Goats Milk Cheese

Excellent curds forming.

With the guests safely returned to their homes we had the house back and quickly moved on to new ways of 'messy-ing' it up. We now have 2 sets of friends who are into the milking of goats and producing more milk than they can handle. Charlotte you will already know about, milking just Nanny Óg and her only on a 50/50 share basis with the kid (Henry Óg, but now shortened to 'Henno'). Well Sue and Rob have recently sold off all their many kids at just 6-8 weeks old, so have inherited, as a result, 3 milking nannies who are going at it like mad things - producing good rich milk and lots of it.

Scooping out the curds

As soon as we heard this we put in a bid for "at least 5 litres" (that is a sensible batch size for cheese making) and Sue and Rob duly turned up with 8 creamy litres, fresh and raw. The only cheese making we had done up to that point was the (supermarket) cow's milk Ricotta and then Mozzarella from the kit which I wrote about in a recent post ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/03/blessed-are-cheese-makers.html )  and then Liz's small rapid batch the other day. Nothing ventured, though, nothing gained. I chose a recipe from our 'Strawbridge' books for "Feta style" cheese and nabbed the first 5 litres. Liz did an Internet hunt for a soft goat cheese "with rind" with the remaining 3 litres. Both these batches are currently mid process.

We were both amazed by the amount of curd you get from this raw, full cream goat's milk. When the cow's milk curded it separated into the curds, floating on the surface as a 2 inch thick mass with almost clear whey under it. From the 5 litres of  cow's milk we actually got back over 4 litres of whey for the pigs (I soak their flaked barley in it, they love it). Because of this, in my ignorance, when I went to cut the curds for this cheese, I only sliced the knife in about 3 inches. When I went to scoop out the curds with the draining spoon, I found that the curds ran right to the bottom - the whole depth of milk had 'set' and the whey was only going to leak out of the cut surfaces of the curd blocks. We both made way more cheese than we had imagined we would.

The drained mass from the sieve and cheesecloth.

The curds, once cut, scooped and set to drain, do actually leak that whey slowly so they need to sit in cheesecloth on a sieve or colander and will sag slowly down to about half the volume as the cheese starts to become more dense (and would be pressed for hard cheeses). For my 'Feta' (not actually allowed to call it that as Feta is one of these protected geographic names) the cheese mass now gets spread out on plates and sprinkled with salt to continue the 'cure' while being drained every day.

Liz filling the moulds.

Liz's rinded one goes into moulds to drain further and then gets tipped out of the moulds and left to start forming that fungal 'rind' that anyone who likes the French 'chevre' cheeses would be familiar with. That is the stage we are now at for each, the 'Feta' is curing and the rinded one is growing its rind. More on these in future posts. We do not actually possess cheese moulds, of course, so the 'moulds' were a makeshift collection of plastic cups and punnets with lots of holes punched into them using the hot meat-skewer method

Makeshift moulds.

All this cheese making put us into 'food processes' mode. We are starting to come into the season for 'harvesting' (nice euphemism) some of the stock so we need freezer space. We generally go through the four freezers doing a bit of an audit deciding what we really need to use up, consolidating the few remaining bits into one or two of the freezers so that we can defrost and clean the empty ones.

Trying to grow rinds. 

All this efficiency threw up some pig's trotters which I have been meaning to slow-boil into pork jelly for use in some Melton Mowbray style pork pies. It also showed that we have way too many chunks of pork belly left and I could salt some down for streaky bacon rashers (which would admittedly probably end up back in the freezer). Thus spurred on I hauled these goodies out and thawed them for onward processing. The jelly is now made and the pork pies will be made this weekend. The bellies are dry-salted and being drained of brine each day (the salt on the surface draws a huge amount of water out of the meat) for 7 days. There will be room for young Ebony and Ivory, our ram lambs, when they come back from the butcher's on the 4th of July.

