Why no special Orders?

We won’t be taking special orders for the time being for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that Clover and I specialize in different areas (breads for her and sweets for me) and we have various travel plans coming up which will mean parts of our menu will be unavailable when one of us is away.

The second reason is that we are a small bakery with a small kitchen and limited numbers of certain pan sizes/shapes so for example if someone puts in an order for rolls to pick up at a market that have to proof and bake in our 9 by 13 inch pans then I won’t be able to bake the cake that bakes in that pan for that market. Sometimes too we can run out of certain ingredients (usually for fresh fruit, dairy and eggs) which again means we won’t be able to bring a certain item to market.

If you see reason 2 and wonder why we don’t just do orders on non-market days the reason is that breads take a long time (multiple proofs, shaping and baking) and so if we only get one order for one loaf of bread Clover will be in the commercial kitchen working for 4 hours for the price of 1 loaf of bread, if that is our Honey Cranberry Walnut bread that’s 4 hours work for $8 (and that’s not factoring in the cost of ingredients!)

All this being said we will be doing special orders for holidays because we do love our bakes being a part of people’s holiday traditions and if someone asks if I could make a certain cake or cookie for the next market i’m usually going to do that!

2023 A Year of Highs and Lows

Wow I haven’t updated the blog page in a while, its been a busy busy year! There were high highs and low lows. I’ll break it down into 3 sections: Animals, Markets and Weather.

Animals:

This year Duck Duck Goat Farm had its first births: 3 beautiful baby goats! We borrowed Groot, a handsome male Nigerian Dwarf goat from our Starry Eyed Farm neighbor Cathleen to come and live in the barn with the girls in January. He had a very calming influence on our 3 girls and Peanut was far less aggressive at meal times while he was around. While we never saw him actually mate with the girls they definitely all got much wider after he left so we figured he had been successful.

Now due to faulty memory and a trip to the UK I mis-remembered what month we had Groot to stay so it was a huge surprise on June 11th when Clover interrupted my scone-making to tell me that Juney had given birth to two babies. I thought she was joking at first but low and behold there were tiny baby goats in the barn: a girl, Mochi and a boy, Manju! They were both tiny and perfect and it was a joy to see Juney become a devoted mother.

We watched the other 2 goats carefully and waited upon their births but the next birth was a tragedy. Maple, our smallest and meekest girl went into labor with us there to help but her baby was stillborn. We cleaned her up and she started eating and so we thought it was over but a few hours later she gave birth to 2 more stillborns. We never found out a concrete reason for this but the prevailing theory was that she was just too small to give birth to 3 babies. Our hearts were broken but at least darling Maple survived and we had to swing into practicalities like buying milking equipment, building a milking stand in the woodshop and learning how to milk. Because Maple had no babies to feed it was our job to milk her to relieve the pain of a full udder. She got very good at the routine of milking and we were able to keep milking her until December. The milk was delicious but we could not afford the pasteurizer needed to be able to sell the milk or use it for baking so we drank some and have some stored in our freezer to try our hands at making goat milk soap.

Peanut gave birth with our assistance the following week to a beautiful baby girl, Nugget! Nugget is the only goat that Peanut will share food with!

Because of the heartache over Maple’s stillbirths we decided to keep Mochi, Manju and Nugget instead of selling some of them as planned and we decided to skip breeding this year. Our 6 goats are happy and healthy and love their forage walks and snuggles.

As to the other animals our chickens and ducks are aging and not producing as many eggs (they are still happy and healthy and enjoying retirement) so we got some new chicks this summer, hopefully they start laying soon!

Markets

This year we started going to our first offsite summer time farmer’s market at the West Hartford Library. We had originally planned to go to a different market but due to their decision to do a last minute day change from Thursdays to Fridays we had to find another market. Luckily West Hartford took us as many other places were no longer accepting applications so late. I’m so glad that this is how it panned out though as I love the West Hartford Library market! I enjoyed making some new regular customers, the market had a great atmosphere and held lots of little events during the market. We plan to return in 2024!

