Goat update and Burnt Milk/Cheese

We have swapped Brownie boy goat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RS44IHI8lY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmDtwOkEs6s) for a white baby buck from Mako which we've named Jimmy white (left on the photo below). He is completely unrelated to any of our goats  so breeding in the autumn this year should be fine and should happen naturally. He also is quite full of life and love and is very hard to distinguish (from a distance) from Snowdrop

Jimmy White (left) and Snowdrop(right) with old and new (white) chickens 

One of the side products of this swap is that Goaty is producing lots of milk (~2 L/day) and so with careful management, we are starting to make cheese again in 10 L batches. However, disaster struck during the pasteurisation of our milk - Our 10 L enamel pan has started to burn milk! There is a scratch/fault on the bottom of the pan and this has resulted in the current batch of curds being tainted with a nasty burnt taste. The Dogs will be come mid-class for a while and dine on Goats cheese and Mixed dog food whilst the big pan will be relegated to water-heating duty and large pasta/potato and rice cooking.

The solution will be a nice 15L Stainless steel pan which can be mercilessly scrubbed without affecting any subsequent heat treatments

Meggy Harvest

In a corner by our vegetable patch, we have a thicket of wild fruit trees. This years' warm/wet weather has results in a large amount of budding fruit. The first to appear this year is the sour-cherries. This 15l bucketful of cherries is about 55% of all the fruit on the trees but all I could reach with the assistance of a walking/goat herding stick. We also have fruit from new trees which have naturally grown from fallen seeds.

It looks like we will be making a lot of cherry jam and cherry wine :) 

Our job for the cold weather will be to top the cherry trees so that they grow out instead of up and to remove the non-fruit trees so we can access next year's harvest a little easier