Garlic Infused Olive Oil

So, if you know me in person, you probably know I’m a big fan of using home remedies before going to the doctor.  I figure if I can take care of something at home it’s better for my body and better for my bank account.  Also, doctors can’t really do much about colds and things of that nature, so why bother going?  Anyway, here is a simple and inexpensive home remedy that we’ve started using recently.  Someone shared it with us, and we’ve found it effective.  It’s garlic infused olive oil.

Infusing olive oil with garlic is quite simple.  Mince some garlic (however much you want), put it in a small glass jar or bowl, and cover the garlic with olive oil.  Place the jar in a pan of water and put it on the stove on medium or medium-low heat for 15 to 20 minutes.  The heat helps the properties of the garlic to infuse into the olive oil fairly quickly.  This is useful for a variety of illnesses.  We’ve mostly used it for colds.  To use it, you rub some of the oil on the bottoms of your feet, then put on socks so you don’t leave oily footprints everywhere.  The pores on your feet are among the largest in your body, so it absorbs the oil and distributes it throughout your body.  Raw garlic has antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal properties.  It’s also helpful for expelling intestinal worms.  We feed it to our goats to boost their immune system and keep the worms down.  It works well for people, too.  You can also eat the raw garlic, but that’s far more unpleasant (to me) than rubbing some gently warmed oil on your feet.  It smells pretty garlicky, but that’s a good thing in this case.  We usually use it at night before bed when we’re not going to be going anywhere, and thus the smell isn’t that big of a deal.  As I said, we’ve only tried it with colds, but I would think it would be effective for stomach viruses as well.  I’ve heard that it also works well for ear infections if you place a little of the oil in the ear.  Overall, it’s a pretty simple and effective way to combat illness with things that might be in your pantry, or at least in your local grocery store.  Since you don’t need very much of the oil to rub into your feet, you can cap the jar (or cover the bowl) and store the remainder in the refrigerator. I don’t bother straining out the garlic, as leaving it in only makes the infusion stronger, and that’s not a bad thing in this case.

Thaw

After last weekend’s snowstorm, this past weekend brought a nice thaw.  All of the new snow is pretty much gone, we’re just waiting for the rest of it to melt away.  Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day that melted a lot of snow.  Today is a bit more blustery and rainy, but it’s still well above freezing.  Melting is messy, but it means spring is on its way.

Another sign of spring is that our goats are beginning to shed.  Goats grow a downy undercoat to insulate them from the cold.  In the spring, they shed the down.  Jack is starting to shed quite a bit.  This down can be collected and spun.  It is essentially cashmere (it’s not technically cashmere because it’s from a Lamancha goat, not a Kashmir or Cashmere goat). Yesterday on our foray into town we stopped and bought an undercoat rake.  After we got home I combed the goats.  Jack is really the only one shedding at the moment.  I didn’t get much of anything off Colby and Brie, but from Jack I got enough down to almost fill a cool whip container.  We put the goats in the stanchion to comb them, just to make it easier for me.  They enjoy being combed, though, so it’s not an unpleasant task for anyone.

Raising Organic Family Farms

There’s an organization called Raising Organic Family Farms that is giving away grants for beginning and transitioning farmers and college students.  The grants are up to $2,500, which, for us, would make a big difference.  We have applied.  Application is open until March 16, and then they select the recipients.  Our answers to the application questions are posted here on their website.  Feel free to go read it and click on the thumbs up to like it.  There are lots of other stories published there from current and past applicants.  I don’t know if liking our post will increase our chances of winning, but it certainly can’t hurt.  If nothing else, it’ll give you a more clear idea of why we’re doing what we’re doing and what we hope to accomplish.  We would appreciate any prayers or good thoughts sent our way for winning the grant and making things happen this year.

Learning Curve, Part 1

There have been many things that we’ve learned since moving here.  This is our first house, and with home ownership of any type there’s a bit of a learning curve.  Add several acres of property, and the curve’s a bit bigger.  Still, we’re learning and enjoying it without regret.