This winter we joined the Norwich Farmer’s market lineup for their by-weekly Tracey Hall markets. It is great having a regular market to go to through the winter this year!

Weather

2023 Vermont had some unusual weather, the summer was usually rainy resulting in flooding in many places! We live up on a hill and so we were lucky that the farm didn’t flood but it still caused problems for us, some markets were cancelled or poorly attended due to storms and many of our usual vegetable crops didn’t do well. The rain didn’t deter my farm stand regulars though! It touched my heart to see you all braving the rain to come get your baked goods!

The winter weather is turning out to be unusual too, we’ve even been able to take the goats out for forage walks (my goats don’t like going out in the snow)!

So that’s it for 2023, a year of highs and lows. We are taking the new year off this year to have a bit of a rest, though we have both been doing some recipe testing: look out for jammy thumbprint cookies and a cottage cheese and dill bread in the coming year!

So why the name change from Nick to Clover?

Don’t worry we don’t have a new baker! The owner and main baker of Duck Duck Goat Farm and my wonderful spouse realized a couple of years ago that they are not comfortable living as a man and began taking steps toward living as a woman. She is now ready to go by her new chosen name of Clover. The current political climate is very scary to us as we see how other States in the US are demonizing trans people and taking away their rights, even here in Vermont a few months ago a trans woman was murdered and the pride center in Burlington was vandalized during her memorial! We have been very hesitant to come out because of things like this but we hope that our neighbors here can accept that we are the same people who just want to bake bread and look after our gardens and animals. We saw how wonderful and nurturing and this community is here by all the well wishing emails and offers of help that we received when we had Covid and this is what made us feel safe enough to go ahead with this announcement.

Hope to see you all at the farm stand soon!

Kat

Measures to combat Avian Flu

Avian Flu is now in Vermont and in order to protect our beloved chickens and ducks from this deadly virus we are unfortunately not going to be letting them free range and pasture feed until further notice. This is a shame as we enjoy seeing them wandering around, love the increased variety in nutrition that they are able to obtain when left to forage for themselves and like that they eat the dreaded tics! It is necessary though especially as we have a large pond which attracts wild waterfowl who could transmit it to our birds directly or indirectly through fecal matter.

Our ducks and chickens are housed in large stalls in our barn with plenty of space to walk around, perches to climb on and in the case of the ducks clean water to swim in. They are perfectly happy housed in our barn during the winter and we supplement their grain diet with bugs, fruit and vegetables to keep them healthy and there is no noticeable difference in the flavor, size or quality of their eggs. We are also taking measures to make sure we don’t bring the virus inside to our birds such as special shoes/clothing when in their stalls and sanitizing equipment, feed bags etc as we bring them inside (it feels like the early days of Covid once again!). We had planned on getting additional chickens and ducks this year but we are not going to risk poultry swaps and the like until this virus is over.

We will be using our eggs in our baked goods and selling boxes of eggs on the farm stand as usual but if we notice any signs of illness in the birds we will of course cease to do so. Fingers crossed our measures keep our birds safe!

Reflections on 2021 and our new business

This year was HUGE! We went from having a garden, some trees, shrubs, ducks and chickens to being an actual business. The year started rather slow and inauspiciously. Vermont winter is long! The maple sugaring season started and we were ready to get a whole lot of syrup made but we had a small fire that made our evaporator a no go so that ended that. The next big problem was that as the snow melted down in the field and the ground turned to soup, the greenhouse anchor pegs had nothing to hold on to and we had some huge high wind storms leading to our greenhouse cart-wheeling up the field while we tried to stop it and then in desperation to pull it apart. We were able to reassemble it as best we could (many pieces were broken and some panels were lost) and some people visiting our farm may have wondered why we have the greenhouse in the partial shade of a tree on one side and a barn on the other since the whole point of a greenhouse is the sun! The reason is that the prevailing wind that almost blew our greenhouse to Oz is blocked by the barn and that the ground near the barn does not get as soupey during snow melt. The greenhouse actually worked very well in spite of the shade and all our seedlings flourished and were protected against the early spring flea beetles that prey on any young brassica that we plant in the garden. We do plan on building a new wood and glass greenhouse from scratch in 2022 (perhaps using reclaimed windows) with a proper foundation down in the field.

