How we ended up with goats

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Goats

When my husband, David, was little he wanted a goat. His sister had a pony and he thought he should have a pet comparable in size. But his parents, who were out in the barn at the crack of dawn every morning soaking Hazel the pony’s chronically infected hoof, wisely decided a bunny was a better idea. David loved that bunny, but “Pepper” wasn’t a goat.

Fast-forward thirty years… After a decade of city living, David and I were more than ready to move to the country. The home we fell in love with, and subsequently moved into last summer, included a picturesque barn with stalls and a paddock already set up for a variety of farm animals, a flock of chickens, and a large vegetable garden. We settled in with the plan of growing into rural living, and slowly adding to our little homestead. Knowing my tendency towards impatience, we made a concerted effort to pace ourselves. We’ll be careful not to take on too much too soon, we said. After all, we are two working parents with three young children. It would be easy to become overwhelmed. We decided to focus on the garden first, and think about farm animals in a few years.

But now, as we plant, weed, and harvest, we’re very aware of the empty barn. Instead of housing animals, the stalls have become home to bicycles and scooters, a lawnmower, a variety of gardening tools, and old carpets we haven’t figured out how to get rid of yet. We can’t help but think that the barn has become a shed… and isn’t that a shame?

Still, we acknowledge we’re not ready for farm animals. We limit ourselves to casual conversation about what kind of animals we’ll want when the time comes: We don’t eat much meat, so pigs don’t make sense. Plus they’re supposed to be really smart and great pets, could we really butcher a pig? What about a cow, not for meat, but for milk? But a milking cow is a huge amount of work. Sheep? Sheep could be nice. But they need a lot of grass and the fencing would be a big investment. Would there be any payoff? Maybe goats. But what do goats do? They’ll eat the brush... Then we sigh and turn our conversation back to the vegetables, reminding ourselves again that the garden alone is almost more than we can handle at this point.

But the thought of goats lingers in the back of my mind. I start to pay a little more attention when we visit friends who have goats. I start asking questions, slowly building up my knowledge of what it means to keep goats. The picture takes shape and I can see goats being a good fit for our family. The goat people I talk to encourage me, describing each of their goats’ personalities, and declaring that goats make great pets—our children would love them, and so would we.

I visit farms that have “great goat set-ups” and I tour their barns, learning about bedding and fencing, grains, and minerals. I price hay bales and learn the difference between first and second cuts, and why both are important for goat nutrition: the first is higher in carbs, the second in protein.

I’m still just gathering information, I tell myself, but soon the momentum is stronger than I am. I have immersed myself in a crash course on goats. Without realizing it, I have tapped into a community that is full of knowledge, resources, and enthusiasm. I’m starting to feel like a goat owner without goats.

So when a post on our local list serve announces four Nigerian Dwarfs for sale, I reply. I’m just going to look, I tell David as laughs at me. He knows that’s not really true. I’m going to look at what will soon be our goats. But he doesn’t stop me.

Later that night we have an honest conversation. We have no business taking on four goats right now. Our days are already full with work, children, the garden, and a variety of other commitments. We are going to pace ourselves.

But I am impatient and David has always wanted a goat.

Clementine, Mabeline, Temperence, and Caramello arrived on Sunday.

 

Around the Garden: Flower Edition

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What's in bloom has completely changed over the course of a few weeks. Luckily, I have a very generous friend who took me on a tour of my own garden… so I am slowly but surely learning what is what and how to care for it all. Some of my favorites this week are nasturtiums, shirley poppies, meadow rue, musk mallow(?), clematis, bee balm, and tiger lilies. I have other favorites too, but either don't know or can't remember their names!

Oh, and see the paddock? Isn't it just crying our for a herd of goats?


Around the garden: kitchen edition

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Kale chips, basil pesto, and raspberry bars are what's happening in the kitchen today. Our goal is to preserve half of everything. Pesto and raspberries are easy to freeze (well, in theory raspberries are easy to freeze… if we don't eat them all straight out of the garden!), but I'm not sure how to preserve kale, or if it is even possible. Anyone have any good (vegetarian) recipes that use kale and would freeze well? Wouldn't it be nice to not have to cook once or twice a week this winter? Instead I could just pull out a frozen meal from this summer and heat it up... 

I have also discovered that garlic scape pesto on a sandwich with tomato, lettuce, and cheese is delicious. 

What's happening in your garden kitchen?


Slow summer days...

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Around the Garden

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Sometimes it feels like not much is happening in the garden, and at first glance it looks a lot like it did the last time I took pictures. But things are growing - taller, thicker, bushier - and we are (still) on the verge of a burst of produce. At least I think we are. This is my first garden so I'm not really sure exactly what will happen. 

I'm learning a lot from neighbors and friends, and through trial and error. I now know we need to build the pea and pole bean trellises higher than we think earlier than we think, and then the plants need a little help finding their way up. The squash needs some sort of covering to keep the beetles away, at least early on. I think part of why we're so behind is because the seedlings spent their first weeks battling the bugs. We also need to soak the hoop house soil before planting and then water a lot more frequently, especially during the seedling stage. It gets so dry in there. I still don't know what to do about the critter who is helping himself to our strawberries. Maybe some sort of cover for them too.

But all in all, our garden is coming along. The freezer is starting to fill with various pesto recipes and our salad bowl is now filled with fresh greens. I'm really looking forward to adding in the tomatoes, peas, and carrots!


Vegetables!

