11 Jan 2014

Sometimes I forget that it’s only been 3 months since we moved here, I do get the impression that it’s been longer (in a good way), and that now and then makes me feel like some of our plans are not moving fast enough … Patience has never been a quality of mine, and I am starting to practice by reminding to take things one at a time, and most importantly, to enjoy them for what they are. And although most of our little steps don’t look like much, I believe they are already taking us where we want. Okay, so this was the zen part of the blog here come the facts:

Hannes has been most busy building our kitchen and getting firewood. After hurricane Xaver’s visit to Northern Europe (my longest storm, more than 36hours of howling winds and bending trees – or in some cases thrown down), this was the perfect opportunity for Hannes and his friends to go and play lumberjack in the woods for a couple of days. Result: we got close to 10 trees that Hannes is still busy chopping to pieces, including 3 alder trees that had to be felled to ensure the long term safety of our goats in their future barn in the garden, and Hannes has enough wood to transform our living room into a sauna almost every evening

Now the next big milestone is building our barn, some 20sq meters wooden construction with green roof and equipped with a long milking bridge, trough (mangeoire, Trog) and headlock (cornadis, Fressgitter). Gretchen and Frieda are doing fine, they are tolerating Kasimir although they keep him at a respectful distance and have occasionally rammed him… Luckily he’s being very fair play about it. We weighed Frieda in order to adapt her feed, as expected she didn’t seem to mind standing on the old sack scale to show off her 47Kg. We only managed to get Gretchen’s front feet on the scale, but it’s work in progress… Both ewes are starting to show and need to take in more feed in the last two months of pregnancy, as they are young and growing they are also still gaining about 100g/day.

Last but not least, I made my two first batches of ice-cream. The first test wasn’t very conclusive (goat milk, elder sirup and chocolate chips), the taste was nice but it wasn’t creamy enough. Next I improvised a creamy blackberry ice-cream… almost perfect! But I also realised that I may have to put my larger scale ice-cream project ‘on ice’ because of the costs associated to fulfilling German foodstuffs rules and controls. My first contact with the local food administration lead to a pretty surreal explanation about ‘Ökoleute’ (les ‘écolos’) and their kids getting E. Coli by petting veals… Don’t ask… In short, here is an area for which having EU regulations does not prevent the regional competent authorities to apply stricter standards and controls… meaning that in Germany pasteurisation and cooling of the milk to ice-cream need to be almost fully automatised and handled with some expensive machines. Whereas in Belgium I’ve seen small producers properly pasteurising their milk in a simple pan, controlling the temperature with a thermometer, and simply pouring the mixture into their small household ice-cream machine. Done. Anyway, that only means that I’ll focus on cheese first…

Ah yes, and for the birdies amongst us, here are some pictures of geese and cranes in a nearby field…