The next adventure was the beehive. We had helped with some aspects of beekeeping when we were in Kauai so we set out with lots of confidence, purchasing the beehive and the bees. One thing we didn’t get on quick enough was bear protection! One morning I looked over toward our hive and saw it completely pulled apart with live and dead bees everywhere. We suited up and put the hive back together: many frames full of honey, bees and brood were salvageable but after a few days we realized that the Queen must have been one of the casualties on the destroyed frames. No Queen means no hive! We were lucky to be able to buy a nucleus colony (a few frames of bees with a Queen) and we installed it in the hive with fingers crossed that our old colony would accept their new ruler. They did!! Our bees worked hard for the rest of spring, summer and fall (surrounded by an electric fence to keep the bears away). They pollinated like mad and we got our best yields from our fruit tress and bushes this year. We didn’t take any honey from them as it was the first year of the colony and as I mentioned before Vermont winters are long! We are hoping that they survive this winter on their honey stores and that next year we will get some of their sweet sweet honey. We also plan on getting a few more hives!

I’ve blogged before about the finishing of the kitchen, the start of the farm stand and the introduction of baby goats so I’ll skip ahead a little. The first successful farm stand day was by far not our only one! Every weekend I was stunned to see new faces and the faces of my new regulars. People bringing their kids along in wheelbarrows or on quad bikes, cyclists stopping for lunch and Pam and her dogs! Word of mouth spread and soon it wasn’t just people from our street but people from further afield, our customers were taking cookies to gatherings of friends who then came along themselves. When I had initially envisioned the farm stand I had imagined it unmanned with an honesty box but I found that I enjoyed being there at the stand chatting to people about their lives, describing our products and taking people young and old over to see the baby goats! That aspect was priceless to me and so the farm stand will not be unmanned (if I’m not there I’m usually nearby: showing off the goats or harvesting a vegetable that we have run out of). Another thing that wasn’t like what I had expected was that the baked goods were the main draw, every week we were having to bake more and more and my beautiful organic produce was sitting unsold. A customer put the issue very succinctly “I see that whole cabbage and I see work”…and from that I saw opportunity. The cabbage got chopped and mixed with carrot and chives and became bagged slaw, the kale became pesto and the zucchinis became bread, zoodles and sauce! That being said though the baked goods were still the stars and we sold out early many days!

As we got further into fall it started to be a wee bit chilly to be out for 6 hours so we trimmed our hours to 3 but it still worked out well: word had got out that if you want to get the biggest variety of baked goods you have to show up early, so we still seemed to make the same amount of sales in half the time. Eventually it got too cold for me to be out at the stand so we had our final weekend at the end of October. It was really sad to say goodbye but we hoped that we could live on in the form of special orders of eggs and baked goods picked up at the house and my lovely regulars did not disappoint! We have been getting orders every week and man we had some busy weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas!! We go into the new year knowing that we may have a quieter January as people try to cut back on their baked good intake but we will be using that time wisely doing some recipe testing!!

Wow I got this far without gushing about our babies (baby goats that is)! They are growing upward and outward and have thick winter coats right now. Peanut is still such a greedy girl-butting away the others until she gets her treats first but she is the one who most likes cuddles from us. Juniper (or Juney as we now refer to her) is a very good forager: on our goat walks she is usually the first to try munching a new tree. Maple is still the adventurer and is usually the first to climb on to any new structure or toy. The goats bring us joy every day and even though they were bought with future milk and cheese in mind it is seeing their little faces that makes them worth the money we paid!

