Kidding Season

The milking and cheese making are getting into swing, and the experiments in yogurt have been consistently successful, so that’s going on our product list this year! Milk, chèvre, Camembert, and yogurt: all goat, all the time.

Iris and her Jumbo. I walked on the ferry to deliver this pair to their new people last week. We were a grand spectacle for all passengers and ferry workers.

Of course, in order to having milking season, we had to survive kidding season. With the arrival of fifteen baby goats comes the kind of exhaustion that makes sleeping either extremely easy or almost impossible. It makes us question our dedication to bottle feeding, but at least the eleven-member squad has efficiently figured out bucket feeders.

Newborn twins, when not sleeping, commonly attempt to obtain milk from each-other’s noses. This buckling pair came from the lovely Valentina.

The first buckling is purebred Nubian, so we’re raising and registering him to sell out of the herd. Three wethers shipped out in their first week, snatched up by a local woman wanting to build a pet herd. The last pair of boys have a deposit down on the raise-to-weaning option we offered this year.

Winchester here is the Nubian buckling we plan to sell. Those moonspots are amazing and all over him, so he will definitely throw gorgeous kids. It makes me wish we could keep him, but our herd is already lousy with his mom’s genetics.

Ermergerd! Sunshines!

And then there are the girls. All eight girls. All eight beautiful, elegant, big-eared, energetic, bouncy doelings that we get to raise and keep and love all over. Okay, yeah, we also have to train them to collar directions and their names, and trying to teach them the come-hither herd whistle keeps upsetting all the adult goats that can’t get to me, but mostly what we are storing up in our memories are the times when they bounce around and behave like brats (but in a cute way).

The entire squadron of kids thought that my two-year-old nephew was the most fascinating human available.