Fillet du Chevon

Or for those of us who don't speak French, Goat Tenderloin.

This past weekend I butchered a ~2 year old Nigerian Dwarf goat wether. We had kept him around the farm to provide company for our doe, but since she now has her own kid he was not needed anymore. I had never butchered a large animal. I have processed my fair share of chickens, turkeys, ducks and even the random rabbit, but a goat, even a dwarf goat seemed a big step. But with the help of the book of Country Wisdom & Know-How and some net searches I figured I would give it a go.

The weather on Saturday cooperated, being slightly cool. Julia and Sam were interested in seeing the process so they climbed up into the hay loft, watched and took some photos, while I dispatched the goat with a .22 behind his ear. The hardest part of the process was getting the goat hung at a level to work on. I wasn't prepared for how heavy he was and I didn't have a block and tackle handy.


After getting the goat hung up the skinning and gutting process went fairly smoothly, although slowly. When I was mostly done I took him out to the clothes line so that I could finish in the sun.


I then washed and quartered the carcass and put it in our garage fridge to age. I went to Seattle on business Monday-Wednesday. I stayed home from work on Thursday to catch up with my family and started the process of butchering up the carcass. I got three bags of cubed stew meat and some soup bones from hind section. I carved out tenderloins, or back straps, from the ribs/chops. The bellies were saved for the dogs.


I still have a lot more to butcher but was interested in trying out the meat, so I decided to grill up some of the tenderloins. Danielle took this opportunity to pull together a zero mile meal for the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge.


Danielle describes the meal in detail, all I will say is that the goat tenderloin was great. Not quite as tender as good beef tenderloin, but the flavor was excellent. There was a slight undertone of goat but there was not a strong gamey taste. We were somewhat concerned since this goat was considerably older than the age at which they are conventionally butchered, usually around eight months. I am happy to say though that there was not any taint to the meat, although I was careful to closely trim all the fat, which is where the strong flavor supposedly is concentrated.

Another Birthday

This past weekend it was my turn to celebrate getting another year older. I had a most enjoyable weekend, highlighted by some fabulous food. You may notice that regardless of the occasion we celebrate with food. I had at least two birthday dinners, one Sunday and one yesterday on my actual birthday. On Sunday Danielle made homemade sundried tomato fettuccini topped with alfredo sauce. I put together and fried up some crabcakes which she served over a bed of sauted greens. All this with some homemade chiabata bread and a glass (or two or ...) of red wine made for a wonderful gastronomical experience.


Last night we made a much more "normal" meal. Rotisserie (farm raised) chicken with grilled olive tomatoes over the remaining sundried tomato fettuccini, sauted string beans and foccacia bread. As Danielle pointed out in a recent post, this is why we farm, and also why we gain weight in the winter.


We had a lot of great food but the highlight of my birthday celebration has to be the birthday video-card that my kids sent me.

Happy Brithday

This past weekend was Danielle's birthday. No I am not going to tell you how old she is, you do not get to be married for 12 years without learning some things. Much if not all of our celebrations (birthdays, holidays, etc.) are organized around food and this one is no different. Eggs Benedict is Danielle's favorite breakfast. In fact she would probably be happy to eat it for any meal of the day. This time it was special since we were able to make the entire meal from our own farm produce. The bacon was from our first round of pigs, the eggs were fresh from the hens and the potatoes were grown this spring. Even the herbs and berries were grown on the farm. The only things not produced locally was the English muffins, the butter in the sauce and the salt and pepper.


The weather was gorgeous and we enjoyed Danielle's birthday brunch out on the patio, although the mimosas destroyed my productivity for the rest of the day.


Happy Birthday Honey!

Labor Day Farm Feast

What do you get when you put together farm raised baby back ribs


with corn and beans right out of the garden?


A delicious Labor Day meal.


The whole family enjoyed the feast,


although the kids were disappointed that the nice large watermelon we picked was still not ripe.


Maybe the watermelons will be ready by October!

