What we've been up to...

I promised to post photos of our new place. Here are a few older shots from this summer, so those first...

coming down the drive, main entrance at the back

new garage

 front of the house overlooks Kachemak Bay

 Barn

 Interior of barn, prior to renovations

Also, since we've moved in, we have three new additions to our tiny herd! Fedderly was born on August 9. We came home from a day trip to Homer, and he was already dry and running around, as healthy as can be! He is the third time Belta has freshened, but this will be the first time she has been milked.

Two days later, poor lil' Olga was out in the yard, when all of a sudden, a kid dropped out! Luckily my sweetheart Will was nearby to notice the new ruckus and let me know "Olga had a baby too!" So I ran out, cleaned the new kid off, and took him in the barn. Both Olga and Belta followed, and Belta was motherly enough to show Olga (her daughter) that she needed to lick her baby off. A few minutes later, Olga backed into a corner and pushed out another kid! I ran over and cleaned it off (A girl!! YIPEE!!), and set her in front of Olga as well. It didn't take long for those kids to get up and about! Olga was still unsure of what she was supposed to do, and Belta continued to show her that she needed to lick them by demonstration. I thought for a moment that Belta was going to let Olga's kids nurse on her, but was glad to see that she refused them, and nosed them toward Olga. Before long, Olga allowed the kids to nurse, and all was well. 

 Olga was overwhelmed at first, but Belta helped her realize her responsibility.

 Olga was very stiff and unsure to begin with (& pardon the awful quality of the pictures!)

 It didn't take too long for her to warm up to the cuties!

We'd been reading a children's book called "The Summerfolk", and Bo was infatuated with the characters, so we named the kids after them. It's a fantastic little book filled with fun imaginative kid adventures, and if you have kids of the human kind, you should check it out! Doris Burn is the author and illustrator.

Meet Fedderly!

and Twyla Loo

and Spinner!

Our plan is to keep Twyla Loo for breeding, Fedderly as a wethered companion for our buck Loki, and raise (wethered) Spinner through the winter for spring butchering. They are almost two months old now, and both the boys are now wethers (I sure as heck hope the Burdizzo emasculation worked because I'd hate to have to perform that procedure twice on the same kid!)

I just started milking the dams 5 days ago. My girlfriend Emily at Wild Roots Homestead suggested that I wait to begin taking milk until the kids are at least 6 weeks in order to be sure they're getting plenty to grow on. I was overjoyed at this suggestion because I worried about the kids putting on weight before winter. I'd be interested to find out how much this delay in taking milk effects the does' milk output. I imagine that it doesn't make too much difference in a full-sized dairy goat like Emily breeds, but because my girls are only partially nigerian dwarf (who put out much less milk than a full-sized goat anyways), I wonder what difference it makes. Perhaps I'll aim at freshening having a doe freshen in the spring some time so I can begin milking earlier without worrying about the kids development so much, as they'll have a lot to munch on in the summer. But because I commercial fish during June and July, I'd like to avoid needing to milk during that time. 

As far as yields go right now, I'm working up to obtaining any kind of yield gradually. For the first 4 days, the kids were not separated at night, so I only was able to milk a cup at most. Last night I finally was able to contain the kids in their pen, and this morning I milked about 2.5 cups, with plenty left over for the kids. And it's going well. I still have to chase the girls about to get them on the stand and in the stanchion, but this morning I didn't have to hobble either one in order to milk. I still don't trust them enough not to kick entirely, so I'm still milking with one hand into a cup in the other hand. But the important thing is that we're making tremendous progress. 

When I bought these girls last September from White Fireweed Farm, they were wild girls. I've slowly been acclimating them to close encounters with humans on a daily basis. I only chase them when I have to for shearing or hoof trimming, but now they'll just have to get with the program and get chased every morning and led to the milkstand. We'll see how much quicker the forced-socialization program works. 

I don't have any milking pictures, as Will has been working this month in Valdez (and I didn't think about asking Bo to photograph!), but I'll post some soon. I do, however, have a few photos of Olga's fall shearing! So now I have two mohair fleeces saved up for processing this winter, as well as Belta's cashmere-type shedding from this spring!

 After I had her completely sheared, she didn't even get up and bolt! 