So, the title is reflections on 2021 and so far it feels more like a diary entry so I will try to draw together some summary thoughts. Firstly I think it is important to not get swallowed up by the setbacks: starting the year with evaporator fires, cart wheeling greenhouses and dead bees was so disheartening and some days we felt like just giving up but if we had we wouldn’t have been able to save half a colony of bees and we wouldn’t have had anywhere to start our seedlings. As to the evaporator, it did stop our sugaring this season but we ordered an amazing new one from a Vermont company that also acts as a grill, smoker and pizza oven so watch this space…

Secondly and somewhat related to the first is that this year made us learn to be adaptable. The farm stand was meant to be unmanned with whatever surplus vegetables we had, a couple of boxes of eggs and the odd baked good on there but it ended up being more of a manned little shop for baked goods, jams and dinner fixins!

The third reflection is that it is so nice to get to know your neighbors and have that sense of community. Before the farm stand I didn’t know the names of anyone living nearby, now there are people that I truly miss seeing! I can’t wait until spring and the return of the people who don’t winter in Vermont and seeing if the rhubarb crown that my most regular customer Pam gave to us grows (and then making her something tasty with it!) I can’t wait until the spring opening day of the farm stand where the neighbors will greet each other after the long winter.

Baby Goats!

Ever since we decided on starting our farm we knew that we wanted goats! We wanted milk and to be able to make cheeses, yoghurt and ice cream. Now cows work for that of course, however when my in-laws bought their home it had been a goat farm and so the barn was already kitted out with stalls of the right size for goats with built in hay mangers and everything. In order to decide what kind of goats we wanted we visited a few contacts that we had through friends and family to see their goats and their set ups and Nigerian Dwarf goats seemed right up our ally! Nigerian dwarfs despite their small stature produce a lot of milk and theirs has a very high butterfat content making it taste really creamy so it would work great for our cheese, yoghurt and baking plans. The dwarfs being small can be more easily picked up and put back in their pens after the inevitable escapes so that appealed too! It still took us a while to take the plunge because somehow goats just seemed like they would be much harder to look after than say chickens and ducks so we wanted to get our research done and make sure we had everything ready before we got them.

When we finally decided to go for it we contacted one of the family friend contacts who had so generously showed us her farm and let us try some of her homemade goat yoghurt and we reserved 2 doelings from when her does next gave birth. We then waited with increasing excitement, hoping that the mommas didn’t birth all male goats and were so happy that enough girls were born, enough that we could maybe get 3!! The next step was going for a goat walk! Wendy (our goat lady) takes her whole herd of goats out for a daily walk around her property and pasture, I had imagined leashes but was amazed to see how they all just followed along obediently with the baby goats taking their lead from the mommas! It was so cool to see 15(ish) dwarf goats all different sizes, colors and patterning streaming up and down the hills. As the babies were young we had to leave them behind to spend the next few months with their mothers as they needed all the goodness of the mother’s milk and also to learn what to eat and what not to eat when out in pasture. We went for a second goat walk to finally pick out which babies we would take and a date was set! The pressure was on to make sure the barn stall was ready, get the fencing, make them a field shelter, buy hay, feed etc etc ! I cut it somewhat fine only getting the hay the day before goat arrival date as many farms were having issues getting out to cut hay as there had been a lot of rain and some farms would only sell us 100 bales at a time! (we calculated how much hay we would need for 3 baby dwarf goats for the winter and came at a number less than half that so we didn’t want to risk getting too much that could potentially spoil and make our goats sick)

 August 12th was goat day! I packed a dog crate in the car lined with a towel and some straw and drove up to get the babies! Wendy showed me how to trim their hooves and went over their feeding regime and I popped bright new collars on them; pink for Peanut, blue for Maple and green for Juniper. They were very noisy on the drive home and wow does a baby goat sound like a crying baby human! I carried them 1 by 1 from the crate to their stall in the barn and they screamed so loudly when they were separated from each other but finally they were all settled in. Every time I tried to leave the barn led to more yelling until they eventually quieted down. Later that day when I went to do a pre-bed check though I found Maple in the hay manger with her hooves at the cusp of escaping from the stall! I guess the people who had goats in that stall before mustn’t have had baby dwarf goats that could squeeze into the manger! Out came the tools and I made a hatch for the top of the manger so that I could load the manger but then have it latch closed to prevent escape. Other interest for the goats in their first week came in the form of inquisitive cats peering into the stall and plumbers digging in a water line to the barn (deep enough to avoid winter freeze). During the digging many large rocks were unearthed and the kind gentleman with the digger arranged these rocks inside the goat’s pen so that they have something to jump around and play on. It was a big hit, goats are built for the mountains so anything for them to climb on is welcomed with big leaps! As the goats are still babies it will be a while until we are getting milk but at the moment I am just so happy to get to watch them have fun and grow!