One of the first lessons that I learned is that looking at a house and living in a house are not the same thing.  When we looked at the house, we didn’t mind the paint job too much or look closely at the countertop tile job.  After moving in, we decided the paint was horrible and needed to be redone.  The countertop til job was obviously DIY, and not very well at that.  It was lacking a backsplash (which we did notice before moving in) and the tile work is very uneven and badly grouted.  We didn’t really notice that until we were already here. We’ve had a backsplash put in and plan on getting the counter regrouted, we just need to clean out the gunk between the tiles and schedule it first.  While not fantastic, it’s not a high priority.  We also discovered that the sprinkler system has a water leak and the guy who lived here before really liked to splice wires, whether that was really a good idea or not.  We’ve ripped out more bad splicing jobs than I care to think about.  A lot of it was for outdoor landscape lighting that wasn’t working anymore anyway, so we don’t feel the lack of that wiring or the need to redo it.

The major house related thing we’ve had to learn is fire and wood stove maintenance.  We have a wood stove in our house that we’ve been using as our primary heat source this winter.  We do have a furnace, but the wood heat is less expensive and more cozy.  We can keep the main part of the house at a nice warm temperature without it costing a fortune, and our bedroom stays nice and cool which makes for better sleeping.  But, starting a fire and keeping it going is definitely a skill.  When the only fire you have regular contact with is a candle flame, you don’t realize what a skill it really is.  It doesn’t seem that big of a deal, but getting a fire going can be a challenge.  We’ve had to Learn how much wood to add before bed or before leaving the house for a while so that there’s still something left when you’re able to tend the fire again.  Restarting the fire from the leftover coals is also a challenge.  Then there’s recognizing when the chimney needs cleaning.  We burn conifers here because that’s what’s available.  The wood we’ve been burning is fir, which, from what I understand, is better than pine, but not as good as hardwood.  The problem is, we live in a coniferous forest, not a deciduous forest, so there’s not much hardwood available.  The softer confers produce a lot more soot, which means the chimney gets a lot of buildup rather quickly.  There are signs from the fire that the chimney needs cleaning, but you have to be able to know that’s what they are before you smoke yourself out of the house.  That one’s been really fun to learn.  We have gotten it figured out now, though, so next winter should be easier in that regard.

Saving lots of money with a wood stove also takes advance planning.  If you want to cut your own wood, you have to let it sit for a year before using it.  Green wood doesn’t burn very well.  It needs to be seasoned for at least a year for it to do well.  There was some cut wood on the property when we moved in, but we’ve had to purchase two cords.  Next winter we’ll probably buy three cords.  It’s still less expensive than paying the equivalent in the electric bill, but cutting it yourself would save quite a bit more.  So, if we cut wood this spring and summer, we’ll be able to use it in the winter after next.  But, starting this year means saving a bundle later.  We have trees on our property that need to come down, and, after that we can get permits to cut on the US Forest Service land.  The permits are very inexpensive.

*So as not to make this post excessively long, I’m breaking it into two parts.  Part 2 will be coming on Wednesday.

Old Man Winter Back Again

This is what happens when you leave the ladder on the deck and your gutters don't work well.

It’s been snowing here all weekend.  While I am still hoping spring will show up soon, it is pretty to watch the snow falling softly through the trees.  Especially when you don’t have to go anywhere.  We did a few maintenance chores this weekend – hoof trimming (got that in before the snow started on Friday) and adding new bedding to the goat house.  Michael also adjusted the height of the feeders.  As the bedding gets deeper through the winter, the goats were kneeling more to get at the bottom of the feeders, which is where all the leafy stuff falls, which is their favorite part.  Michael put them up a bit higher to make for easier access.

Here are a few photos from our weekend.  The first ones were taken Friday before it started snowing, the others were from Sunday, after we’d accumulated around a foot of snow.

Garden Planning

My garden area is currently buried under snow.  This, however, does not stop me from starting to plan my garden.  I went through all my seed packets the other day and made a chart of the plants, when to plant each one, the number of days until germination, the number of days until harvest, and the spacing.  I also have columns to note when I actually planted them, when I transplanted them outside (if they were started inside), and a column for notes.  I then measured my garden beds (at least, I measured the places where the snow looks higher because the ground is higher there) to see how many square feet of prepared garden bed I have to work with.  I currently have two beds, one of which is 36 square feet and the other is 48 square feet.  I plan on adding more beds this year, but that’s what there was time to get done in the fall.

