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!