Lunches supreme

When we finally had our first ripe tomatoes, in mid-July after a month of steam and sweat, we discovered a remarkable way to eat them. Only on the farm could we have indulged our urgent cravings for this treat!

We took our homemade bread and cut it thick, and toasted it in the toaster oven, then covered it with butter. 

We then cut a fresh wheel of goat cheese into 1/4 inch slices, and laid them on the bread, as soon as possible so they would soften from the warmth left over from the toasting operation.

On top of the goat cheese went one or two huge, thick, incandescent tomato slices, usually still warm from the garden and filled with that glorious earthy smell. They were red all the way through and juicy.

Then we added the lettuce, fistfuls from the later planting and already in danger of bolting before it could all be eaten. 

And then, maybe some good mayonnaise, or maybe not. And then on top, another slice of that good coarse deep brown whole wheat bread.

And then a diagonal cut, because Nana always cut things diagonally and it seemed respectful to do it her way. (She said a diagonal cut is a way of keeping your face clean because you can eat the point first intead of having to dig in sloppily on the side.)

And then the first bite, pure heaven - creamy tangy cheese with bright tomato with crunchy, slightly bitter green with the deep roundness of the whole wheat. 

A glass of cold goat milk or water stood by, and did a pile of napkins to handle the tomato-y drip. 

When the green peppers were ripe, a slice might be added to The Sandwich, but no other adulterants were tolerated or desired. It was already Perfect.

Fufarah

Our evening meal was fufarah, which was anything the garden handed us.

We dug early potatoes and cut them and sauteed them in the big frying pan. Baby beans also went in, cut once or not at all. By July the peas were dying, and the brown vines had mostly gone to the goats, but a few peas were left for the pot. 

The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants were growing but were not yet ready.

But small squashes began to appear, and by the next day they were no longer small. So we learned to pick several each night, and they too went into the pot.

It was all sauteed, then served on brown rice or noodles or eaten with bread.

But just before serving, we topped the mixture in the pot with crumbled goat cheese in great quantity. This was a rather dry cheese from our constant production that used up the excess milk we had in mid-summer.  The wheels sat salted on the counter for a few days, and it was a contest to see whether we could eat as much as we made.

Not that we wanted to. We hoped to make it through the winter months with summer's bounty. 

So every few days a wheel of cheese about 6 inches across and an inch deep went into a plastic bag and then into the freezer.

The cheese softened when tossed onto hot fufarah and added a zesty flavor and a nice touch of protein. With rice and all those garden veggies we ate well, and no two meals were the same. But they were all fufarah, all summer long.

School's out - loving it!

What a relief it was when school was out! What fun we had together! It's not so much that we - mom and kids - hung out together all day long, but that the kitchen was homebase, where the young adventurers would come back several times during the day from their forays into the neighborhood.

Once chores were done, their time was their own. They had long hours with friends, and also we made frequent trips to the little library in the tiny village of South Natick, just less than 3 miles away and as close as any public area. The waterfall below it was especially enticing on hot days, though we mostly just looked at it as we hurried by on some errand. An ice cream cone at Brigham's or Friendly's accompanied most trips into Wellesley to buy groceries. 

In the car we sang and talked and sang some more, mostly camp songs from my childhood. We loved the two-part sections and any song that could be sung as a round.

Back on the farm, the heat of the day was spent reading, each of us gorging on the tall stacks of books we brought home from the library.

June was kind in that most evenings were cool even at the end of hot days, and that meant more time for the garden. Now that we were eating spinach, chard, and peas, the evening hours were ushered in by a quick run to the garden for ingredients for our perpetual summer meal called fu-fa-rah. It consisted of whatever combination of garden goodies that were harvestable with whatever additions the fridge and larder yielded.

A typical early summer fu-fa-rah would be sauteed peas, greens, rice, and goat cheese, of course drunk down with frothy, cold goat milk. 