I am no expert but i *think* this is a lesser
butterfly orchid found in one of the local
bogs. 

All this food prep has left little time for any other entertainments. I had a nice early start on one of the mornings, woken at some ungodly (but dawn-lit) hour by a loud cacophony of magpie and jackdaw screeches and croaks. A Hell of a din. In my barely awake, befuddled state as I came to hearing this my brain was shouting "Mink in the chicken coop!", "Pine Marten eating the gosling!" and "Fox!", not registering that it was the maggies I was hearing. Leaping out of bed, then, in a hurry, I raced outside in wellies, jocks and my fleecy jacket (I know! Quite a look!) and found Blue the cat had one of our newly-fledged baby magpies on the ground in the cattle race and the rest of the magpie family plus half a dozen jackdaws all "mobbing" him. Soldier, our other cat was moving in too.

Blue was not actually touching the bird but sitting a few inches away, the way cats do, tempting it to try to take off so that he could pounce on it again. The baby just sat there in shock. I reached down and picked up the unprotesting bird and moved it to safety on a compost heap where the cats seemed to lose sight of it and I could hustle them indoors. When I went out later at a more sensible getting up time (07:30), to do the stock, it was gone and later that day I saw the maggies feeding 2 babies which is all we think they have this time, so my youngster may have made it. I am not sure I love magpies - they steal too many chicken eggs - so perhaps I should have dinged this one when I had the chance, but it was too early in the morning and my merciful streak got the better of me. Perhaps they will name the lad 'Lucky'.

They do, do they? 

Ah well. Enough for this one. More on those cheeses, slabs of bacon and pork pies next time. Cheers.

First there were 2 Goslings....

First time on public view and, here, 'photo-bombed' by one of
the male Guinea Fowl 

As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, we are suddenly goat-less again for the first time since early January. We shipped Nanny Óg and the new kid (Henry Óg) home this morning to their new abode in Sligo in my trailer. K-Dub and I had been hard at work in the blue sky, sweaty heat (OK it's only 21ºC but this IS Roscommon) of Saturday, creating a third paddock at the Sligo rebuild house while being eaten alive by mozzies. Luckily for me, anyway, K-Dub is like Lizzie in being a very attractive target for these bitey b**tards, so he was the one being eaten. They don't seem to find me palatable. But then, it WAS his fence.

Only days old here. 

The holding over there includes a nice big and smooth but slightly sloping 2 acre (?) field. The field, though, has been left to go to ruin dominated by huge tussocks of rushes and thickets of bramble and 'sally' willows. The tussocks trap water and the whole field can get very boggy - way too boggy to risk driving the yellow 'JCB' tractor onto it.

This green stuff is grass, children and we eat it.

Never mind - Carolyn is an experienced and cunning improver of grassland and knows that by using combinations of grazing by the mini horses and goats, brush cutting and loppering, the field will soon be brought back into good heart. Razing the rush tussocks to the ground helps water run off and allows grass to recover faster than the rushes by growing up through and between their clumsy root pads. The horses and goats WILL eat the fresh green rush regrowth. We know this works - we have no more rushes on either our front lawn or the East Field after we 'borrowed' the mini horses and the field in this village where the horses were up till recently was also a rush-bog a few years back, when Carolyn's squad moved in.

Baby pears, or an excuse to photograph those
glorious blue skies?

The secret is to divide the field into paddocks so that you can concentrate all your grazing into one small area at a time preventing anyone from being choosy and just eating the sweetest grasses. When the field has been 'hammered' down to the 'clay', you take all the animals off to rest the paddock and let the grass leap into action. Several cycles of this and you have a good field and continuing to rotate the grazing by this 'mob-grazing' system keeps it that way. Hence K-Dub and I sweating and beating off mozzies in the sun.