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The garden is on the verge of bursting. In the space of a few days, we went from a stalk of asparagus here and a few spinach leaves there to a sudden abundance of garlic scapes, basil, spinach and lettuce. After such a late spring and the slow - painfully slow - growing of  seedlings, I plain old forgot that these plants would actually produce. Now as I walk through the garden, I feel slightly overwhelmed by what's coming… and how I'm going to deal with all of it so as not to let anything go to waste. Mostly, I realize I'm going to have to set some time aside - not for "gardening", but for picking, washing, cooking, freezing, and canning.

Of course I shouldn't speak too soon. You never know with those pesky beetles who devour squash plants and the little critters (I suspect a mole) who like to take two bites out of every ripe strawberry. But for now it looks like we will have vegetables.

My first summer recipe was garlic scape pesto. The first batch was way too hot, so it went into the freezer to be dealt with another time. The second batch was delicious: scapes, oil, basil, walnuts, and parmesan. I froze half and the other half was devoured in one sitting. We're as bad as the beetles.  

Happy gardening!

Taking my kids swimming

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This month at VT Mommies I write about taking my kids swimming and the anxiety I feel when my kids are around water. Since writing this, I've taken my kids swimming a few times and it has been great. They absolutely love it and beg to go to the pond every day.

Jumping in: Taking my Kids Swimming

“It’s going to be at a swimming pool, mom! We get to go swimming!” my daughter enthusiastically tells me about her classmate’s upcoming birthday party. My stomach clenches as I wonder how I’ll manage that one, especially if it is on a day when my husband works and I’ll have to take all three children, none of whom can swim yet.

I have no particular reason to feel anxious about my children and water. I have always loved swimming and consider myself to be a strong, if not fast, swimmer. As a child, swimming was one of my greatest pleasures, and, as an adult, I find it both invigorating and calming. I never sleep better than after a good swim, and the sight of a sparkling blue swimming pool or clear, glittering lake makes me profoundly happy.

Even the way I learned to swim should quell any fear I have about my own children and water. When I was six, my mom signed me up for what she thought were swimming lessons at the local high school. But as she sat in the bleachers with my little sister, watching lines of kids dive into the Olympic size pool and start swimming across, she realized it was swim team, not swim lessons. There was nothing she could do as she watched me obediently jump into the pool when the whistle signaled my turn. I didn’t sink. I doggy-paddled my way across and loved every minute of it.

But the thought of my own three children in a body of water scares the crap out of me. There is no doubt that drowning is a real danger, but to some degree, my fear is irrational, especially since I am not particularly risk-averse in other areas of their childhood. I let my kids climb high up in trees without a second thought, we go for bike rides on curvy country roads, and I drove them hundreds of times on the Anacostia freeway in Washington D.C., all of which should be scarier than allowing them to swim in a life-guarded pool or lake under my supervision.

I blame my fear on anxiety. Thanks to a combination of my anxiety-prone genetic makeup and our increasingly anxiety-prone parenting culture, I have let swimming slip into the category of “hazard to avoid” rather than “essential childhood pleasure.” I’m not sure why my perspective on swimming—but not tree climbing—has been skewed, but I’ve somehow let the unlikely possibility of tragedy override the absolute joy of going swimming on a hot summer day.

Some degree of anxiety is a good thing: it can sharpen our minds in a high stake situation, like taking an exam, and ensure we are vigilant while supervising children at a swimming pool. But keeping anxiety at just the right level can be tricky, especially when our children are involved and the protective instinct isn’t always rooted in a rational risk assessment.

This summer, I will get my “swim anxiety” into balance and share my love of swimming with my children. I will take them to the upcoming pool party and we will meet friends at the lake for play dates. To help ease my fears, I will ask my friends with one child to help me watch my three, and I will sign them up for swim lessons, making sure they are lessons and not team practices. Not yet, at least.

Around the Garden: Flower Edition

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Vegetables are great and all, and I love the neat and tidy rows of a well-organized vegetable garden… but the flowers are stunning. The unknown of our flower garden this year - what I call "Garden Surprise" -  very nicely balances out the orderly toil we've put into growing vegetables.

Greens that looked like weeds, but that I've resisted pulling up, are now colorful bunches of flowers whose names I am finally learning. Sweet William spans the patch in front of the hoop house, with bunches of daisies and pansies interspersed here and there, and a low layer of poppies waiting to take over later in the summer. In front of the barn are bleeding hearts, peonies, poppies, clematis, mint, and a few other things I don't know yet.

I've also started to add a bit of my own (well, my mom's) touch: allium, sunflower, impatiens, nasturtium, lupine, and zinnia. The allium and impatiens are doing well, and we're still waiting (hoping) for the others to come up.

Usually I don't like chaos, but in a flower garden, the messy mix of this and that and here and there is just perfect. 

Flower3.jpg



Around the Garden

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A long overdue garden update. We've finished planting (we think). Pole beans, bush beans, carrots, shallots, pumpkins, dill, tomatoes, garlic, peas, basil, cucumbers, winter squash, acorn squash, zucchini, broccoli, chard, lettuce (which sadly isn't growing), kale, spinach, rhubarb, asparagus, watermelon, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and indian corn. I think that is all… I might be forgetting something. Oh, and a wood chip path is in progress.

We seemed to have overcome the snail problem, but now the cucumber beetles have arrived and seem to really like the squash. I've been told I need to not only hand pick them off, but squish them with my fingernails. I'm ok with picking them off, but squishing them between my nails? I'm not quite there yet. But I guess I'll have be if I want squash.

And now, here are many, many pictures.