This past fall I decided to engage in a somewhat modified version of lasagna gardening.  Lasagna gardening is a method of preparing garden beds by piling alternating layers of compostable materials and letting them sit from the late summer and early fall until spring.  It’s a no-dig method which appealed to me for a few reasons:

1. The garden is going in an area covered in grass.  I don’t have to dig up the grass, just smother it.
2. It gave us a place to pile up the goat bedding when we changed it out.
3. All we had to do was pile things up before it got too cold and leave it until spring.  Since we didn’t have time to do much else with everything else going on, that was a major plus for me.

I call it a modified version because true lasagna gardening requires greater variety in the layering of the materials.  I have a layer of cardboard at the bottom (to smother the grass) and on top of that we piled lawn debris from cleaning up the property and used goat bedding.  I know the goat bedding composts pretty well, because we’re doing the deep litter bedding for the winter in the goat house, and the bottom layers are already pretty composted in their house.  We do also have a compost pile started off to the side of where the garden is.  When we clean out the bedding in the goat house this spring, that will be added to the compost pile unless we need it.

The "lasagna" garden beds when they were first started.

I am also planning on creating a couple more beds for use this year.  Michael wants us to grow some corn, and there won’t be enough room in the beds we’ve already started for that to happen.  Also, in the beds I will be using intensive agriculture methods, and, from what I understand, corn is less suited to that type of gardening.  Corn is tall, which means I won’t be able to reach across an outer plant to get to an inner plant as I can with other types of vegetables, so it will have to be grown in a block of rows.  The other things that won’t be going in the lasagna beds are potatoes.  I plan on growing those in some sort of vertical planter, either old stacked tires or a wire cage, or something.  Last year we grew potatoes in a couple of large plastic bins, but I’ve read that you get more potatoes out of something more vertical.  As the plant grows, you add more soil around the base of the plant, which causes it to continue growing upward and adding more potatoes as it goes, so the entire structure is filled with potatoes.  Maybe we’ll do a few potato varieties this year, rather than just one.

I won’t be starting seeds for another month, but I’m looking forward to being able to do that.

So, has anyone else started planning their garden yet?

Solipsism

Happy goats browsing on the back 4.

sol·ip·sism

[sol-ip-siz-uhm]  Show IPA

Noun

1. Philosophy. The theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.

2. Extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption

Sometimes I can be a bit solipsistic.  Not in the first sense of the word.  I don’t think I’m the only real person and all of you are figments of my imagination.  But, in the second sense – a bit.  I tend to forget that not everyone thinks the way I do or knows the same things I do or have come to the same conclusions based on the available information.  Occasionally something happens that brings this to my attention.

Yesterday we took Brie, our doe, to get blood drawn to be tested for CAE and CL.  CAE is Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis.  More information can be found here if you’re curious.  CL is Caseous Lymphadenitis.  More information about that can be found here.  Basically, they’re goat diseases and they’re not good.  Most breeders want to know that the animal you’re wanting to breed is CAE/CL negative and will provide the same information to you.  The place we took her yesterday is where we were thinking of breeding her as well.  The lady offered to do the blood draw for us and it would be less expensive than using a vet.  So, we borrowed a dog crate from a friend (we haven’t obtained one of our own yet), loaded Brie into it and drove to the other farm.  I’m glad we went, because it was an eye opening experience.

The goats seemed fairly healthy and well fed, but their area was very small.  In the same amount of space that we use to house three small goats (small as in not full grown yet), she kept more than ten goats (I didn’t get an exact count).  Several of the goats were kept in small fenced areas either by themself or with one other goat just off the main area.  They had bedding and, I’m sure, food and water, but they didn’t have room to run around.  Also, her herd management practices are very different from ours.

We try to use natural methods to preserve our goats’ health as much as possible.  If they start coughing or acting off, we give them garlic right away and that usually takes care of the problem.  If necessary we would use medications and more serious measures.  We did give them a little bit of a chemical wormer this fall because I suspected that one of the goats had lungworm.  Garlic doesn’t take care of lungworm in the same way it does for other intestinal worms.  But, they’ve otherwise been healthy without routine use of vaccinations, chemical wormers, or other medical interventions.  We also like to let our goats have access to browse and pasture, which our current fenced area can no longer provide.  In order to give them access to more variety in their diet, we took them for walks twice a day to browse the back part of our property until it got too cold and snowy to do so.  There’s not much to browse on back there right now, so they’re getting hay.  The fencing and barn building projects that we hope to do this summer (for more info on that, see this post) will allow us to give our goats more access to pasture.  We believe this helps keep them healthy, just like having a varied diet keeps humans healthy.  It also helps to clear our property to make it more usable in other ways.  When we can, we will start rotating the goats through different sections of pasture so that no one area gets over grazed or begins to harbor parasites and other pathogens.