The Grand Opening of the Farm Stand 8/8/21 and how we came to be

So we started thinking of having our own farm back in 2017 while we were off working on a farm in Kauai, HI. We were doing a program called WWOOF where basically you work on a farm in exchange for a room and food. The reason we decided to do this crazy WOOFing thing was that we had become disillusioned with our way of life living separate jobs and barely seeing each other. I was working as a personal trainer and Nick, having graduated from the New England Culinary Institute was working in a kitchen and it seemed we passed in our apartment like ships in the night. We wanted to spend much more time together and also to be outside, not in stuffy gyms and hectic kitchens. We moved to Kauai and lived for just under a year on an organic farm. We got to spend all our time together: working on the farm, hanging out in our farm shack, going to beaches, jumping off waterfalls and meeting lots of awesome people who passed though the farm. It was great but it had its drawbacks, we had no car on the island and so were reliant on other people to take us places. Also most of the food that we were growing was saved for taking to market so there we were growing organic produce but eating a lot of ramen and spam!

Now when we had told Nick’s parents that we were moving to Kauai to farm they said to us something along the lines of “we have land here that you can turn into a farm, it was a farm before we bought it”. So there we were in Kauai thinking about starting a farm in Vermont! The ideas started flowing, we would get ducks, goats and bees! Nick would bake things, make jams. We would expand the vegetable garden and plant fruit trees and bushes. We would start a farm stand!

So you’ll notice that a fair amount of time elapsed between 2017 and August 2021, that’s because dreams don’t come cheap and without a whole lot of work. We started by expanding the garden little by little and all by hand, no tractors and tillers and only organic practices (I’ll do a blog post about the garden expansion sometime). We have been adding fruit trees and bushes every spring and also inoculating logs with mushroom spores. In 2020 we started to get the first of the livestock which also required that I (Kat) had to learn how to woodwork so that the animals could have houses. Now the baking aspect also needs to be addressed. Turns out that if you’ve got pets with access to your kitchen you can’t make and sell baked goods from it so we had to build a commercial grade, pet free kitchen (I say ‘we’ but it was mostly Nick’s rockstar mum Mary! The kitchen was completed, kitted out and inspected this spring. The kitchen is a thing of beauty and stainless steel. With the kitchen complete I needed to get my bum in gear and build us that farm stand! Meanwhile Nick had to jump through all the hoops required in setting up a business; insurance, licenses and so forth.

August 8th was our Grand Opening! The weather forecast had predicted a whole day of thunderstorms but it was actually hot and sunny all day! We had duck and chicken eggs, loads of organic produce and Nick baked multiple types of bread, cakes and cookies. I’d had nightmares the previous night about nobody showing up but nothing could be further from the truth! Right from opening time at 10am it seemed the entire neighborhood showed up! It was a great atmosphere, people meeting new neighbors and others greeting each other as old friends. After being practically a recluse since the start of the Covid pandemic it was so nice to get to speak to so many people. We plan to keep setting up the farm stand every weekend until the Vermont winter sends us scurrying inside but since we can still bake and collect eggs through the winter we are hoping to have neighbors special order from us for pickup or delivery. Speaking of special orders-we do them now too, pics and descriptions of our baked goods are on “The Bakery” section of the website and you can email us at duckduckgoatfarm@gmail.com to arrange an order or I can take orders right at the farm stand!