That (lovely) straying dog, our most frequent visitor, again

Meanwhile the humans in this saga seem to be pinging about all over the place also. Liz went down to Silverwood-land to see the First Holy Communion (and party etc) for youngest niece 'R'. I must admit I cried off this one on grounds of livestock, newly hatched geese and not being Catholic (OK, maybe not that last one) so Liz went down to spend the night and would return on Monday in Mum-in-Law's car (with M-i-L, obviously) so that she could spend a couple of days here catching up with the farm and the various animals. Last time she was up we had the lamb bottle-feeding incident. We were to remember this yesterday evening. There may be a pattern forming.

Bobby the Dog. His brother, Shep, is just as gorgeous.

During this break Charlotte came home from college for the Summer and hence all the goat-moves. Charlotte is our go-to animal wrangler and we know she can usually help if we are doing anything live-stock. She wanted to gather up the goats to bring them home (where she now is, of course) so that she can try out some goat-milking, and we knew we could 'borrow' her to grab my ewes one by one while I trimmed off the last fuzzy edges of my shearing. Everyone's a winner!

Early Purple (?) Orchid

Ah but the livestock "incident" I mentioned. Sad to say we synchronised a bad event with this visit by Mum-in-Law. I had gone out to lock down the poultry for the evening and found one of the goslings looking like a casualty. He had either taken a bad clout (peck?) from an adult bird or been trampled underfoot. He was lying on his back in the dirt on the coop floor with his legs twitching and his head trying to get upright. He was stuck like that, as if a tortoise had been flipped over. Adult geese are massive strong beasts compared to the few-ounces fragile balls of fluff goslings and they can be very clumsy with their feet set so far back on their bodies. It was not looking good.

Some first fox gloves

We rescued the gosling to the sickbay via a warm-up cuddle down Mum's "front" while the 'electric hen' warm-plate warmed up. The brooder box is in the same room as Mum was to be sleeping but she said she could cope with his little pathetic cheeping so we all retired to bed quite hopeful. The little guy was still alive in the morning but although he could sit upright and squirm back up the right way if he toppled, he could not walk. Gander George was all over him when we tried to re-introduce him but that was no good to us if he couldn't move about with the family. Back into the brooder box then, with the little chap, hoping that maybe he was only bruised and might recover over the next days.

One of our big red showy poppies. 

Sadly no. He went downhill mid morning and died while Charlotte and I were doing our goat-taxi run. Ah well. You don't win them all. The other gosling seems to be thriving and is out and about in the orchard today with anything from 1-4 adults depending on who wants to stay near the remaining eggs. Sorry, Mum - we will try to arrange a visit soon where livestock does not die at you!

You are Kidding!

Flowering Cherry

When I 'went to press' on the last post, the last night of the village play was still going on and everyone was a bit anxious to give it their best shot and impress everybody. Well, I can happily tell you that like the other two nights, it went down a storm and was very well received by another sell-out audience. The cast and the whole team are delighted with it all and there has been lovely feedback and comment all about the place, so huge kudos in the village to all involved. They are all now wondering what they can do for next year and Liz fully intends to be part of that, possibly as "continuity" (that's what the programme said - she prefers just "prompt").

Half a dozen Khaki Campbell ducklings

We all needed a day to recover from the play and the new piggies, but that was all we got before the next bursts of excitement sploshed like pebbles into the calm mill-pond (ha!) of our small-holding life. A text from Sue early Sunday morning announced a "Clan Gathering" in her incubator - our duck eggs bought at Roscommon Poultry Sale a month back were all hatching. We needed to nip over and collect them and start the duck-owner phase of our lives. This also gave us a neat excuse to go admire the 6 (orphan?) baby lambs they have bought to bottle-feed, which includes a fine looking Suffolk lad who may well end up being our sire/tup/ram for this autumn.

Liz unpacks the precious cargo

We brought the ducklings home, cheeping away (yes, they do 'cheep' or at least 'pipe' at that age, rather than quacking) in a small expanded polystyrene box, quickly photographed them, and then let them loose in the baby chick's brooder where they could soon get warm by creeping under the 'electric hen' heat-plate. They got the same baby food as the chicks - finely mashed hard-boiled egg (incl. shell finely chopped) and commercial chick-crumb and they are thriving. They are little, very cute and utter charmers.

