May 25
Things have been spinning so fast that I haven’t had a chance to write anything down! We have actually sold our first few pints of milk – I was so proud as I looked at them lined up on the counter like little soldiers. They got loaded into Taid’s old orange cool box and away we went – five to the farm shop in Sarnau, five to the health food shop in Newcastle Emlyn. They seem to be selling pretty well – we now have some more in the Carrot Cruncher in Newcastle Emlyn, and got word that another shop in Aberporth wants them as well. It’s such tiny money – four and five pounds at a time – but I carefully keep track of it in an envelope where our weekly takings are recorded. little acorns, little acorns, I chant under my breath. Keep the someday-maybe-we-hope-mighty-oak-that-might-grow-if-we’re-unbelievably-lucky in the mind’s eye, and don’t get discouraged…
In the meantime, we’ve finalized packaging for the soap. It’s lovely – unbleached cotton bags with a drawstring and the logo, inspired by an old Celtic symbol for animism, on the front. The bags cost a huge whack of money – so I’m holding my breath that it will all work, and we will earn the money back. Little acorns, little acorns…I want to find some new silicon moulds for the soap that have our symbol on. And I need to make some soap to sell!
In the meantime, (the other meantime?) I’ve just spent two days at Food Centre Wales at Horeb, working with the terrific team there to try to develop our probiotic smoothies. We spent two and a half hours the first day slowly and tortuously bringing the goats milk up to a boil, stirring it the whole time. Unfortunately the result was a nasty mess that tasted like goat sick, and all the flavorings I had brought with me didn’t disguise the horrible flavor! Not ideal, really…we tipped most of it down the drain. So, like Edison before he had his break-through with the light bulb, I know a thousand ways it doesn’t work! Back to the drawing board I go, bloody but unbowed…When I asked Mrs. Grant, the white-haired, no-nonsense great grandmother and doyenne of the goat world, who handily drove a bus for many years and raised many generations of her family on goats milk, what we had done wrong, she laughed. “I always just whack it up on high heat, boil it as fast as possible, then simmer for fifteen minutes. Heating it slowly like that just gives the bacteria time to develop, and will make it taste horrible. (No kidding!) Stirring it the whole time batters it – just boil it quick and leave it alone!” So much for high tech methods and data sheets! I’ll give Mrs. Grant’s way a try next…Good news is that I contacted the wonderful doctor, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, who wrote the book about the GAPS diet, with kefir and raw milk, that seems to have healed Rich. We followed it without even knowing what it was! The doctor is lovely, said that she was eager to try our kefir, asked if we would like to contribute our story to her book of success stories, which of course we would! Looking forward to asking her some of the scientific questions about the probiotic that I haven’t been able to answer…
Rich and I have been pole-axed by the amount of work involved. At the moment we have 16 goats, milking 6, feeding NINE GOAT KIDS three times a day. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like today, Rich goes off to work at the harps (they’ve asked him to come back for more days than two a week, but so far he’s resolutely resisted. It’s scary, because we’re not making enough yet to replace his salary – but if we don’t have his time and energy behind it all, we never will! Little acorns, little acorns…) and I’m here on my own. That means I drop Benji off at half eight, then come back, feed all the goats, turn on the milking machine, wipe and milk the milkers, put fresh straw and hay for all the goats, put extra milk into the bottles, feed the nine kids, who are now old enough to jump out of their pens, put their hooves up on my chest and fight each – and me – for the milk! Then the milk churn has to be hauled into the place where the milk is filtered and bottled. Only one bright spot – because we’ve found a proper source of new milk bottles, we don’t have to rinse, wash and disinfect recycled bottles, as we used to when it was just us drinking the milk. But the 9 kid bottles still have to be washed 3 times a day…And THEN any deliveries have to be made. And THEN maybe I sit down and have some breakfast. There’s maybe two hours in the middle of the day to do computer chores, things like editing the final proofs of the book that’s coming out in July! Or doing the soap labels. Or writing copy for the website. Or meeting with the computer guy to buy a reconditioned laptop that will actually run my business accounting software, since the bank neglected to tell me that it wouldn’t work on my mac. And this after I’d already spent that whole day in Cardiff, learning how to work with this particular software…
Then there’s shopping, dinner prep, picking up the kids from school. And the whole milking-feeding two hour routine has to happen again at night, after supper, before we fall into bed.
Goats, we says sometimes, looking at each other. Goats. Who’d have them?
It will all get easier, we tell each other. It must. Little acorns. Little acorns…