The one harvest we could count on even this early in the season was rocks. This was an area where the glaciers had scraped and ground the bedrock and left stones and boulders behind. Large and small, they seemed to rise up all summer, so that every time we went out to the garden, new ones were lying on the surface. 

The family ritual was to pick up as many as any one of us could carry, then pile them up in the yard-wide margin between the edge of the garden and the property line. Soon we had a miniature stone wall growing up beside the garden, reminding us of how the real stone walls that lined our property had come to be. 

Picking rocks and peas was fun in the cool of the evening, especially when we didn't have to worry about getting everyone to bed. On breezy nights the mosquitoes were no bother. The display of stars overhead called for lying on our backs on the grass so that Dad could tell us their names, and point out the constellations. It was a season in-between, soft and sweet.

A flood of milk, a wheel of cheese

And so the very warm days of May saw us committed to staying home and enjoying the life we were putting together on the farm.

The baby goats had been nibbling hay from the beginning but now they were really enjoying it. The result was that we had more milk for ourselves. Lots more milk. Streams and rivers of milk.

So it was time to start in earnest preserving it for the winter ahead, and that meant making cheese.

Each day, we would put what was left of the the morning milking, after the babies were fed, into half gallon bottles for us or those who were buying from us. And we would put what was left of the evening milking into a pot to make cheese.

The coagulant for the cheese was rennet that we bought at the drugstore. The bacteria to ripen the cheese and give it flavor would come from the air. 

We brought the milk back on the stove to a good temperature for the coagulant to work, about 110 degrees, then added the rennet dissolved in a small amount of water. Within a half hour or so the milk would begin to separate into curds and whey. By morning the separation was complete, and we'd cut the curd into inch cubes so even more whey could escape.

Meanwhile the bacteria were beginning to grow in the milk, changing its character in a way peculiar to each type of bacterium.

As long as we worked with meticulously clean pots and stirrers, and with fresh milk, we found only wholesome bacteria growing. But under less ideal conditions, the milk could produce yeasty or foul cheese. And sometimes if conditions were just right, we produced just curds with little bacteria and hence little good goat-cheese flavor.

After the curd was cut, it was time to put it in the collander. We used several layers of cheese cloth to retain even more of the curd while it was straining.

The mass of curds needed to sit for a while in the collander, usually several hours into the new day. Then we transferred it to a cheese press and cranked down on it. 

The press was a tube about 6 inches in diameter, with a disk that fit into it. A heavy wood screw could be cranked and made to press on the curds. Whey could leak out the bottom.

The harder we pressed it, the better it would keep and the harder texture it would have.

We made an effort to get most of the whey out of the curd. When we decided it was done, usually by the next morning - 36 hours after the process had begun - we took the wheel out of the cheese press, salted the outside to help preserve it, and put it in a plastic bag in the fridge. For many months we were able to produce a wheel a day.

Some went into the freezer. The texture was a bit crumbly after freezing, but perfectly good for a topping for spaghetti sauce or hot veggies.

At times we also left wheels out on the counter, and watched them closely for spoilage, rubbing salt on them each day as a preservative. If the cheese ripened at room temperature, or the warm temperatures of summer, they could ripen to a delicious flavor and smooth, firm texture. But the spoilage rate was high, and mostly kept it in the fridge to ripen.

We had plenty to eat, and plenty more to freeze for the winter ahead.

No such thing as a free goat...

As we went to goat shows and saw the truly beautiful animals being shown there, I began to appreciate the elements that made up that beauty, and I began to see what 'dogs' our goats were.

Of course we just wanted goats for milk, so what did it matter?

What we had failed to appreciate in the beginning was the small issue of the need to breed milkers every year so they would continue to produce milk.

The normal cycle was annual: Starting at a year, a young doe had her first kid. That meant she was bred at 7 months. She would produce milk for the next 10 months, the last three of which were when she was pregnant with her next batch of kids. After that her supply diminished to almost nothing, and her owner would dry her up and give her a rest for the last two months before the next batch of babies was born a year after the first. 

