Itsumo Mawaru

Today’s blog post is at Adventures with Yarn. I talk about my newest spinning wheel purchase, the John Bryce wheel pictured above. What a peculiar device!

I stumbled upon this book while browsing the 636.xx section of the library (the Animal Husbandry classification in the Dewey decimal system), and I’m so glad I did! Who would have thought that such an unassuming cover would contain some of the best information I’ve ever read regarding raising goats?

Raising Milk Goats the Modern Way is just shy of 200 pages of information, pictures, and schematics to help the newbie deal with milk-producing goats. It starts off with the basics such as how to acquire a goat, what to feed it and how to house it, and rapidly gets into the more advanced topics of breeding, record keeping, lactation curves, breakdowns of goat feed and how to make it yourself. It even contains a basic explanation of butchering and cheese making, as well as recipes for what to do with your meat/milk.

Pic 2, Example of lactation curves

One thing I loved about this book was its meticulous attention to detail. You easily get the impression that the author, Jerry Belanger, is very passionate about raising goats, and that’s exactly the type of person I want to be learning from. The amount of pages dedicated to making your own properly balanced goat feeds is astounding yet educational and surprisingly not too dry to read.

Pic 3, some feed ration breakdowns

The only qualm I have with the book is that it doesn’t cover fiber goats at all, but that’s to be assumed when the title of the book is Raising Milk goats, not Fiber goats. Still, the book is an extremely valuable resource, and it easily takes my #1 spot for Best Goat Book. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to add goats to their farm.

Rating:

Above is one of the views from the master bedroom. This is similar to the view I’ll have while washing dishes, as the kitchen is directly below. While these animals likely won’t be staying on the land (and the tractor certainly won’t be), my future grazing animals will be hanging out in the same area.

I must tell you, at this current moment I’m suffering a bit from barnheart, the desire to be a farmer but the inability to do so at the moment. Now I’m lucky that I’ll be on the land by the end of February, which is much closer to my goals than I ever expected to be nowadays, and a part of me keeps saying that because of this I should be happy. For the most part I’m able to distract myself with books, crafts, people and blogs. But every now and then I get the strongest desire to be out and exploring my land, chopping down deadwood, painting up the inside of the house, and doing all sorts of things which I cannot yet do. Considering the winter we’re having now in Ottawa is not much of a winter at all, many days would be perfect for wandering around. I can only hope that March and April will continue to be mild so that I can take advantage of this unusual season.

One other thing I’ve been doing to keep my mind off of the currently impossible is considering ordering some seeds. I would love to grow all sorts of things in my first year, as well as starting to establish the long term plants and berry bushes (excluding an orchard, that’ll probably have to wait till 2011). I’ve been saving lots of seeds from various grown and bought plants from last season, but those are mostly peppers/melons/winter squashes. I’ve spent a lot of time on the seed company Veseys’ website, and I’m looking around for other Canadian and possibly US seed companies. I absolutely love heritage vegetables so I’m keeping my eye out for them!

Here’s a picture of a work in progress I’ve got going using 100% my own handspun and hand dyed, the Quad Blanket, which will make its home in my future craft room (hopefully it’ll be painted in these colors too!).

I’ve made a more detailed post about my Quad Blanket on my yarn blog, Adventures with Yarn. Check it out if it interests you!

Today I’ve made a post on my blog Adventures with Yarn. I’ve documented one method I use to dye my handspun yarn using food coloring. I ended up dyeing two more sets of colors, blue and pink, so that I can keep going with a blanket I’m currently working on – a log cabin knitted blanket. If it interests you, check it out, and more pictures of the process can be found in this Flickr set!