've also decided that I need to eat more eggs. My chickens started laying last fall (brown, white, and green eggs) and haven't stopped, and since I don't spend a lot of time cooking for myself I've just been eating plain fried eggs. But that gets old real fast! The first new thing I learned to make with eggs is custard.



I used eggs from my chickens, milk from my goats, and whole vanilla beans. First I made baked custard (amazing), and then frozen custard (super amazing). But that was months ago, and I forgot about how fun it was to discover new egg recipes until today.



I made shirred eggs, which I had never heard of before, thanks to this blog post from Juniper Moon Farm, where they seem to be having the same sort of egg 'problem' (not that all the free-range organic eggs you can eat can really be called a problem). Shirred eggs are eggs baked with tons of grated hard cheese (I used parmesan) and cream. The JMF recipe calls for infused olive oils, but I just put red chili pepper flakes right in the eggs and it was plenty flavorful. Creamy eggy cheesy goodness! This has reminded me that finding new ways to use eggs is always a good thing, and I want to try and find a new egg recipe at least once a month. Please drop me a note if you know of a good one!

*I adopted a 9yr old welsh corgi last january. She's my first dog and she's awesome.

Crafty Bastards yarn preview

Crafty Bastards is tomorrow! Here is a preview of what I'll have for sale:



Corespun yarns from my pygora goats fiber



Cherry Blossom yarn



Leafy yarns



One-of-a-kind patchwork scrap yarns



Brand new patchwork colorways



Yarnbow self-striping yarns. Lots of Yarnbow.



Pick-your-own felty baubles



Sheepy sachets filled with organic dried lavender and cedar, now in mushroom and chicken editions

Crafty Bastards

All this month I've been busy getting ready for the Crafty Bastards craft show in DC on Oct 1st. My favorite craft show! It's always a ton of fun, but this year the DC state fair has been rescheduled to the same time & place as Crafty Bastards, plus there are handmade food vendors and contests. You can find me & my yarns in booth #40 - the map is right here.

Towards the beginning of this month, I had some interesting challenges while trying to prepare for this show. I lost electricity during the Hurricane Irene storm and we didn't get our power back until 5 days later, so I was spinning by candlelight. I was just starting to contemplate dyeing fiber over a campfire when the power came back on.



The one thing I'm most excited about for this year's Crafty Bastards is that I will have yarn for sale from my very own pygora goats. Pygora goats are a breed that was started as a cross between angora and pygmy goats, and they can have 3 different types of fleeces, ranging from a curly shiny fiber similar to kid mohair to a super soft downy undercoat similar to cashmere. Most of the yarns I'll have for sale were spun from my goat Aoife's (her name is pronounced "Ee-fah") fiber.



Aoife has type A fiber, which is closest to mohair. She produces the most fiber of all my goats and needs to be shorn twice yearly.



Her curly locks look just like mohair, but the handle is different - I'd describe it as a cross between silk, angora bunny fluff, and kid mohair. It's drapy and silky feeling, with a hint of wooly fluffiness not found in mohair, but still develops a fuzzy halo. I've been spinning it up into bulky but airy corespun yarns.



I will only have about 10 skeins of pygora yarn available, so I suggest coming early if you want one!

It's been too gloomy and rainy here to take many pictures, but I'm planning on posting a preview of all my Crafty Bastards wares towards the middle of this week.

Summer update

It is HOT here, and everything seems to be thriving - goats, chickens, weeds. The baby goats are coming up on 6 months old and are looking leggy and tall to me. I need to finish up their paperwork, and then some of them will be put up for sale. I'm keeping Nymphadora, of course, my little shadow, and I'm holding onto Luna too because I'm hoping she'll inherit her mother's udder as well as her good looks.



I was resigned to selling Cassie, since I can't keep all the babies, but her sweet demeanor, moonspots, and good genetics are all conspiring to make this a hard decision.



My tiny little chicks are now pretty much full-grown chickens. I'm planning on sprucing up the coop & laying boxes for them this week in the hopes of encouraging them to start laying eggs. They were looking hot, so my mom talked me into getting them a watermelon as a treat. None of them had seen a watermelon before, and it was extremely entertaining watching them slowly edge closer and closer to these strange objects until one brave chicken took the first skeptical peck. They loved it! By that evening, all that was left was two hollowed-out rinds.