Let's say she has her first kid or kids on March 1. She is then in milk until the following Jan 1, and gets a rest until the next March 1 when she has a new batch of kids. She would have been bred on Oct 1.

Some few goats can produce for more than 10 months, but the rule of thumb is that they need to be 'freshened' every year. 

The by-product of this freshening is baby goats. One the first year, two or three or four or five thereafter. 

In a dairy with 5 milkers, that would mean something like 15 babies, half doelings.

Newborn does can be raised to make more milkers, sold to someone else for that purpose, or eaten. Newborn bucks generally must be eaten, though some are sold as pets.

Leaving aside the unfortunate young males, there are usually still more little does than a dairy needs to replace the mature milkers, who produce well for at least 5 years.

So they need to be sold. And if the dairy is a business, they need to be sold at a profit, or at least at break-even.

So this is the situation we faced: we had many small does, and it would have been great to pay some of our bills by selling them. 

And of course our goat-people friends were trying to do the same thing.

And that's where shows came in. It was a place to show off one's gorgeous goats, and it was a place to get ribbons that proved the goat was gorgeous.

And after a few shows I realized we did not have gorgeous goats. Nice ones, milky ones, but not good-lookers. 

It could be argued that the looks of a goat have nothing to do with the ability to produce milk. But it's not so: each aspect of a great-looking goat has to do with the ability to produce. These traits define dairy-goat beauty.

So when we didn't win ribbons, we didn't sell goats.

A lot of our first goats were very low cost, or FREE. They made good milk. They didn't win ribbons. They made as many babies as other goats, and they ate as much as other goats. We just couldn't sell their babies.

And that's when I realized there's no such thing as a free goat.

Goat ice cream?

Given our total dependency on ice cream, we had at first assumed we'd be making our own with our goat cream. While we were still living in Wellesley, we had gotten 2 gallon buckets of something called Honey Goat Ice Cream from our coop, and had fallen in love with it. So why not make some from our own goat milk?

We even found an antique cream separator so we could collect the cream to be the featured ingredient.

(Goat milk does not separate spontaneously and create a cream line as cow milk does. Goat milk is naturally homogenized.)

To separate the milk from the cream, you just pour it in the top of the separator and crank the handle a lot, and out of one faucet comes cream while out of the second comes the skimmed milk.

So on our first try, we got the apparatus set up right, and poured in the whole milk. Out came the skimmed milk, but just heavy plops of cream came out of the other faucet.

Eventually we had to take the separator apart, and what we found was cream stuck to everything, but cream the consistency of putty or semi-hard butter.

There was nothing really wrong with it. All it was was supremely heavy cream, so heavy that it couldn't flow out of the machine.

So we scraped it off as much as we could (licked the rest off - it was delicious!), collected it, and prepared to make ice cream.

Usually ice cream is made with liquid cream, but we figured this had to work in a similar fashion. So we put all the ingredients (cream, sugar, fruit) in the ice cream maker, added the ice and salt to the outside chamber, and started cranking.

In maybe 45 seconds we heard a strange slapping or thumping sound, and the crank no longer turned easily. Soooo, we disassembled the whole ice cream maker, and there stuck to the paddles was...

Butter!

You'd never know it by looking at whole goat milk, but the cream is so heavy that you can almost never make it into ice cream, because it turns to butter first.

This butter we had just made was sweet and fruity, and actually quite wonderful spread on bagels. But it was not ice cream!

We gave up making ice cream at that point. We had a hideous amount of clean-up to do with all the parts of the cream separator and all the parts of the ice cream maker, and it just wasn't worth it.

Later we did make ice milk, and we used eggs to make a custard based rich ice milk as another way of using our own produce. But mostly we just bought ice cream at the store.

Out of the nursery...

Throughout April kids continued to be born, and each time we took them to the pen in the basement to join their older cousins, we were amazed at how fast the older ones were growing.

