Missing Willow Farm

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Actually, chevre.  You know, those really expensive logs of tangy creamy cheese you can find in the fancy cheese section of your grocery store?   This isn’t meant to be a tutorial, it’s just because most folks are curious about it.  You start with 3 ingredients.  Culture, rennett and goat milk (thanks Sophie and Bella!).  The culture and rennet come from a cheesemaking supply company.  I met a representative from Dairy Connection at a homestead cheesemaker’s course I took a few years back.  I like their products so purchase my culture and rennet from them.  It doesn’t take much.  Just 1/4 tsp. of culture and 2 drops of rennet per gallon of milk.  I bring the milk to 75 degrees in a double boiler then stir in the culture and rennet.   From there, it sits at room temperature for about 4 hours where it becomes a single mass of curd.  I check for a clean ‘break’ in the curd and know it’s time to cut into smaller chunks.  After about 20 minutes, the cut curds start to seperate from the whey and it’s time to ladle into chevre molds.  They have tiny holes in them for the whey to escape.  This sits at room temp. over night and in the morning, we have cheese.  These get lightly salted and stored in the fridge.  We can’t sell it because we’re not a state inspected Grade A dairy, but we can give it away.  Homemade cheese makes a very nice present!

I usually check on the chicks in the morning after I milk the ladies.  Today, I went into the barn instead to give our hens some cucumbers from the garden.  Hubby checked on them instead and called to me to stay in the barn and I knew there was a creature who shall not be named about.  A legless lizard.  A demon that starts with an ‘s’ and ends with a ‘nake’.  I can’t even say it…  After much commotion including delicious clubbing sounds, the coast was clear.  Did I ever tell you my husband is my hero?  Superhero.  One of our chicks was dead in the chicken tractor.  We removed the heat lamp & the tarp and drug the tractor into the pasture where there are really (really) big dogs.  If they freeze to death, so be it.  If we left them where they were this morning, they would starve to death because I would never go in and feed them again.  I’m just saying….

Well… theoretically it’s all free when it’s your animal, and this is our Helen on the milking stand.  Goats, like all mammals (people included) produce milk after they have given birth.  So.. in order to milk a goat, she needs to have had a kid (goat babies are actually called kids).  The strange thing is, Helen didn’t have a kid this year.  But when she saw the other goats nursing their kids, she filled right up.  We’ve been milking her for a few months now.   Yes, she’s lopsided, but she thanks you very much for not mentioning it.

One of the best things about raising your own food is you don’t have to worry about those big industrial recalls.  That plus the fact that your own food is delicious!  This lovely blue green monster is from Cranberry, our americauna chicken.  Americaunas are also know as easter eggers because they lay colored eggs.   Our family loves to have eggs for breakfast when they visit because farm fresh eggs are so tasty.

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Our daughter Claire came home for a visit this weekend for some R&R (and Mom’s buffalo chicken pizza).  At this evening’s feeding, she scooped the chickens for a snuggle.

Marsha is the first chicken we got.  She’s a white crested black polish.  She jumped off of her roost and hurt her leg.  See her tiny splint? 10 years of EMT training in practice.  It’s all better now.  We got her just as a pet and she ended up giving us eggs.  Score!   Her roost has since been relocated closer to the ground.

We’ve got them and they give us honey.  Well, actually we steal their honey.  Have you ever heard of sourwood honey?  Me neither.  Until we moved here.  Sourwood trees grow in this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It’s quite a delicacy, and the prices I’ve heard quoted are up to $23 a quart at festivals.   We have 3 hives, started this year with 2 but caught a swarm.  It’s not as exciting as it sounds because it was a swarm of our own bees.  I’ll post about that later as we have some photos of that most exciting day.  I’ll also post about getting started in beekeeping at some point because we frequently get questions about that.

Not sure what had gotten those five chicks, but our evil plan of splitting them up to cut our losses seems to have worked.  As soon as they have all of their big girl feathers, we’ll unplug their little heat lamps and move the chicken tractor into the pasture where the dogs will watch over them and the goats will pester them incessantly.   It’s kind of their job.  They do ‘annoying’ so well.

They’re a week old and enclosed in a wooden box with a cover on it in a locked barn.  We just noticed this evening that 5 are gone with no evidence of fowl (get it?) play.  We split them in two groups, secured half in one of our chicken tractors.  Hope everyone is accounted for in the AM.

Jenna is our beloved partner in farming.  She LOVES my husband so much it annoys me.  I’m the one who spoils her, but he is her everything.  I guess you can’t help who you love.  She came to use from Annemarie and Vergil Holland.  He wrote the book on herding dogs.  He really did.  Go ahead and google it.  She has a tick-borne illness which keeps her from working too hard.  When she does, she gets really sore.  Luckily, she gets to work sheep every day on our farm, but not too hard because we only have 7 acres in pasture and 10 or so sheep.  She loves working them, and gets really excited when it’s time to go to the pasture.  She stares daggers at us in the morning if we’re dawdling before chores.  They are her sheep and she needs to boss them around.  Where would you like them?  Shall I move them again?  Do you need me to bite them?  Just a nip.   Are you sure?   Positive??