To Milk or Not to Milk

At this point, I'm getting about a quart of milk a day from 3 goats. It's enough to meet my family's needs, but it seems ludicrous to spend so much time at it each day for such a small return. I need to get all the girls dried up in the next few weeks anyway so I'm debating stopping a bit early.

Fawn, April, and Moses moved to their new home yesterday. I miss their sweet little faces, but we will have a new batch of kids in a couple months. Ike cried like a baby when he found himself left alone in the buck pen, so I moved Magnum back in with him.

He was happy to have some company and the two of them set about bloodying one another.

Onyx seemed upset to see her little girls go and was very, very affectionate last night. She no longer has anyone to cuddle up with at night and no friends in the barnyard. She's too bossy to be friends with any goat but her own offspring.

I am surprised to see how beautiful she's gotten in the last month or two. She has really filled out and turned into a lovely doe. She even seems to have grown into her feet. She always had very long pasterns and I had to take special care to keep her hooves trimmed properly so they didn't cave in. All of a sudden, her feet fit her body! It's a shame her udder is uneven because of the mastitis she had when I bought her.

My neighbor brought us a couple small does Christmas night. Poor Asher was beside himself all day. These girls must have been part of his herd too. I reduced them to backstraps and stew meat and learned that skinning a deer is easier to skinning a goose!

I spent last week trying to knit my first sock. It ended up a failure. Chalk it up to a learning experience.

Even though my tension was correct at 8 stitches per inch (okay, so there is that part in the middle where my tension loosened up to 7.5/in), the sock came out really, really wide.

I looked at some other patterns and found that they called for considerably fewer stitches to be cast on. The pattern I used called for 64! I am trying a pattern with 56 stitches now and size 1 needles instead of size 2. I hope this works! I have so many hours invested in this now I'd like to actually get a wearable sock out of it.

Wishing you all a happy 2014.