In our conversation, it became clear that this farm is not run in the way we intend to run ours.  There were too many goats in too small of an area.  The ground can’t absorb the amount of poop being put into it, so it gets a lot dirtier.  The goats were friendly, but they didn’t have room to run and play – especially the ones kept in separated small pens.  She vaccinates and uses wormers on a regular basis.  For her herd and their conditions, this is probably necessary.  But, it also means that her goats don’t possess strong enough immune systems to resist on their own.  Since we don’t intend to worm and vaccinate, it’s preferable to breed our goat with one that has a strong immune system.  Since wormers are, essentially, poison, they suppress the goat’s immune system (garlic, our preferred treatment, strengthens the immune system, allowing the goat to fight off whatever it needs to).  We generally weren’t thrilled with the goat housing conditions there, and have decided that we don’t feel comfortable taking Brie back there to be bred.  We gave all our goats garlic last night just to be safe in case she picked up something she hadn’t been exposed to before at the other farm.  Plus, traveling is stressful, so immune system support is a good idea.

We haven’t been around a lot of other people who raise goats.  Really, the only other one we’ve spent much time with is the lady we bought Brie from, and she has the same ideas about goat husbandry as we do.  The websites and books that I read tend to focus more on natural methods of raising animals.  So, it’s easy for me to forget that other people do things very differently.  There were good things about that farm visit.  We did get Brie’s blood drawn, which will provide us information that we need no matter where we take her to be bred.  We also saw the condition of the farm where we were thinking of breeding her before taking her there to be bred.  Now we can set up farm visits for the other places we’re thinking of breeding her to make sure we feel comfortable with the conditions she’ll be in before taking her there.

More Snow

We knew that we would get more snow before the end of winter.  It usually snows around here into March and occasionally April.  The thing is, it doesn’t usually stick or accumulate. It snows right on the cusp of freezing, we might get an inch or two of slushy wet muck, then it melts and goes away.  We thought we were done snow blowing for the year.  Yesterday morning we woke up to this:

C’mon, Spring!  We’re ready for you!

Meet Our Goats

People often ask me how many goats we have.  Right now we have three.  We have two wethers (castrated males) and a doe.  We will be breeding our doe in the near future and expect to add her babies to our herd when they are here in July.  We are deliberately growing our herd slowly at this point.  We need to have a larger barn and more pasture fenced in before we get very many more animals.  I also get asked why we got the two wethers.  We can’t breed them to our doe, so why did we get them?  There are a few reasons.  For one thing, a single goat is a lonely goat.  Goats are herd animals and need at least one companion in order to be happy.  Does are more expensive than wethers, so we got one doe and two wethers.  Our wethers are twin brothers and were being sold as a pair.  We also got them because about four of our five acres are mostly brush and weeds. Goats make great weed eaters.  And they’re less expensive, less work, and more fun than trying to clear brush and weeds with machinery (or by hand).  Goats also make fun pets.  The other reason why we got wethers instead of a buck is that we’re not equipped to keep a buck right now.  Bucks tend to be more aggressive than either does or wethers.  They also smell more, particularly during rutting season.  (Goats are seasonal breeders.  This means that does go into heat and bucks go into rut at a specific time of year.)  Bucks need to be kept separate from the does so that you know when your does have been bred.  It’s nearly impossible (from what I’ve read) to tell if a doe is pregnant by looking at her, and it’s important to know when she’s been bred so that you know when to expect her to kid.  We don’t currently have the infrastructure to allow us to keep a buck.  We may, at some point in the future, decide to do so, but for now we’ll use breeding services from other local goat farms.

On to meeting the goats.  The boys are currently ten months old.  Their names are Colby and Jack.  We’ll meet Colby first.

Colby curled up at my feet in August. He was almost five months old.

Colby in profile.

Colby hanging out in the snow.

Next we’ll meet Jack.

Jack in August.

Having a snack.

