INTRODUCTION
Homestead Roots Newsletter - 4/25/2024

While it is still only April it sure feels like we are working into our summer routine. It is nice to ramp up slowly! We've started harvesting and selling at the farmstand via a couple of pup up openings. This gives us a few days to work out all the kinks before we really open up for the year. In this weeks newsletter I walk through some homestead news, talk about keeping goats and give an update from the market garden. In the closing I talk about building resilience. Have a great week! And as always if you have questions please reach out!

HOMESTEAD UPDATE
All the Animals are Happy and Canning Tomatoes

With all our baby goats born the barn yard is busy with bouncing babies! All 5 of the baby goats look pretty similar with white and black markings. Ingrid was taking pictures of some of the goats this morning as we are preparing to sell some of the moms and babies together. Will be really nice for someone wanting to get into goat milk to have a goat already in milk. I believe she has 5 goats in mind to sell at this point. Hopefully we get a few buyers. Herd management is important with goats otherwise numbers can quickly get out of hand!

With the baby goats comes the best part of keeping goats, in my opinion anyway, and that is the milk. All 4 of our momma goats are now getting milked in the morning. Espen built a second stanchion so he and Ingrid can milk together. The system seems to be going well. It is always a little hit or miss when you are training new goats in to being milked. They are smaller and easier to control than cows which is nice! We give them a little treat and for the most part the stand nice while we milk. To get a good supply of milk it is important that we separate the babies from the moms. We do this for just a few hours overnight and then after milking, the babies have access to milk all day. Somehow immediately after we milk there is always plenty left for the hungry baby! At this stage we are getting a little over a half gallon of milk per day. That will likely go up a little bit as we continue to milk and the babies grow. I have more on keeping goats below!

The pigs are doing great and still living in the barn. It is certainly not ideal so we will look to transition them outside starting early next week. They will move to their permanent pen where we will be able to rotate them around. The trick is finding a stretch of days with good weather to get them acclimated to their new area. The weekend looks wet but hopefully we can dry out and get some warmer temperatures next week. We want to give them the best chance to stay healthy and happy when we move them outside.

A slightly random homestead tidbit. We found a new feed supplier and are really happy with it. It is a local family run business and so far we really like the quality of the feed. Feed is a big expense for us on the homestead. This last order was about 2 tons of feed combined for our hens, goats and pigs. The bill was just over $1000. That is a big investment! We make back all our money with the hens and the pigs, the goats are a little trickier to figure out but the benefits of having dairy on the homestead are pretty awesome!

Lastly, we just finished canning tomatoes from last summer this week! We were a bit tomatoed out at the end of last year and filled a small chest freezer with fresh tomatoes. Ingrid emptied the freezer and turned most of them into canned tomato sauce. We were also out of ketchup so she whipped up some ketchup too. It turned out great!

KEEPING ANIMALS
What’s the Story with Goats?

Goats were the 3rd animal to join our homestead. It took us 7 years and a pandemic to pull the trigger on them.🙂 We purchased our first doe in May of 2020. Goats are one animal that you need a fair amount of fencing to manage. They can be hard on fences and are escape artists. Once they get out they can then cause a lot of damage to fruit trees, berry bushes or landscaping! So building out infrastructure for them needs to be well thought out. Before we brought our goats home we built a barn for them and put up a boundary fence to keep them in. This is still the set up we use today. We periodically let the goats out of their pen area to graze on our property as well. We've used electric netting to contain them and have also just let them free range.

The purpose our goats serve is for milk production. We pretty much have Alpine goats these days which we really like. We had a Nubian early on and our main doe has some Nubian in her as well. So there is some Nubian blood in them. We prefer the Alpine and feel like the Alpine is well suited to our climate, we also like their sturdy appearance. People also raise goats for meat, though we have yet to harvest one of our goats for meat, we have thought seriously about it. Maybe this year? Our goats are on the larger size but there are certainly smaller goats as well. There are both milk and meat breeds of the dwarf goats, similar to the larger breeds.

