Big Pink Farm

I have a secret.  Ok, it's not really a secret now that I'm about to tell you:

Houston, we have a soap page!

I was overly optimistic when I announced my plans for the page way back in January.  I mean, how hard could it be?  Famous last words...  Anyway, we're up and running with it.  Thanks for your patience!

Speaking of soap, I thought I'd share a couple of photos of the soapmaking process.  In this one, you see the warm coconut, palm, and olive oils awaiting the addition of a goat milk/lye mixture.

After adding the goat milk/lye soup in a slow stream and stirring like crazy the whole time, the saponification process begins.  When it's done, it looks like pudding and is ready to be poured into the mold.  Like this:

After that I put it in a warm place until the next day when I carefully unmold it.  Then Roger cuts it into big bars and sets it aside to cure.  A few weeks later, this is what it looks like:

Now you know.  Cool, huh?

The weather as I type this is far too lovely for me to be squandering time in front of the computer, so this will be brief.  But since I am still sitting here with a child on my lap, I might as well show you the turkeys.  They have been here for two weeks already - my how time flies!

That's what a turkey looks like when it's one day old.  Ben is raising them for one of his 4-H projects this year, just like he did last year.  He does a very good job of taking care of them; I only have to look in the brooder once a day to see that he is keeping them in food and water.  In a couple of weeks, they'll be ready to move out of the brooder and onto pasture.  Then, when they're ready for market, they will be almost as big as Ben.

Here he is in the show ring with the turkey he selected to take to the county fair for judging.  He won the trophy for Novice Showmanship.  I'm very proud of him!

Today was the kind of day you daydream about in the middle of January.  The sun was warm, the winds were mostly calm, the mud was drying up, and the pastures were green.  Green is very good.

 

We got a lot of spring cleaning done this afternoon.  Max tended the fire.

Olivia helped clear debris out of the garden.  Note her stylish attire.  She's a very classy little girl.

The duck harrassed Frodo, which was, I suspect, the highlight of his day.  Poor Frodo endured the humiliation with great patience. 

Here's the very next photo in the series, in which Frodo gets his revenge.  Best Friends Forever!

There's no such thing as perfection here on earth,  but today was a really good day.  Roger and I and all the children will go to sleep tonight with pleasantly worn-out muscles and sun-reddened faces and the faint fragrance of pollen and moist dirt...Spring's lullaby for us.

I keep thinking spring will arrive for good.  It will, it just has to!  This morning during chores I convinced myself that the pastures are greening up a little.  They are, I swear!

Yesterday was rainy and dreary, so I stayed inside for most of it and played Queen of the Kitchen.  (Except for the hour or so spent outside chasing baby goats with Max.  Most of them don't like to be caught, and half of them are more agile and wily than football players.  More agile than gazelles, even.)

Last year's garden produced 8 tons of cayenne and habanero peppers, and I'm only slightly exaggerating.  I dutifully dried them out for long-term storage in my handy-dandy food dehydrator, and now I have a lifetime supply of really hot peppers.  What didn't get dehydrated got turned into relish, hot sauces, and even jam.  Good thing Roger and Max both crave really hot condiments.

Yesterday, as Queen of the Kitchen, I made more hot sauce with some of the dried cayennes and a couple of the habaneros.  I was curious if the process would differ any from using fresh peppers.  The good news is that the results taste the same, but because the peppers were dried this time, I didn't have to get all freaked out about the hot oils getting on my skin and wear gloves up to my elbows and try really hard not to rub my eyes absent-mindedly.

I took pictures.  I'm kind of a dork.

 
But wait!  There's more!  Milk production is really starting to take off now that all the dairy does have kidded, so yesterday I made cheese.  Here's the curd just after it has been cut.

Here's Calvin, my little helper, next to my makeshift cheese press after the cooked and drained curds have been loaded into it for the first light pressing.  Before it was done, the cheese got flipped and pressed two more times with increasing weight.  And behold, this is what we have this morning, a little more than 2 pounds of fresh cheese.  I'll let it age for a few weeks before we dig in.  So yummy!

I have other photos of mundane happenings around the farm (like the baby turkeys that arrived two days ago!), but I'll save those for another post on another day.

I'm hoping to distract you, dear reader, from noticing that I have not posted anything new, despite my promise.  So here's some photos!  The weather here has alternated between spring-like (which means lots of mud!) to arctic-like (which means single-digit temps!).  The weird weather fluctuations have been rough on the kids.  The people haven't liked it much, either.

 

This little one is very friendly.  Natalie usually is, too.

 Sunbathing kids.  If you look carefully, you will see a children's playhouse in the background that we were forced to put into active duty in the goat shed when the temperatures dipped into the single digits with winds over 30 mph.

 

See the little red tongue?  I love that.

 

Quick!  Find the duck in the snow!

So did it work?  Have you forgotten all about my empty promises?  Stay tuned for further updates, but let's just say the timetable is fairly fluid.

What a difference a day makes!  As of this writing, 25 kids have been born here at Big Pink.  Sleep?  What's that, and why do I miss it so?

We have one little doeling who lives in the house for now.  She was weak this morning, so we scooped her up and now she's our bottle baby.  We will transition her to the great outdoors, of course, but for now she's here.  And she's really cute.  Frodo the Dog really likes her, too.  Too bad he can't be the one in charge of giving her the bottle.

So this is my birthday week, as I mentioned earlier.  With all the goats being born, I haven't had a lot of sleep.  So please keep that in mind when you look at this photo of my leftover cake.  I'm sleep-deprived, and I'm pretty sure that qualifies as a mental handicap.  Right?

The last few days have been a flurry of activity.  The first kids arrived on Monday morning and they just keep coming.  Six does have kidded so far, resulting in ten doelings and 3 bucklings.  Twenty-four more does are due at any time.  When I sleep, I dream about goats, goats, and more goats.

So that explains why I have been slow about putting up new pages.  You will notice, however, that I did put up a woodworking page.  I can cross that off my to-do list.  I love crossing  things of that list; it makes me feel productive. 

Today is my birthday.  Because Natalie's birthday occurs two days before mine (she's 12 this year!), the usual celebration for Mom is leftover cake.  I don't mind.

But this year is different.  Just look what I got for my birthday!  That's right, twin doelings born in the wee hours of the morning.  The first meat goat kids have hit the ground!  The next few weeks should be a hectic flurry of more kids being born. 

Before it gets really crazy around here, I will be adding new pages this week: A soap page, a For Sale page, and a woodworking page.  I think.  At least, that's my plan, Lord willing.

Isn't it lovely?  Nothing beats the creaminess of lather from goat milk soap.  That's Peppermint/Rosemary soap, just about ready for packaging.  I will be adding a soap page to the website soon.  Maybe next week, after I get back from a brief vacation with just the baby to the artic tundra.  Roger and the other children will keep the farm running along for a few days while I visit my out of town family.  In the arctic.  Ok, it's not really above the artic circle, but the weather forecast says it might as well be.

I can't promise I'll have something to add every day, but I would like to post here regularly as a way to keep you, dear reader, up-to-date on what's happening here at the farm.  They'll be some family stuff, as well.  For instance, some of you have asked for a family photograph.  We don't have one per se, but we do have one of the kids taken last month.  We do it every year.  Happy New Year from Big Pink Farm!

Roger says one day we'll have a family band.  Perhaps we'll call ourselves "Goat Hot Dogs."