They quickly adopted the habit of climbing on top of the 'electric hen' instead of cosying down under it and the reason never occurred until Carolyn told me today. The electric hen works by having a warm plate facing downwards and running at broody-hen breast temperature (36ºC, I think). The top of the plate is plastic and well insulated from the hot plate so that birds can rest up there as extra space but only get mild benefit from the plate.

Of course (said Carolyn), ducklings have no instinct to burrow under Mum to get warm - Mum is generally swimming about on a cold pond with her feet underwater! That would NOT be a good plan for the babies. Instead they climb on her back and hide under a wing or the body feathers. Obvious once you have been told. Duck owners generally use the Infra-Red heat lamp option. It turns out that the Sitting Room is so warm here that the ducks are fine 'living' on the back of the 'hen' and only nipping down their with their chicken-cousins every now and then. I have even started feeding them their share of food up there.

Seconds old, the kid gets a good licking

If I had thought that ducklings, more log splitting and another testing archery session were enough excitement for one day and I needed to relax, then the small-holder gods were definitely not listening. We almost had supper on the table, and I had laid same and it was 7 p.m. when suddenly Towser started kicking off barking upstairs in a determined fashion. Suspecting that our stray dog might be about, I quickly got my wellies on and went to check. I could hear all manner of pained groaning and moaning coming from the top of the East Field and could see Nanny Óg rolling on the ground looking in distress. I now know that this is what goats DO in labour and all was probably well but I was straight onto some goat expert advice to check.

Mum cleaning up in the first minutes.

By about 7:15 p.m I could see a small white tuft protruding from Nanny's vulva, looking for all the world like an extra tail. Before I could react, Nanny groaned loudly once more, rolled over again, squirted the baby kid out onto the grass and stood up all in one movement. Apparently fast labour is another goat thing. I now raced to get Liz - the supper was stew, so that was not going to spoil - and we watched Nanny give the kid a thorough licking (plus tidying up the 'surroundings') while we sipped our wine the other side of the fence, only yards away from the action.

This was our first ever goat-kid so we were fascinated watching it quickly try to get to its feet (back legs first!)  and then to suckle, all the time being thoroughly licked all over by Mum who was grunting and chuntering away to the baby all the time. We were also wondering, of course, whether there might be more as well as needing to text the real owners of the goat (Carolyn and Charlotte) with the great news. It was also getting dark. We watched for as long as we sensibly could while the kid got closer and closer to the teat but then decided to leave them be so in case they were distracted by our presence. We'd check on them in an hour - we dived indoors for our stew.

Struggling to its feet - back legs first.

Well, safe to say now that this kid (which is male and has been named "Henry Óg" by Carolyn's young son) was indeed the only one, it did get to its feet and suckled successfully. It is still with us, is now 48 hours old and is thriving. It has been duly admired by all the interested parties. There is only one minor issue with this and we have read that this can happen with singleton kids. They can tend to favour one side of the udder and ignore the other, so that you need to help the Mum's comfort by milking out the un-used side for a few days, till baby gets big enough to start needing output from both 'barrels'. Nanny is a bugger to catch when she is out loose in a field, even when limited by not wanting to abandon the baby kid, so I have not yet been able to catch her, single handed. That is maybe one for tomorrow.

That was definitely enough excitement for that day and we are quite glad that there are no more births or babies due now till one of the birds goes broody.

Are You Kidding?

Nanny gets her nose into the trough. 