Without all that mohair, she's barely bigger than her babies

Harvest time has just about wrapped up around here, especially due to the fact that may garden is still at my old place, and I just wanted to feel some sense of culmination to the move. I did a terrible job this summer at multi-tasking between gardening chores, fishing, child-rearing, and animal husbandry. Set-netting swamped me. I thinned too late, weeded too seldom, and left the creek-fed soaker hose on far too often. Slugs conquered too much of the garden to realistically admit to. I was only able to make three quarts of fermented cabbage goodies, two quarts of chard-rib pickles, blanch and freeze 5 quarts of peas, a gallon of frozen raspberries, three pints of black currant jam, and NO FROZEN BROCCOLI OR KALE!!! Guess we'll be spending more money than usual on produce this winter.

Bo helping out with the Cortido

 One quart of Cortido, 2 of Kimchi

Lacto-pickled Chard Ribs

But, the root crops are also in now, and their bounty is easing the sting of my garden neglect. The garlic and shallots I planted last fall in sawdust did surprisingly well. I planted them far later than planned and just covered the whole she-bang in sawdust hoping to insulated it more. I also planted multiplier onion in the spring (totally spaced them out last fall), and although they didn't multiply enough to brag about and harvest, they did more than double the amount for me to plant this fall.

The hard-necks

A couple shallots to harvest, the rest to replant

And, I'm still bringing in potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips, and Brussels, so I'll be sure and let less time go in between posts! 

How was your harvest? And what will you differently for next season? 

Background Noise....

I'll start out on this journal venture with a little about this place and what we're doin' here. We live on 42 acres of steep coastal northern temperate rainforest land in Seldovia, Alaska. The ridge slopes down to a flat meadow which almost borders the slough lagoon, emptying into and filling up with Seldovia Bay waters. In the forties, the original owners of the two-acre parcel pastured a few cows in the meadow, so even before the mud-wracked road was laid in the nineties, this was a farm. And we have always called it 'the farm' from the time my dad purchased it in 2001. But a decade ago, our intentions of farming were limited to a small kitchen garden and landscape renovation.

More recently, we purchased 200 bloomin' blueberry plants from Michigan, planted them in rows atop rotting spruce logs, and failed miserably at protecting them from their first Alaskan winter (which was unusually cold and barren of snowcover), and hence also failed at cultivating our blueberry ranching dream. Temporarily, at least. I did manage to have the foresight to plant a small nursery patch of each of the various cultivars, and those are thriving, albeit needing elbow room and row-covering to truly reach their potential. I'll write more on that at a later date, as I do plan on dividing and expanding our berry patch in the near future.

Around that time, my dad also acquired two wethered dairy bucks (which was another adventure worth a few jaunts down the memory lane of goat antics), and my sister and dad dabbled around in beekeeping.  They kept them for two years, and actually had enough luck to see quite a few bees through the winter. But the second summer was a year notably low in pollen availability, and they ended up providing the bees sugar water throughout most of the summer, and the quality of the honey suffered. No color or depth, but still worth harvesting. In retrospect, both my dad and sister say there was probably enough spruce pollen at least to suffice. This is another topic I'll revisit later in this blog, as I do plan on rejuvenating the hives with a spring bee order.

This property was purchased in two parcels. The lower 2-acre piece came with a two-story 2 BD, 1BA gingerbread ticky-tacked cottage house tucked back in a sitka spruce copse, a pooshky & fireweed field flopped out before it, with a protected but spacious cathedralesque view of the saltwater lagoon, that briny artery to town. There was a redwood snorkel hottub and faded shingle shopshed, a rotting log bridge across our tricklin' crick, and no direct sun in winter. Dad weed-whacked a ton that first summer, then finally bulldozed the field of native herbaceous growth. I started my inaugural garden here with a covered double-swing to enjoy it on. We shoveled labrynthine pathways through the snow and I returned from college & settled in. A couple years later, Daddy-O bought the forty-acres caddy-corner to the lower field. 40 acres of steep lowlands alder scrimmage and prickly thickets of spruce and devil's club understory. A year-round creek, and one top corner of the parcel even corralled the gorgeous gorge biting into said creek. South-western exposure.  Dad had a road cut in up the mountain the same summer I put up a wall-tent over-looking Seldovia Bay.

We've made a lot of changes to this little slice of landscape, and we've gone through a lot of alterations in  other aspects of life, too. A whole lot happens in 10 years. We've added on to the shopshed to accommodate goats and chickens, turned a relocated greenhouse into a new workshop, fell and milled choice swaths of spruce, expanded gardens and tinkered contentedly. My man and my son and I currently live in the original 80s era cottage and keep up with the continual maintenance. Future projects include building a milled-log house, sauna, and greenhouse out of salvaged windows. Current preoccupations include chickens, goats, rabbits, and permaculture intentions.

Here are a few shots of our place & life.

So that's the short story on the neck of these woods. What's led you to deliberate your intentions?