A brand-new kid is the size of a small cat, if you don't count the long legs. Or the size of a man's shoe, plus legs. They stand within an hour of birth, and start to bounce and kick an hour after that, if they're still awake.

But a week later, they are noticeably bigger, and their skills are equally more impressive.

The baby goats were all 'on the ground' and well. We moved them from the pen in the basement as soon as they were big enough to step over the fencing. We were amazed at how fast they'd grown. They went out to the 'kid yard', where they continued to 'popcorn', as we called it.

They still needed to be fed by a bottle, but that was no problem now that the weather was nice. We'd fill up the pop bottles to the top, cap them, and send them out two by two in the arms of the human kids. They'd prop the bottles under their elbows and the babies sucked them dry in about 2 minutes.

We let them have as much as they wanted. There was plenty.

But the milking routine now took longer: gather equipment, put the goats on the stand, milk out the half gallon or so they gave per milking, run it into the kitchen for filtering and pouring into bottles through a funnel, run back out with the bottles and feed the babies, who knew the routine and were crying lustily.

You could tell when a baby was full because his sides stood out and he'd begin to stagger. Soon he'd crawl into the pile of already sleeping babies and doze off.

By the end of April only the tiniest babies remained in the basement, but we decided not to keep them there. We moved them out with the other babies and they learned the routine quickly.

It remained only to dismantle the nursery and haul the used bedding to the garden. The plastic tarp that we had put down under the bedding, before the first baby was born, made the clean-up fairly easy. We dragged the sheet up the stairs and out the bulk head and around to the garden, where it helped nourish the roots of our future meals.

Our first kidding season was over. Our older bucklings were leaving for their new homes, mostly in suburbia. We were working from dawn till sunset and beyond. And we had a new habit called 'goat TV', which was the pastime of standing and watching the babies cavort to express their joy of being alive.

Poised for spring...

As the New Year of 1977 came and went, several things happened.

First, we built a pen by putting up a chickenwire fence in one section of our spacious basement, under two windows that let in some sunlight. We filled it with straw and shavings and looked forward to the birth of the first babies, in early March.

Second, we planned our garden. Our property was somewhat narrow and quite deep. We wanted the garden near the house, but we also wanted to leave plenty of room to play frisbee and baseball. We needed to figure out the area we needed, and after much discussion decided to have 3 gardens. (Why would we want to start small? Had we ever started small?)

The First Garden, as we called it, was for the regular things that would be used in the kitchen every day: spinach, peas, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, all the regular vegetables. It was perhaps 12x20. It was to be dug in near the side of the property, about 3 feet in from the property line.

The Second Garden was for perennials, because we wouldn't want to have to plow there in the future and disturb them. These foods included jerusalem artichokes and asparagus, to begin with. The size was huge, maybe 16x30. It was behind the first garden with plenty of space between them for wheelbarrows and walking.

The Third Garden was for big long-season plants, like watermelon, corn, and squash. This one was about 40x40. It was down behind the goat pens, nearly out of sight.

That seemed like enough.

We had read about organic gardening techniques, but not about any intensive methods. What we knew was from childhood, and consisted of:

plowing
planting in rows
weeding
spraying with a hose
harvesting

So that was the plan.

Then we thought with all that plowing to do we needed a rototiller, and after much discussion spent a great deal of money on a Troy-Built.

We bought the seeds and they arrived before the ground could be worked.

The does were all bred and growing fat and the milk supply was drastically diminished.

The snow was beginning to melt. Buds were appearing on trees and crocuses and daffodils appeared. Everything was filled with promise.

The arrow was drawn back. The days grew subtly warmer. Ready, set....

Freshening

The purpose of having dairy goats (at least in theory) is for the milk. Good goats produce milk for 10 months and then slacken off. To get them to start up again, they need to have a kid. Some great goats will go longer, but the usual rule of thumb is to freshen a doe once a year.