Another Varmint Down

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my jobs around the farm is de-predation. Last night I was picking corn from the market garden, some for our dinner and some for the CSA members. Walking back to the house I noticed a groundhog munching on some grass, just on the other side of one of our fences. I quickly hustled into the house and grabbed my .22 rifle. The dogs were out in the barnyard, separated from the groundhog by the field fence and obviously unaware of his presence. After telling the dogs to sit and stay, so as not to spook the groundhog, I started creeping over to see if he was still out. At first I didn't see him since he was on the other side of a burn pile and by the time I located him, he spotted me and made a quick retreat to the hedgerow. Determined not to give up, and knowing that groundhogs are curious and often come back out to see whats going on I setup at the fence line to wait. After ten minutes or so I was about to give up, when I realized he was sitting just at the edge of the hedgerow in some tall grass. I slowly took aim and squeezed the trigger. After walking up and around the fence line I found the groundhog dead having made it only half way back into his hole.

Early in the season we had a problem with a groundhog tunneling into our kitchen garden. I shot "at" one but did not recover the body. The tunneling into our garden stopped so I assumed I had gotten him but he had managed to get back to his burrow. This groundhog was shot in the same spot, but whether it is the same one or another that took over the empty burrow I have no way of knowing. What I do know for sure though is that he will not be digging holes in our garden or eating any of our vegetables.

CSA Deliveries

As part of our CSA, on Wednesdays I deliver some shares to members at work. Normally I bring in two shares, but today due to some surplus and other arrangements there were four. Danielle, who does the vast majority of all CSA related work -- I am in charge of corn and potatoes -- picks the shares Wednesday morning before I go to work so that everything is as fresh as possible. This morning when my alarm goes off at 5:45 AM I look out the bedroom window to see a headlamp in the garden. The shortening days mean that Danielle is often out in the dark picking produce so that I can beat the traffic. The fact that there were four shares to pick and the drizzling rain did not make this endeavor any easier on her. The produce looked so good all laid out on the kitchen table right before she packed it into the coolers.



Danielle puts a tremendous amount of work into the CSA and our farm in general, all so that we can eat the healthiest most sustainable food possible. I try to make sure that I acknowledge all her hard work and thank her for all the great food we get to eat, but since I am sure I don't do it enough I thought I would say it again here.

I love you honey!

Market Garden -- Update #3

Here is what the market garden looked like last night. We were lucky enough to get over an inch of rain last Thursday on top of the half inch or so we received over the last two weeks. Thanks to the rain things are finally starting to green up a little. We are still in drought conditions but at least the plants are growing some and the pastures are starting to recover. The rain also has the weeds growing again, so we need to get on top of them before they start to take over.

The first two plantings of corn had good yields, however the corn worm pressure is increasing so we will have to try to stave them off to save the last couple of plantings. We are leaving the stalks in place until they dry out, then we will harvest them and put them up in the barn for winter feed. I have hand dug most of the Yukon Gold potatoes and while they still taste great their yield has been abysmal. I need to get the tractor in with the potato plow to get the rest this weekend.



For comparison here are the photos from July 21^st



July 3^rd



and June 19^th

Gone Fishin

Bored kids and a hot summer day are the perfect ingredients for a fishing trip. We drove down to the Conococheague Creek which is less than a mile from our farm and fished for a while.


The kids eventually got tired of fishing so we went to the Potomac River so that the kids could cool off a little.


To get to the river we pass through the C&O Canal National Historical Park in Williamsport, so we took a little side trip along the canal path.


While walking back to the car we spotted these damselflies mating.


All and all an enjoyable afternoon adventure.

Severe Drought

It's official, as of Tuesday we are in severe drought conditions. We are located in Washington County which bridges between Pennsylvania and West Virginia to connect the two western counties to the rest of Maryland.


It is bad across much of the South East with Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee fairing the worst. You can see the drought conditions for the entire country at the US Drought Monitoring website.

Market Garden -- Update #2

Here is how the market garden looked on Saturday. You will notice that the corn is continuing to come in and the sunflowers are also coming up. Unfortunately the Red Nordland potatoes are no where to be found and if you look at the surrounding pasture you can see what a toll the drought is taking on everything.



For comparison here are the photos from July 3^rd



and June 19^th



Best I can remember we haven't had a decent rain since Memorial Day.

First Corn!!!

Nothing like the first sweet corn to make you remember why we are doing all this. Lack of rain has really been depressing and making this entire endeavor more difficult than last year, but the taste of the first corn fresh from our garden makes it all seem worthwhile.


Last night I grilled up some New York strip steaks from Legacy Manor Farm, and some fresh zucchini from our garden and had a delicious local dinner.

