It’s the Little Things…

I have been a little absent in updating lately, but we’ve had big changes around the homestead. I guess that might be in part why I’ve been away from my computer screen. There’s been too much to do!

We had a bit of clean up to do after Dorian hit. Not a lot. We were extremely blessed. A couple of (already dead) branches came down from our apple trees, but that was quickly turned to firewood. We had our barn flood. That was not as quickly righted. We needed to move our poultry out of their existing coops while the water slowly evaporated. Now I should clarify, this flooding was from rain fall (and the fact that our gigantic barn that can be seen from space doesn’t have ease troughs), not from sea level rising. So this frequently happens when we have a big rain storm.

Once things were cleaned and liveable again, we decided it might be time to look into a cow. Don’t get me wrong, we love our goats. They are incredibly friendly and so much fun. We are excited for Spring time when we will (hopefully) have three goats in production. We have, however, also realized that there are just some things you cannot do with goat’s milk. Like make butter. Goat’s milk is naturally homogenized, meaning the cream does not separate. You can buy a cream separator that will do this for you, so that you can make butter, but they are costly and difficult to clean. Since we wanted this to be a daily process, we thought this would be too much work for us.

So while we love our goats, we realized if we wished to be self sustainable, a cow was a necessary addition.

Thankfully our neighbour happens to raise both dairy and meat cows. So we got in touch with him to see if he had a dairy cow he might be looking to sell. Turns out he had a Mama and her baby that he was willing to part with.

Meet Ella. (Short for Mozzerella)

Just taking my bull for a walk, don’t mind me…

This little guy is Sir. Loin Coo.

So now, after a little trial and error, our house is filled with butter, cheese, sour cream, whipped cream, cottage cheese, ricotta cheese, … and we could not be more thrilled. I mean, look at that face.