Archive for the ‘Goats’ Category

Goat Walk

Monday, December 18th, 2006

We have started to take Daphne and Lulu for walks along the road we live on. It’s an unsealed road, a dead end, and mostly very quiet. Still, the risk of a car coming along means that we are very careful to keep a tight hold on their leashes. The goats are rather jumpy around traffic.


Becky walks the goatlings, Lulu and Daphne

Twice now, we have walked about a kilometer up the road, with the goats trotting along beside us. They like to stop once in a while to nibble at a juicy patch of weeds or scrub on the roadside. Since we do not have a dog, we really appreciate having animals to take for a walk. Our two little goats are great companions.

On our last trip to town, we bought grown-up collars for the goats — Daphne’s is red and Lulu’s is blue. The collars are too big at the moment, and look rather ridiculous. We hope they will grow into them in due course.

Daphne seems determined to go ahead of Lulu when we are out for a walk. Maybe it’s an alpha-goat thing?! Lulu’s main concern is getting between Daphne and whoever is walking her, so if we don’t watch out, we all end up in a tangle.

Grape Leaves

Monday, December 11th, 2006

I am trying to prune the grapes so that they don’t take over the vegetable beds. This is a bigger job than it ought to be, because we missed our chance to prune them in the winter. We are certainly learning from our mistake, and plan to be better organised next winter! The grapes are now a beautiful, rampant, tangled mess, and I am struggling to sort through it all in order to prune. According to our neighbour, who has a great many grape vines of the same variety as ours, doing plenty of fix-up pruning now will give us the best chance of having a decent crop despite our negligence over the winter.


More grape leaves, please

Since I am pruning the grapes, it’s a good opportunity to make pickled grape leaves. Here is the recipe I used to make an inauthentic version of “Podonnip Chorim,” or Grape Leaf Kimchi:

Grape Leaf Kimchi
36 tender young grape leaves, stalks on, washed thoroughly
1 tablespoon sea salt

4 tablespoons whey*

2 cloves garlic, minced or finely chopped

1/4 teaspoon chile flakes

2 teaspoons fresh ginger, grated or very finely chopped

Mix whey, salt, and 2 cups of water. Soak the grape leaves in this mixture for about an hour, weighting them down so that the liquid covers them completely.

Roll up 12 of the leaves, all together, and stuff them into a wide mouthed 1 quart (1 litre) preserving jar. Sprinkle with some of the ginger, garlic and chile. Roll up 12 more leaves into another roll. Stuff this roll in the preserving jar on top of the first one. Sprinkle with seasonings. Do the same with the final 12 grape leaves.

Now pour the whey/water/salt mixture into the jar on top of the leaves, so that they are completely covered. Add a little water if necessary. Make sure you leave an inch of space at the top of the jar, as the contents may expand.

Cover the jar tightly and leave at room temperature for 3 days. If necessary, put a weight on top of the leaves to keep them immersed in the liquid. After 3 days, move the jar to the fridge of cold room for storage.

*To make whey, put some plain live yoghurt in a cloth and leave it to drain over a large bowl. The liquid that drains out of the yoghurt is the whey you need for this recipe.

In Korea, they don’t use whey to innoculate their kimchi. Also, I think that they add rice porridge and fish sauce to some kinds of kimchi, but I’m not certain about that! I intend to do some research on this matter, and will be sure to write about it if I end up making fish sauce and rice porridge and adding them to future batches of kimchi. (I think Kevin has some serious concerns about sharing the house with any kind of fermented fish project, so I will have to tread carefully in this matter!)

As well as making one batch of spicy grape leaf pickle, I’ve made a second plainer batch — omitting all the seasonings except for the salt and whey. These can be used for making dolmades.


Dolmades

One way to serve the Korean-style pickled grape leaves is with sticky rice, whole lettuce leaves, chile sauce, toasted sesame seeds, and pieces of cooked marinated beef (marinate in honey, garlic, soy sauce, and a little fresh citrus juice). Diners can use the lettuce and/or grape leaves to make little parcels of the other items. Yum!

We humans are not the only Farmlet creatures who enjoy eating grape leaves. The goats love them, too. I tethered them in the yard while I was pruning, so that they could munch to their hearts’ content on discarded grape leaves.

Goat Training

Monday, December 4th, 2006

I have never trained an animal before, and neither has Kevin. As we begin to train our Daphne and Lulu, I get the feeling that we might have even more to learn from this experience than than they do.

We are amazed at how intelligent and sociable the goats are. We were lucky to get two little goats who had already been handled a lot by humans. They really seem to love human company, and are surprisingly ready to respond to different calls and commands. They had never been on a leash before they came here, but after only a couple of days, they now come running to have their leashes put on.


Daphne and Lulu on a stroll

After we had finished moving the cows the other day, I decided to take Daphne and Lulu for a walk. We went up the hill to check on Kevin and the cows. Cows and goats seemed rather curious about each other, but apparently the cows looked a bit big and scary to the little goats! We will not be grazing the cows in the goat paddock until the goats are older, and we’ll first be making sure that cows and goats have plenty of chances to become accustomed to each other under our supervision. This was the first close encounter.


Introducing the goats to the cows

We are also teaching the goats to tether. We think that prolonged, unsupervised tethering can be cruel and even dangerous to goats, so we don’t plan to tether them for a long time, and certainly not overnight. Our plan is to tether them in a spot near where we are working, so that we can keep half an eye on them. The goats seem to enjoy a change of scenery, and we appreciate their weed-eating services. At five weeks old, they are both already eating grass, leaves, and small branches like little champions. They are also great company and very entertaining. So far, we have tethered them in the house paddock for a while each afternoon. We have only had to untangle them a few times!

Two Little Goats

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

Today, two more animals have joined our Farmlet menagerie: two little saanen doe kids. They are twins — five weeks old.

Today we went on a much anticipated mission to pick them up. It was a long day for the little goats, since they had already had a three hour journey to meet us. When we first put them into the cab of the truck with us, they were a bit feisty and unsettled. Luckily they settled down after a few minutes, and curled up in a box by my feet, a bit like two large cats. We were very impressed that they were able to wait until we got to the Farmlet to relieve themselves! We are delighted with these dainty, curious little creatures, and hope they will be very happy here on the Farmlet!


All aboard!

Settling in

Why did we choose saanen goats? Because we wanted goats bred for milking. Of the milk breeds, saanens are by far the easiest and cheapest to obtain around here. We got two of them, since they are herd animals, and do not do well without company. We are happy to have found two healthy goats from an organic farm. Their previous owners have been raising dairy goats organically for quite some years, and have given us lots of advice about how to care for them.
The little goats seemed to enjoy nibbling at the forage and looking around in their new paddock, but they still look a bit lost in a new place and without their mother. After letting them explore for a little while, we gave them a bottle of goat milk, mixed with some formula, and put them in their shed for the night. (Their previous owners gave us a bit of goat milk that we are using to soften their transition onto milk-replacer formula.) They are already grazing a bit, but will continue on formula until we wean them in about six weeks.


Evening meal

Why are we bottle-rearing the goats? According to the previous owners, five weeks will have given the little goats a decent chance to drink plenty of their mother’s milk. Bottle-feeding the goats should help them bond with us, and (we hope) will make them easier to handle and milk when the time comes.

We are still working on choosing suitable names for our dear little goats. At this point, it looks like we might call them Daphne and Lulu. Daphne (black collar) is the more settled of the two. She had horns, but has already been de-budded. Lulu (blue collar) is polled. She is smaller and a bit feistier than Daphne, so it’s easy to tell them apart.