Thunder and lightning

The tree which might have saved our house!

More visitors

Beautiful!

Click on the pictures to enlarge.

Camp site

What is going one, some of you wonder, with the camp site? Now I am happy to anounce: we are up and running! And it is fun! The campers enjoy our place and we enjoy that they enjoy it! Our neighbour parks his truck close to our house so that he doesn't need to drive over the camp site in the early morning, how wonderful of him. So it is really nice and calm on our site, which is what our campers are looking for.
But this is a farm blog so not (too) much about the campsite on this blog. Arnold has a special blog for the camp site (in Dutch): Camping Lazy Blog.

More goat stuff

I found this one on a goat-product-company-blog and I love it!;
Top 10 things I’ve learned from goats by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

10. Don’t butt heads with anyone who has bigger horns.
9. The grass is always greener when someone else cuts it, bales it, and totes it over to where you’re already lying down.
8. Better the same old milking hands every day than getting used to a whole new set of callouses.
7. If you’re not sure about something, go ahead and taste it. You can always spit it out.
6. The manure may pile up in the winter, but it keeps the barn warm. Sometimes it’s just one sh*tty trade-off after another.
5. If there is someplace to stand around and do nothing that is higher up than the current place you’re standing around doing nothing, it’s worth the effort to move.
4. If everyone else is running away in the same direction, join them now, ask questions later.
3. Getting mud between your toes is not as poetic as people make it out to be. Better to stay out of the rain in the first place.
2. There’s no better pillow than someone else’s tummy.
1. Fences are mere suggestions.

Goat Milk Stuff

With 5 litres of milk daily, and more to come next year, I started to wonder what you can do with it apart from drinking it and making delicious cheeses.
Goat milk soap! They say that it is very nice for your skin. The 'Goat Milk Stuff' company has as slogan: Work hard, Get dirty, Use good soap! So we will. I have made soap in Burkina Faso and know the principle: it is a chemical process in which you mix lye and fat (and goat milk!). As soon as I have found out where I can get the lye I will start experimenting.

Us

July 2009 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - October 2009 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - May 2009 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - July 2010

Tata, Titus and Tinus

We are now milking two goats, next year we hope to have four goats for milk production so most of our offspring will be kept for reproduction. Tinus is our new billy goat, I de-wormed him (again) today, it seems that he wasn't very healthy when we got him although his former owner was a veterinary doctor.

Friends

Insect control

One swallow might not make a summer - but six do!
We haven't been able to close or lock the door of our workshop for weeks since a couple of swallows decided to make their nest and start a familly in it. We're happy we didn't, six beautiful little birds are now having their residence in a adobe nest above the workbench.
We have a few nests in and outside our house: nice since these birds are truly useful in controlling the insect population;
Swallows feed their nestlings by rolling insects into a compact ball and carrying them back to the nest in their throat. A typical barn swallow will bring about four hundred daily meals, consisting of about twenty insects per meal, back to its brood.

Summer

Hot weather and every few days some rain; makes the grass grow much faster than our animals can eat.

Guest

Lovely Gizmo and his very active friend Fly enjoyed a week holiday on our farm.

Garden 1st week of July

On the pictures: will be fennel, will be beans, broadbeans, lettuce, won't be pumpkin (male flower), spinach, will be gherkin, will be tomatoes, will be tonight's dinner: baby carrots and new potatoes.