Farm Panorama

Above is a panorama of our fields/pastures. Our house is just visible behind and to the left of our barn. Our property runs behind several properties and is nominally in the shape of a L. The barn off in the distance is our neighbors. Our turkeys are in the foreground, the mobile layer coop is near the middle and the pig and goat pens are near the right side beyond the market garden.

We had some friends visit us over the long 4th of July holiday. Tom is a painter and has been doing a series of landscapes "to celebrate the beauty, history and reality of life...". While he and his family were visiting he started doing a landscape of our pastures from this perspective. The painting came out so well that I stole the composition for the above photo. We already told him that we want to buy the painting from him after he uses it in an upcoming exhibition.

Praying Mantis and Praying for Rain

Julia and I were going out to dig some potatoes when we noticed this Praying Mantis on one of our Hostas. I am having fun with the macro function of my digital camera and have been trying to find new things to take close up pictures of.

Unfortunately, the Praying Mantis was the highlight of the outing. I wanted to dig some Yukon Gold potatoes to distribute to our CSA members. We ended up harvesting more than a row of potato plants and did not completely fill up two 2 quart baskets. Last year this same amount of potato plants would have provided us with a trailer full of potatoes, but each plant only had one or two tubers on it.



The severe lack of rain has really taken a toll on our crop production and has been making it difficult to provide enough produce for our CSA members. As my wife and I were discussing over dinner last night, we have our pride and honor wrapped up it meeting our CSA commitments (although part of the CSA model is shared risk) but our financial situation is not affected by the venture. I can only imagine how stressful it would be to have your entire livelihood held hostage by the whims of the weather.

Market Garden -- Update #1

Here is the first of my promised market garden updates. The corn is doing surprisingly well given the little rain. The first planting has tasseled out and the other three plantings are all going strong. We have our first beans in with our corn and will likely need to start harvesting them this week. We have already harvested some zucchini and there are numerous yellow squash coming along. The yukon gold and fingerling potatoes are continuing to do well, but I am still waiting for the red nordlands that I re-planted to pop. I am hopeful that they will soon, otherwise we will have a diminished potato harvest this year. On Sunday I dug two more of the floundering rows from the upper plot. While the potatoes are still tasty, their yield leaves much to be desired.

De-Predation

One of my jobs on the farm is keeping predators from harming our livestock and crops. I have a fairly broad definition of predator -- cotton tail rabbit eating our strawberry plants is a predator -- and generally don't mind the job. To date I have taken care of a number of rabbits, one skunk, and one groundhog (or whistle pig). Must mention that I am not positive about the groundhog since he got away, but I am pretty sure I got him with the .22 rifle.

Last night I was feeding the peeps -- 20 some chickens and 8 Chinese geese -- that are brooding in a stall in the barn. The geese had been getting out of the small plastic pool that we were keeping them in so I decided to pull it out to let them run about the stall just like the chickens. Well, I pull the pool away from the wall and I am greeted by a rather large black snake. As I find out later, he was in the middle of making a meal out of one of our Delaware peeps, and based on our count already had helped himself to another sometime earlier. To most people this wouldn't be a big deal, as I mentioned I am in charge of killing on the farm, but I am irrationally afraid of snakes. Just thinking about them gives me the heebie jeebies, but I was mad and this snake was eating my chickens, so I grabbed a shovel and dispatched the snake. I went inside to get the kids before I tossed the snake in the hedgerow since they get mad at me if I don't let them see the carnage. The first thing my 7 year old son says is, "Dad you conquered your fear, I am so proud of you!" To say there was something of a role reversal is an understatement. Sam took this picture of me with the snake on the end of the shovel.

Market Garden

Here is a picture of our market garden taken on Sunday (click on image for an expanded view). My wife and I (read my wife) are doing a CSA this year, and while a lot of the produce is planted up in our kitchen garden this large plot will provide much of the late season goodies. As you can see (or not see as the case may be) not all that I have listed is up yet, however as of Monday night all of it is at least in the ground.

Everything on the right hand side is Danielle's. My only contribution is plowing and tilling of the ground.