Guest goat, Nanny Óg is still keeping us guessing and waiting. Will she kid? How many babies? When? She seems to us to be continuously growing in girth but her udder should soon start to look full to bursting rather than just big-but-saggy. Owner Carolyn has recently upped her estimate of when things might start to happen. Going by our knowledge of when we collected Nanny from the breeder (and thereby separated her from her men-folk) and of the gestation period, we had mentally had April 14th as the last likely date. If she was not done by then, she must just be fat or very late.

3 of the lambs, nice and stocky now, start to show a healthy
interest in the grown-ups' food. 

Now, though, Carolyn thinks that when we brought Nanny Óg back to meet Billy and she didn't want to know him (so we all surmised that she was 'with child'), that might have just been a 'first impression'. The pair were left together for a couple of weeks(?) before Billy started showing signs of head-butting Nanny in the flank when she tried to eat from either of the food buckets (his or hers). Carolyn became concerned about injury to Nanny or to any unborn children in that abdomen and separated them. If Billy had, in fact, managed to get his wicked way while humans were off watch, then the 'last-likely' date might stretch as far as the end of April. As the song says, "It goes to show you never can tell"

Mum makes a comfortable bed. 

Meanwhile, regular readers will recall an angst-filled post about the issue of dogs worrying pregnant sheep ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/02/exasperated.html ) which described the frustrations we were having with a local collie and its owner's inability to prevent the dog from straying (in our direction). That story ended with me having a bit of a rant at the lady of the house and, fair play to the people, they obviously heard me and strove to keep the offending lad under control. We never saw him again all through lambing and, in fact, right round to a couple of nights ago.

A nicer pic of the front of the house, sans trees

An apologetic Easter Egg from a dog?

When all hell broke loose among our dogs at 03:30 that morning we knew straight away that the dog was back. This time, we found, he was dragging 8 feet or so of chain behind him and I suppose that it was the unusual noise of this chain being dragged across our gravel drive and front lawn that was detected by our dogs. We sorted it in the usual way (all be it struggling to raise the owner in the middle of the night) and the guy could see from the fitting on the end of the dog's chain, how he had broken free. So, a load of apologies and off they went promising, as usual to hold the dog secure again.

No such luck that time, and we left the house the next evening so that I could drop Liz into the village, and who did we meet just outside the front door? Yes, our furry chum. More phone calls and a text message had us struggling to contact the owner, so I loaded the dog into our car and set out to drive him home, but then crossed paths with the guy half way there. He spotted us, turned round and followed us home. Usual apologies and promises but this time a nice sweetener. The dog had apparently been out and bought us a nice Lindor Easter Egg as an apology for all the trouble and inconvenience he is causing. Thoughtful dog.

Nice open view from the bedroom window. 

Back at the ranch our most pressing big (in terms of man hours and graft!) project is to start splitting our enormous pile of tree rounds into sizes that will help them season but will also fit into the solid-fuel range that does the heat and hot-water task round these parts. Local wisdom has it that this species of wood is easier to split up when it is new and green, than when seasoned. That is a bit counter-intuitive, as we expect log rounds to start splitting almost by themselves as they dry out. Black spruce, we are told, sets like rock when dry. We do not want to leave the pile there while we find out so I have had feelers out re log-splitting technology.

This little 'car trailer' sized splitter has a Honda engine and
punches well above its weight, with a 25 tonne blade force. 

I checked with our tree fellers to see would they come and do "some of" the wood - I don't need it all split just yet. They, however, have to come all the way from Strokestown so the 'logistics' (their word) of them doing it do not really pay - half a day's splitting would still cost €250 because of the 'call out' segment. They did say. mind. that they would kill half to 2/3 of our pile in that half day.

An hour's log splitting just to "make sure the machine was
working" generates quite a pile.

Step forward then, my bloke from down the road who came and sliced up the tree which got blown over in my pig-run 2 Novembers ago. He owns, I knew, a small car-trailer sized hydraulic splitter powered by a small Honda petrol engine. This beast proved to be very easy to operate once set up and is man enough to drive its wedge into your slice of tree with a force of up to 25 tonnes. That makes the engine grunt a bit but it soldiers on and to see a 2-3 foot diameter slice of  tree suddenly crack open is quite an impressive experience.