Playing on the doghouse.

And finally, meet Brie, our doe.  She’s the youngest at almost seven months old.

Brie at one month old.

Brie crawling under my chair.

Brie curled up under me. She did that a lot when she was tiny and I sat in their pasture with them.

Hanging out with Michael.

These are just a few pictures of our growing goats.  We have more on the Sláinte Mhaith Farms Facebook page.

 

 

Projects and Patience

The brighter green tips mean spring is on its way!

We have a white board hanging in our house.  We use it to keep track of different projects that we need to do and a running list of things we need (groceries, things for the house, etc.)  We have quite a few projects planned for this year.  The biggest ones are fencing our property and building a new barn.  The biggest obstacle for both of these is financial.  We are planning on installing the fencing and building the barn ourselves to save money, but we still need to purchase the materials.  We’re still researching plans for the barn, so we haven’t been able to price materials yet.  The fencing needs to be in place before we can use the barn, but we would really like to have both in place before next winter.  We’re planning on breeding our doe soon, which means we’ll have a couple more goats this summer.  We would like to gradually grow our herd, but will need more space for housing. We also need a better hay storage solution.  The previous occupants had built a deer blind/tree house thing at the back of the yard.  We dismantled much of this and used the walls for our goat house.  We left the floor up, closed it in with plastic sheeting and tarps, and put our hay on a couple of pallets in there.  We thought it would be nicely out of the weather.  What we didn’t think about is that the “floor” of the deer blind, which is now the roof of our hay storage, is only made of pressboard and isn’t waterproof.  Once it started raining very much, it leaked.  We’ve lost a lot of hay to mold because of that.  Once we realized it was leaking, we covered the hay with tarps, but a lot of damage was already done.  So, while we’ve been able to protect the rest of our hay fairly well, it’s definitely not ideal.  Plus, the hay isn’t right next to the goat house, which makes feeding messier.  If we had a good sized shed, part of the shed could store our hay and the stanchion, and the rest would hold our goats.

It’s difficult to be patient for all of these things to happen.  We both want them to happen now.  But, there’s still several inches of snow on the ground on most of our property, which means we can’t even stake out where we want the barn to go.  I know it’s still February and it’s not unusual for there to still be snow on the ground, especially out in the woods where we are.  I’m ready for spring, though.  It’s also hard to have patience with the fact that the funding is simply not there for these things yet.  We’re going to start purchasing fencing materials as we can, and start putting them up (once the weather warms enough) as we get them.  We’re researching grant opportunities to help with infrastructure costs, but there don’t seem to be that many out there.

The other thing we have to be patient with is the fact that we’re working with a biological model.  We have to wait for our doe to be old enough to breed.  We have to wait for her to be in heat in order to breed her.  Then we have to wait for her to kid before we can start milking her.  We bought our three goats last August.  We won’t be able to milk until this coming July.  We also didn’t get to start a garden here last year.  It was too late in the season when we moved in to do much and there was so much else to do that took precedence.  I did manage to prepare a couple beds in the fall for planting this spring (which brings me back to the waiting for spring comments), but wasn’t even able to get in a fall garden.  Other projects for this year include building cold frames and row covers for season extension, possibly obtaining a greenhouse of some sort, small root cellar options (we’d like a full root cellar, but with the time and expense involved in fencing and barn building, that’s not likely to happen this year), and expanding the garden area.  This is all on top of expecting our first child.  Part of my impatience to begin sooner than later has much to do with the fact that I’m halfway through my pregnancy.  At some point my ability to do all the things I want and need to do will be far more limited.  I would like to get as much done as I can before then.

So, I’m trying to do as much planning as I can while we’re unable to build.  We’re researching barn building and determining the size and shape of the barn.  We’re hoping to use as much salvaged material as possible in order to save money.  And we’re starting to save so that we can afford to buy what we will need to buy.  If you would like to contribute to our efforts, we now have a “Donate” link here on the blog as well as on our website at www.slaintemhaithfarms.com.  We would also welcome donations of any materials, leads on places to get fencing and building supplies for free or cheap, and, if you’re in the area, help with the construction.  Maybe we’ll get to have an old-time barn raising sometime this summer.  We also have hand crafted soaps and lotion bars for sale under the “Products” tab on our website.  Click on the About tab to find out more about our goals and philosophies.