Like so many animals, dairy goats are on yearly cycle. A doe kid is born in the early spring, eats well for the better part of a year before winter conditions arrive, and has her own baby or babies when she is a year old, the next spring, so that the cycle can repeat itself on schedule.

The gestation period of a goat is 5 months, and at the end of that time the newborn is ready to leap up and begin life, on the move so as to avoid predators if in the wild.

On a farm, the newborn kid is not in danger of any predation except excessive petting and picture taking.

But the 5 month rule still applies. If you want babies in March, better get them started in October.

Most breeds of dairy goats are in season throughout the fall, and the kids are born throughout the spring. Some breeds aren't so particular, such as those whose origins are closer to the equator. These will breed in the fall for spring babies, but they will also breed in the spring for fall babies, or at any other time, just about.

We had only goats who were in season in the fall, and that presented a challenge if we wanted year-round milk. Does are usually milked 3 months into their pregnancy, then dried up for 2 months so all their energy can go into the babies. So that is two months when that doe will not be contributing milk to her owners.

The smart course is to breed some of the goats early, some late, in the fall season. Say some in late August with their first heat of the season, and some in November. Anything later than that is risky because the breeding season is almost over.

Freshening is all about bringing does into milk, not producing baby goats. In a sense they are throw-aways in the process, little mouths to feed that use up the precious milk.

But with good planning, they become assets, with homes waiting for them. More on kids later!

With a couple of does freshening around the end of January, and others coming into milk in April, the flow of milk can be out of bounds. Milking all those does is a bigger chore than it was in the fall, when the milk supply was running down and last year's doelings were not in milk at all.

What to do with the seasonal abundance of milk is the big issue of a goat dairy.

The barn: Part 3, using it...

As soon as the barn was installed with goats, we developed our little milking routine.

Milking for most goats must be done twice a day, ideally 12 hours apart. As the days shortened, that meant milking in the dark at least once a day.

A reasonable time for both people and goats was 7 am, but that left the evening milking on the late side.

Soon we got into a routine of 7 am and 5 pm. We found the hour didn't matter critically, as long as we were consistent.

So here's what the routine entailed for the evening milking:

1. Fill the small pail with warm water, a squirt of Basic H, and a rag.
2. Get out the old pot that had lost its two handles and rinse it in hot water.
3. Grab the milk pail.
4. Stack the pot in the pail and the small pail in the pot, and hold them tight.
5. Grab a flashlight, and head to the barn.
(We have direct evidence that this can be done by a 6-yr old. Wish we had photos.)
6. Upon reaching the barn, open the people door, slip through while closing it, open the milkroom gate, and put the pile of pails on the ledge above the milkstand. Turn on the light.
7. Pour some grain from the grain bucket (a nice clean new trash can) into the feed dish on the milk stand, and admit one goat.
8. When she puts her head through the bars of the stand to eat, use the hook to lock her in.
9. Grab the warm, wet rag and wash her udder and teats. Grab a piece of paper towel from the roll on the ledge and dry same.
10. Take off mittens!
11. Take the old pot and put it under the goat. Aim the teats at it, and ready set squeeze (after squirting once on each side into the wash water).
12. Continue squeezing rhythmically while leaning your head against the goat's warm flank and humming.
13. When finished, pour the milk into the big milk pail, strip the teats, quick-wash them with the damp paper towel, and unlock the goat. She will leap off the stand. You will open the door and let her out and the next one will come in automatically.
14. Repeat with number two. Keep adding the milk to the big milk pail when you finish each goat.
15. Continue till all the goats have been milked.
16. Make sure all the goats are back in their part of the barn. Feed them their hay (if another child hasn't done it already) and a little grain. This can be done by leaning over the milkroom wall and putting it straight into the row of feeders there.
17. Toss the water from the wash pail out in the yard. Then put it in the pot. Turn off the light. Put the pail and pot in one hand, and carry the milk pail full of milk in the other hand, all while letting yourself out of the milkroom, closing and locking the gate, letting yourself out of the barn, locking the door, and carrying the milk without spilling a drop all the 100 feet to the house. Maybe in the snow.
18. Pour the milk into the filter that is awaiting its arrival in the sink. A parent will have ice waiting in the sink and will fill the basin with cold water, to chill the milk rapidly. He/She will also wash the pot and pails, and the big funnel filter, and bottle the milk.
19. Someone will do the water. More on the water, along with a discussion of feed, shortly.