My man brought the machine here, set it up and showed me how to use it over the course of an hour's "checking it worked - it hasn't been used for 2 years". You can see from the picture how much wood we split in that hour. Loads of fun for me over the next few days or more working my way through the pile. All volunteers to help welcome!

87 growth rings on the stumps of one of the three trees. 1929!

On the subject of trees and wood we are still delighted with the new open views up to the house from the lane and from the bedroom window down the drive. The last few nights have been near-full moons so we get good views even at night across the lawn and, from my pillow, I can see sky and even the actual moon. It is quite bright all of a sudden. With all these logs it should be warm for years too.

Why do donkeys always appear to be judging you? This is not our animal, but I thought it would make a good '365' photo. It did, and it is now up on the Lisacul website (www.lisaculinfo.ie)

Blesséd are the Cheese Makers?

Cheese Making Kit

...because everyone needs a Monty Python quote in their blog now and again. Making cheese is something into which we had never delved. Years back we went on a goat-keeping course which included dealing with the dairy products of milking goats. The course was excellent but I have to admit we were rather put off the dairying side by all the talk of food grade plastics, spotless cleanliness and perfect maintenance of temperatures. In theory you could make goaty cheese in a 'normal' kitchen but what we were seeing looked more complicated, precise and careful than any kind of kitchen we felt able to reproduce in our tiny 8 feet by 6 feet space.

Pouring the curds and whey through the muslin and colander

Ah well, that was then. Recently we had the Mum-in-Law up to stay and, as a thank you, she bought us a cheese making kit in a box as an enjoyable taster. This kit, the "Big Cheese Making Kit" is by a company called "The Big Cheese" of Tranent, East Lothian, EH33 1AZ (UK) but we got it via Mr Middleton's Garden Shop which is, we believe, the Irish version of Thompson and Morgan. Google any of those names and you are sure to find it. Our kit makes up to 10 batches each of Mozzarella and Ricotta, each batch being based on 4.5 litres of full cream milk and yielding 1-2 lbs of cheese. The kit contains instruction sheets plus all the things you might not have in a standard kitchen needed for the job - thermometer, butter muslin sheets, veggie rennet, citric acid powder and fine organic sea-salt. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Ricotta cheese - small granular crumby curds

So, I was dispatched to the local shops to buy 9 litres of milk while Liz set up the necessary pots and pans and colander. I won't bore you with all the details of method but suffice to say it went really well and worked like a dream. We did the ricotta first as that looked simplest (add citric acid to milk and heat to 85ºC - you will have curds like magic). The mozzarella was a little more complex as there was rennet to add and the curds formed at only 35ºC but more slowly. There is then a repeat microwaving and kneading stage like bread dough but which you do with the Marigolds on as the curd mass is too hot to handle with bare hands.

Portioning up the finished mozzarella

You squish and knead and fold and stretch like someone trying to get life back into old, dried up Blu-Tack. You end up with a much denser (than ricotta) shiny, stretchy lump which you can then portion up into rounds or flat lumps for storage (freeze and/or submerge in brine or whey). The whey can be a bit of a problem, as you get nearly as much whey back as you started with milk but there are recipes on line for using it in stock and soups. I would not recommend chucking it down the drain as it must have an Oxygen Demand (BOD) similar to milk and you may kill all the local fish! You are also not technically allowed to feed it to pigs (as in Danish Bacon) as it is from a human kitchen. For want of knowing what to do with it for the moment we have frozen it in the milk bottles.

How blue do you like your sky?