I'm actively attempting to get more spinning done, despite the stifling heat, now that the animals are more independent and don't need to be watched as closely. I just listed a big batch of yarn in my etsy shop:



I'm trying to spin down my stash, since my fiber room is overflowing, which means I should be able to update again in the next few weeks. Since I'm spinning stash fibers, there will be a wider range of wool breeds represented than usual - blue faced leicester, CVM, Warhill, and even some small farm merino that I just found hidden away.

I've been MIA the last few weeks since I had a houseguest (hi mom!) and a 3 hour long daily class, but the one really silly vacationy thing we managed to do was attend the midnight premiere of the last harry potter movie. I think my costume turned out pretty well - I sewed the coat completely from scratch, and I didn't start it until 11pm the night before! I debated about my costume for a while, but Lucius and I ended up going as our goat's namesakes - I went as Nymphadora Tonks and he went as Luna Lovegood ;)



(The coat is rather rumpled, but it was 114 degrees with the humidity when we took these pictures so I couldn't be bothered to fix it, I just wanted to hurry up and get it off. Ick.)

Farm Update: Babies galore!

A few weeks back, we had four baby goats and 50+ day old chicks arrive, all on the same day. I thought it was probably about time to at least introduce the goats! We named them all after Harry Potter characters this year, since I just finished listening to all 7 audiobooks. I grew up reading the books, but this was my first time listening to the (british version) audiobooks, and my first time reading all 7 in a row. First up is Nymphadora, or Nymphie for short, whom you have already met and who is now a big girl at 6 weeks old.



Cameo and Tarot both had a set of boy/girl twins.



Cassiopeia and Orion are names from the Black family tree, and I picked them because they are also constellations and both babies have black moonspots.

I have been spending lots of quality time with the babies, especially Nymphie, who is my darling.








Actually, it's really hard for me to take pictures of the goats right now, because my lap is usually full. 90% of my pictures look like this:



(that's Nymphie, chewing on my scarf, which she is obsessed with - she has a terrible habit of either popping up into photos she was not meant to be in or knocking my camera hand just as I take a picture)

Orion and his little sister are so sweet. They're super friendly, just like their mom, and they will both happily fall asleep in my arms.



Draco and Luna on the other hand, are both a bit unique - like THEIR mom. They're friendly too, but much more independent. Luna is a perfect copy of her mother, she's similar both in looks and personality. I still call her Mini Tarot sometimes.



Draco seems to think that Cameo is just as much his mom as Tarot, he is constantly following her around and trying to nurse from her. He is huge, by far the biggest baby.



The chicks are also doing well. I picked out a mix of 13 different heritage breeds for our laying flock, so we have a wide variety. We will have multi-colored eggs too, green/blue, brown, and white. This is an old photo from their first week, they have now grown feathers, tripled in size, and look and act like mini chickens.



I will get better pictures of them once they are moved outside. They're in our basement right now to keep them warm, but I'm building a chicken tractor so they can forage around the pastures and garden during the spring & summer.

The kids are still nursing right now so I'm only milking once a day.



But when they are weaned in about a month, I'll be milking twice a day. I am enjoying milking, it's very meditative for me, like spinning. A nice quiet moment to start the day. Although I am a novice milker, so it takes me about an hour to milk three goats and do a few other chores. The milk is amazing, so lovely and rich and sweet. I don't really drink milk except for a dash in my morning tea, so I'm learning to make cheese. And also yogurt, kefir, ice cream, sour cream, and buttermilk. I'm dreaming of wheels of cheese aging in the basement, hopefully I will learn quickly and not make too many mistakes!

On the fiber front, I was a vendor at the Homespun Yarn Party this past sunday. It was super fun as usual, and I have some yarn left over so there will be a shop update soon! I have lots of fiber dyed for patchwork yarns, so expect to see a bunch of those popping up soon. I also have a few pygora goats that are about ready to be sheared.



Stardust, the matriarch/queen of our herd, is starting to shed. She's going to be really happy to get all that fluff off and enjoy the warm spring air!