Goat milk?

If you say goat milk, people say 'ew'. Even people who have never tasted it.

Goat cheese is popular and a lot of people can't get enough of it. But goat milk?

OF COURSE we tasted goat milk before we bought Monique! And it was good. We also read a lot about it, and the prevailing wisdom was that if goat's milk is handled right, it tastes like...milk.

When we first started milking, Monique's milk didn't taste as good as it had at Judy's.

That meant figuring out what about our handling of it was making it less than delicious.

The list of possibilities from goat books and magazines included:

Dirty containers
Not filtering the milk fast enough
Not chilling it fast enough
Hereditary off-flavor (in a rare goat)
Exposure to sunlight
Exposure to aluminum.

Exposure to aluminum? I had bought a cute little milk pail made of aluminum and that's what I was pouring the milk into. Instant blech.

We converted the milk pail into a flower pot.

The process from goat to bottle is another topic, as you will soon see, but I did learn from this list that even sunlight had a bad effect on the taste. No wonder goat's milk had a bad reputation. You had to handle it just right.

It took us about two months to get our technique down so that the milk tasted like nothing but wholesome fresh whole milk. And then it became a cornerstone of our diet.

Bringing home the goats...

Our goat ladies needed to come home. We had three by the time we moved, and they were occupying space that Judy needed in her barnyard. The first frost would come in a month, and we had work to do.

We had a good-sized garage, divided into two halves. I thought they could do well in there. But first we had to build a milk stand. We set to work and had it in good shape in about a day. We painted it white, and put it in the garage.

I thought that we could let all the girls out of the barn, then bring them in one by one to be milked.

The thing about buying goats in milk is very similar to the thing about bringing home a new baby. Once you have them, you have them, and you have to learn very quickly. We knew how to wash, milk, and bottle, but we'd never had to do it ourselves in the right sequence in a way the goats understood.

So. The first morning I let them all out of the garage through the side door, then selected Monique and let her back in. I had to get her up on the milk stand. She slid her head between the neckholders and started eating, and I locked her in. And then sat down and milked her all the way out myself. My hands ached, but she looked done. I poured the milk into another bucket - more on this later - and let her out. Then it was Erica's turn.

It went ok, but by the time I was done, Elegant had wandered off.

And if they wandered off during milking, surely they would wander off during the day. We realized that the goats couldn't stay in the garage all day, so it was time to get busy on the fence.

And a barn.

Before we got the fence up and the ladies well-contained, they had discovered they could wander at will while I was milking their sister in the garage. And wander they did. One morning they followed the kids to the school bus, and as I came out of the garage I saw Erica climbing on board with Fritz.

It's hard to know what to do in a situation like that. I called her name, but she wasn't paying attention. I had other goats who would follow me down the driveway if I went after her. Finally the driver closed the door in her face and she came running back.

Oh how green we were. Not environmentally green, just green. How long, I thought, would it be before I had it all straight.

Learning how to milk, and the repercussions

Obviously if an academic sort of person from suburbia is going to buy a milking goat, she should learn how to milk.

I went back to Judy's for that purpose. She invited me to come at milking time and watch, and take a hand at milking Monique. (See earlier post explaining about Monique.)

So I went at twilight on a July evening with one or more of our three children, whoever was interested at the time. And we watched Judy milk.

What you do is: Wash the udder, dry the udder, squeeze the teats.

Yes, that's what real goat people call them, and we're not going to get squeamish here over a technical term. They rhyme with meats.