With rather delightful timing, we had no sooner made these lovely light, Summer salad cheeses than the sun finally came out and has given us 2 days of beautiful blue skies and warm sunshine. All our puddles are gone daffs are coming out all over the gaff and even the primroses have started along our 'Primrose Path'. My quince tree, previously the last fruit type to break bud and not moving till May, is racing out into leaf in a solid first place. All around the local ditches and ponds, frogs are 'at it' and the ditches are alive with masses of frog spawn. Not in our pond though, for some reason. The froggy 'house hunters' seem to have passed us by this year. Perhaps last year's were scouts and when the tadpoles were all eaten by our newts or water beetles, the word went round. Stay away.

Those trees again. Enjoy them while you can.

In the tree felling dept, we have now been visited by the man from the 'tree care' company in a mighty 4 wheel drive. He was calm, professional and completely unfazed by my "mighty" trees, quoted us a very favourable price and promised that, weather permitting, he might be back next week to drop them, slice up the trunks and shred up all the debris. I just have to take down the fence around the bases but as this is a post and rail with no high-tensile wire involved, I can do that with my fencing pliers and a screwdriver. It all sounds very promising.

Coffee in the garden but if you bring cake out, don't
tell the chickens!

All parties are now convinced that our guest-goat, Nanny Óg is, in fact, pregnant. This from the size of her, which everyone thinks is much bigger than when they last looked, 3 weeks ago. Maybe only with the single kid, though, says Carolyn (the owner). Also from the fact that she is definitely bagging up in the udder dept. Everyone is quite calm about this as she is an experienced Mum. Carolyn thinks that it is not yet imminent, anyway. We can all relax. The deal I did with Nanny Óg to hold off till Charlotte came home from college might still work although I told the goat St Patrick's Day (17th) and she is not now coming home till Monday. Hang in there Nanny!

Gimme that cake!

Looking at her today, I wondered whether we might all get a rapid surprise. She was only half interested in lunch (she's normally first in the queue even before our ewe Lily). She did a big solid poo (normally it is all as little pellets like over-size rabbit droppings) and seemed to be quite pink round the vulva. She was holding her tail quite high up and, yesterday, she was doing a weird dance on top of the grassy knoll, swinging her head back and forth from all the way round to her left shoulder blade, to round to the right one and back.

However, when we went back to check on her a few minutes later she was back down in her favourite corner of the field lying on a slew of old hay looking as relaxed and not-in-labour as any goat could look. Chilled in the sunshine enjoying the sun's warmth on her ample belly. Maybe she will hold off to Monday after all. Meanwhile Liz spotted a good website/blog about goat breeding which suggested that if a goat only has one kid then it can start to favour only one side of the udder leading to a situation where the owner needs to milk out the other side so that the poor Mum does not swell up and get painful. Now if only we had a use for all that spare goat milk!

Inventive Suicide???

The patient recovering.

It seems to be a "truth universally acknowledged" (if I may borrow from Jane Austen) that sheep are constantly on the look out for new methods of getting sick and dying, inventing new methods of committing suicide and that shepherds have to be as constant and inventive at trying to stop them and keep them alive. That, at least, seems to be the reaction many people will have to your announcing that you propose to keep sheep.

Some cold mornings but at last the days are sunny

They are rather like the stereotyped garage man who looks over the lady's car with a sharp intake of breath and a theatrical grimace before he makes up his list of the things (£££££) that he will need to do to make it right. There is orf and joint ill and watery mouth and scours and 'gunged lambs' and prolapse and mastitis and clostridium and scrapie and and and and.... you get the picture. None the less, people actually do keep sheep, some very successfully and it can go OK, believe it or not. Our own experience has been mercifully lacking in all these woes though we know of some sheep which have died (Rambo, the ram we borrowed, for one, last year) and a friend on Facebook has had a nightmare week of lambing involving lambs born dead and a ewe dying of sepsis. Touch lots of wood; long may our healthy outcomes continue.