We feed our goats quite a bit of hay, and then they are able to forage for food as well. Goats are excellent for people with woods and brush vs. pasture (US!). We have used them to clear brush in the past and they can be effective but it takes a lot of goats and a lot of time to make a big difference in brushy areas. It also takes several grazing periods to really kill the brush.

While we keep our goats in the barn. People have certainly managed with less. Goats are tough and resilient animals. They do need some sort of shelter from the wind and rain but it doesn't need to be fancy. If you are going to milk you will need a way to hold them in one place and we prefer to kid share. Which means we are sharing the milk with the does kid(s). To make that work you need some sort of pen to separate the doe and kid(s). Otherwise you won't get much milk! Some people also separate the babies right away and then choose to milk the goats 2 times per day, and feed the babies with a bottle. Kid sharing is nice as it allows us to go away at times and not worry that the does won't be milked as the baby takes care of it for us.

For breeding we don't keep a buck on our property. We count their gestation time backwards from when we want to have kids (early April) and then find a friend or fellow goat keeper and borrow a buck. He comes and stays for about a month and breeds all our does. Bucks can be a bit stinky and you need to keep them separated from the does or else you will have kids at random times of the year!

Goats sometimes get a bad rap and I for one think that is unjustified. Overall we have loved keeping goats. At times we have considered a family milk cow and we still may go that route someday. For now, goats perfectly meet our needs and we enjoy having them. If you have goat questions send them my way!

MARKET GARDENING
Tomato WHOOPS

I had spoken in my past update about our early planting of tomatoes. We were very focused on keeping our tomatoes warm at night and it turns out we did some damage because of it. We had a sunny warm day Sunday and didn't get over to open up our high tunnel, the tomatoes were covered with row cover from the previous night which was below freezing. The sunshine and warm day made for a hot period In the tunnel and under the row cover, we lost a few plants to the heat. Our losses are very manageable and I think we will just swap in some of our extra plants to the gaps. Another lesson learned! We actually intended to keep the tomatoes covered for the UV protection on the new plants. I am unsure if venting the tunnel would have prevented the damage or not. I know if we had vented the row cover we would have saved plants. Our tunnel is on a slope and the worst of the damage was on the uphill side. The heat under the row cover migrated up the hill and got stuck there where it built up, got too hot and burnt a few plants. When we discovered it we quickly pulled off the covers and got water on the plants. I think that saved a few. My goal as a tomato farmer is to give them the cushiest life, so this was not ideal. I still have high hopes for them!

Elsewhere in the garden things are looking good. We were forced to open our stand early because some of our crops were ready. It has been fun to see a few friendly faces around the farm again. Our officially opening day will be May 1. We should have a few different kinds of greens and micros. Our crop selection will grow as we go through the year.

CLOSING WORDS
Building Resilience

Over the weekend our pastor shared a list of things parents would never allow their children to do to protect them. Ingrid and I made eye contact as our kids have done most of the things he listed! The last thing he mentioned was taking the protective net off the trampoline. We literally did that last week! It was because it was falling apart, and we will likely replace it. But it made us smile. Also on the list was letting your kids climb to the highest point in a tree. I can't tell you how many times Bergen has done that. I can assure you she didn't ask permission to do that, and we didn't tell her to do that but she did it! And it scared us to death. What allowed it to happen was opening up a world of adventure and freedom to our kids. On their own, together or with friends they have adventured, climbed, built and explored. They have tried things and failed. They have attempted sleeping outside night after night only to come in at midnight or 1 am, and then after several attempts they succeed! They get dirty, we let them struggle, and they sometimes get hurt. Our hope with this lifestyle is for them to have an enjoyable childhood but also to teach them resilience and self reliance and toughness. There are certainly lots of ways to teach kids these sorts of lessons, I don't know if this is the best way, but it is the way we have chosen. And they seem to be happy!

I will speak for myself in saying that I have learned ALL about hard work over the last 10 years of homesteading. I had no idea what work really was prior to that. It has been a gift to me! And so we are hoping our kids can gather some of those life lessons as they grow up as well. I know that in the world they are growing up in these will be important skills to have.