Here's how it's done:

1. Wash the goat's udder all over with a very dilute solution of Basic H in warm water.
2. Dry the udder with a paper towel or dish towel or clean rag (aka old dish towel).
3. Close off the top of the teat, right next to the bag, between the base of the forefinger and the thumb, one hand per teat. (Tricky: this is a two-handed operation. Or as goat people say, "If God had intended people to milk cows, he would have given them 4 hands." Two is just right for goats, who have two teats.)
4. Squirt a tiny amount of milk into the wash bucket, onto the dirt floor, or into the waiting cat's mouth. This is to get rid of the milk that has accumulated at the end of the teat where bacteria might grow in it.
5. Place the clean milk pail on the milking bench (more about this in another post) and begin to milk by squeezing the teat from top to bottom. The easiest way is to add successive fingers. (It helps to watch.). Continue in a rhythmic fashion, about one squeeze per every 2 seconds or so. You can alternate hands or do them together. The milk will begin to flow as it 'lets down'.
6. When the milk flow subsides, massage the bag gently and squeeze again, repeating until the milk stops squirting out. Then strip the teats to get the last of the milk from them. They will look empty.
7. Wash the bag and teats again.

That is how it is done. Not the first time, necessarily, though. I got a squirt or two the first night. But I just loved it! I went back many times...

The trouble with visiting Judy's is that she had more than Monique. She had several goats. One was named Elegant. She was tiny - someone had neglected her and Judy had come to the rescue. Guess what happened next?

Buying a goat: Monique becomes mine

So where does a person go to buy a goat?

I had no idea. Our little farm in suburban Boston was not located in what I thought of as 'goat country'. (See the post on buying that little farm for more details...)

So I looked in the Classifieds and found a goat for sale!

I called the number and talked to a friendly lady named Judy. She became my walking goat encyclopedia and saw me through...well, no need to go into that yet.

I made an appointment to go see the goat she had for sale. This would be my first face-to-face with a goat since one at the petting zoo when I was a kid - er, little girl - ate my Weekly Reader out of my pocket. (Do they still have Weekly Reader in schools?)

So I met Monique. Goats have names, I found out. And personalities, as will emerge later in this saga.

Monique was an older goat, about 6 (out of the expected lifespan for dairy goats of about 10-12 years, with some luck). She was steady. She eyed me while chewing her cud (yep, they do). She stood about hip high. She was brownish and goaty: head, ears, mid-section, udder, tail... What did I know? She was a goat!

Judy told me about her. She was a grade - not purebred. She made lots of milk (!!! I said to myself). She'd had mild mastitis (ugly udder-destroying disease), wasn't beautiful (she wasn't?), but was an easy milker. All answers to questions I didn't know to ask.

So I bought her. She cost $150. I had no idea if that was good or not. I just trusted Judy.

I couldn't take her home yet, because we hadn't moved to the farm. I promised to pick her up as soon as we had something to do with her. (I COULDN'T WAIT!)

Why goats, part 1: they're not cows

Why goats?

We started out thinking we should get a cow, obviously for milk. We drink a lot of milk, so the thinking was, the cow could mow the lawn and make us the milk we were paying for at the store.

But a little reading suggested that a cow might be too big. And also that we would need two cows because one would be dry - NO MILK - for at least two months before she had her next calf. And she'd have a calf each year, and so would her sister, the second cow. And two cows produce an awful lot of milk! And what do we do with the calves. EAT THEM?

The same readings suggested goats. The point was, they are smaller (if they step on your foot, you don't have to go to the hospital), having more than one to get through the dry spell is not as challenging, they eat less. Of course they still have babies - kids - every year. (Maybe we could sell the kids? I mean, the baby goat kids?) And the children could handle them.

Right there I was won over. What was the point of having a homestead if the children couldn't do a good share of the work?

The more I read about goats, the more I liked the idea.

I had no idea where to buy them, but that is a different story.