Gorse in flower on Kiltybranks

We did have a little 'wobble' this week, though which we may have caught in time. On Saturday last I woke up to do my first livestock rounds and straight away knew something was wrong. Lily, with her lambs in the 'turkey' house was NOT shouting for her breakfast through the door of the outbuilding, impatient for me to open it and pass in some 'crunch'. I mentioned in a previous post that this was a lady who loves her grub and is always first in the queue. Not that morning; something was clearly awry.

The "pool of the dappled horses".

I completed my rounds and went back for a closer look. Lily was not touching her 'crunch' (a mix of grains and molasses), and did not want hay. She just looked miserable and uncomfortable. One saving grace was that the twin lambs were resting contentedly so were obviously still getting plenty of milk. Lambs do not take long to get hungry and these two were quite loud in their demands (they take after Mum!). An hour later I had decided that this was not going to be a 'keep an eye' job. I could hear those spoilers' warnings ringing in my ears. It was time to get the vet, and we had her on site by 11 am.

She quickly diagnosed a slight temperature and a dribble of rather nasty matter from the vulva which spoke of a small amount of retained afterbirth going infected. Lily got 2 BIG injections of different stuff (one anti-fever, the other an antibiotic to combat the infection) and the vet left me a 2nd dose for the Monday (having showed me how to administer it - it was to be my first intra-muscular go). She also warned me (un-necessarily in my case) to be sure and do the jab even if Lily seems better as well as to warm the mix first (e.g. under an armpit)  and to fire it in very slowly to prevent the needle blowing off the end of the syringe. Lily was to be kept in that day but could be let out for some real grass Sunday and onwards.

Not everyone gets this kind of water feature in their new garden.
This river runs along the Sligo house boundary and under
the main road via this bridge.

She seems to have made a full recovery. Slowly at first, so that I was beginning to doubt whether she was, in fact, getting better but then suddenly perking up on Sunday afternoon. At that stage she was trotting about the lawn obviously grazing away like a pro, followed by her still-thriving twin lambs. I had put her on the front lawn 'field' because the grass is better there after it has been rested since Christmas. She was happy enough to be led 'home' to her turkey house pen in the evening. She has then gone from strength to strength and has had her jab on the Monday. Liz helped with that, holding the front end against the pen-side while I did battle with the big thigh muscle but we needn't have worried; the warmed gloop slid in so gently that she didn't bat an eyelid. A good rescue, we think, and huge thanks to vet, Aoife, our guardian angel against 'suicidal' livestock.

Good progress on the Sligo house roof - real slates!

Guest-goat Nanny Óg is looking at methods of getting murdered instead of the suicide thing. She is currently driving me barmy by raiding the food dustbins at night. She has learned how to flick off the lids and is then necking as much of the contents as she can fit in. Not only is she likely to do herself an injury with bloat or indigestion but I no longer know whether her increasing fatness is a pregnancy or just plain over-eating! I tried wedging the lids down with sacks of feed or trays of catfood tins and later tying them down with baler twine but she learned to toss the weights off the offending bin, or moved onto other bins (she doesn't seem to care - 'crunch', milled barley, whole wheat and layers pellets are all grist to her alimentary mill). She even learned to tip the bins over to save her having to rear up and stretch her neck down into the bin to get at the crumbs at the bottom. She has eaten me out of house and home, that gannet! She then has the brass neck to look at me at breakfast time  'asking' for her customary carrot - she can't reach those because the bag is too high for her!

The west end prior to the block walls getting their pale
'scratch coat' plaster. This gable is not yet ready to be
finished as the electric company need to remove their old
cable, currently strapped to the old chimney.

Ah well. No other news except to show you these few pics of the excellent progress on the slating of the Sligo house roof. K-Dub is still working to a target move-in date of between mid April and mid-May. I have also been out felling ash and logging it up for a near-neighbour and I have made contact with the local archery group and organised myself onto a beginners class, but more of those two stories in a future post. Also, the next ewe, Polly, is due to pop in a few days, so no doubt more on that. Just praying for now that it all goes well and I can report that mother and baby/babies are doing fine.