I planted four rounds of corn approximately each two weeks apart. The first corn should be ready in early July if the crazy weather hasn't effected it too much. Danielle is enamored with the native American method of co-planting corn, beans and squash the so called three sisters. The traditional way to do this is put all three seeds into a mound. She modified this by intermixing rows of the three crops. The brilliance of this planting system is that the beans fix nitrogen into the soil --which corn needs loads of-- the corn provides a trellis for the beans to climb, and the squash foliage shades the corn roots and crowds out weeds. This is our first year of trying this symbiotic planting so we will have to see how it works.

My other main crop is potatoes. We have three varieties planted in this plot. The Yukon Golds at the top were planted first and are thriving. I have hilled them up repeatedly and they are starting to flower. The Fingerlings were planted somewhat later but are coming up strong and have good looking foliage. The Red Nordlands are actually the result of a failed early crop in an upper field. Both the Yukons and Nordlands were grown from seed potatoes from last years harvest. I planted the Nordlands somewhat early and our cold wet early spring and hot dry late spring was not kind to them. The plants did come up but between the less than stellar weather conditions and the increased potato bug pressure --planted potatoes in the same plot two years in a row-- they were already dieing back. I thus took a gamble, harvested what I could and replanted the potatoes in the market garden. I just got them in the ground this weekend, much later than I would like to plant potatoes but I figured it was worth a shot.

I hope to take this same picture every couple weeks to really appreciate how the garden changes throughout the season.

Watering Pigs

We need to water a lot of things on the farm, but the pigs are the most fun by far. Our three Tamworth's spend most of the day sleeping in their shelter out of the hot sun, but two or three times a day we go out and spray them down with rain water collected off our barn. When they hear us turn on the pump they come out for a drink and a refreshing cool shower.


The pigs are really happy now that they are all together. Maya was lonely (or so I suppose) being by herself out on pasture. The boys (Grunt and Runt -- same names as our last two males) were real skittish in the barn but settled in quickly after they were moved onto pasture. The three never seemed to have any major problems getting adjusted but the boys were silly for a while. They would pester Maya and nip at her ears. She would put up with this for some time then growl and bite at them when she had had enough. Maya never did any damage to the boys, but they would get submissive and their tails would droop down. A minute or two later you could see their tails curl back up and they would come back and start pestering her again. It was all very amusing.

Pools Up

It is officially summer on the farm. We set the pool up yesterday morning and got a delivery of 2000 gallons of water in the afternoon. I was in the pool when we were filling it to help get out the wrinkles, but the water was too cold for anyone except a child. Sam in fact slept in his swimsuit so he would be ready to go as soon as the water was delivered.

Lots Going on at the Farm

We have been quite busy here on the farm. A brief recap of some of what has been going on.

Latte our Nigerian Dwarf goat gave birth to her first kid Dragon. Latte has been a wonderful mother taking good care of her little boy. Danielle has been milking her in the morning for the last week or so, and the two of them (Danielle and Latte) are just starting to get it all worked out. We now have our own milk in the frig.



The geese, ducks, broilers, poults and pullets are all growing like gang busters. They seem to like being out on pasture although it is tough at times keeping them stocked with water.



Our crops have had a rougher time of things. We were cold in the early spring and then jumped right to August type weather -- hot and dry. We fashioned a mobile water station from some freecycled barrels and a 12V pump. We collect any and all rain we get and have been watering the crops with it to make it through the dry patches.



We have recently received some much needed precipitation, and our efforts have seemed to pay off since the corn, beans and squash are doing well.



The kitchen garden is thriving, we have loads of fresh strawberries, peas, and all types of lettuces. Danielle has been busy making and canning strawberry preserves and getting the CSA up and running.


360 degree view from the center of the kitchen garden!
Click on image for larger view.

Did I mention that my wife picked up three Navajo-Churro sheep this weekend,



or that our Narragansett hen hatched out a brood of poults.



Like I said, lots going on at the farm.

Early Father's Day Gift

Danielle is horrible about keeping secrets, and thus when my Father's day present arrived last week she showed it to me right away. She bought me the grill for Father's day 4 or 5 years ago, so it only seemed fitting to get the matching rotisserie. You can't see it in this picture but there is a small electric motor that mounts on the right side of the spit and an adjustable counterbalance that goes on the left side. We defrosted a free range chicken and I have to say the it came out even better than my beer can chicken. Since it is always rotating the bird essentially self bastes. We had a salad with greens out of our garden as well as some homemade bread to accompany the chicken. We are already looking forward to doing one of our heritage turkeys and maybe even a suckling pig on the spit.