The day Coal's babies arrived

Coal's babies were born at the end of January. Though she cleaned them up, she then rejected them, leaving us to raise them. This is the second time Coal has done this. The video above was filmed on the day they were born.

Building the new goat house

I filmed this last month - building the new shelter for Coal, our pregnant nanny. The other goats liked it so much that they abandoned the old shelter to move in! Fortunately, this is a close-knit social group and Coal likes the company.

Flans

Back in the kitchen and I've been making flans this week. The first was broad bean and bacon, made using our own beans, eggs and bacon. Alas, we don't grow our own wheat so the pastry was made with purchased flour.



The other was a veggie sausage flan, for our resident vegetarian. More of the ingredients, including the sausages, were purchased. The eggs were our own.

Both flans went down well though after three dinners on the trot, we were pleased when we finished them.

The babies are growing

Our two goat babies are growing well. We have now stopped bringing them home at night as they were getting too big and needed to acclimatize to being in the goat paddock around the clock. So, overnight now they sleep in one of the small hen houses along with 7 hens. Soon, they will be put overnight with the other goats, but we need to repair the goathouse roof before we do that.

We've also named them: Sooty (the boy) and Sweep (the girl).

Fallen tree

A tree came down in our village last week. It was a rowan and I guess it was about 55 years old, probably planted when the estate was built in the 60s. It is always sad to see established trees come down but their passing is also an opportunity to gather feed for the goats (they will eat the twigs and bark) and firewood (which will have to be dried for at least a year). The goats are now happily chomping their way through all of it.  The bark in particular is very nutritious and the goats will go to great length to strip it from branches.

Raising the roof

Storm Ciara hit us on Sunday. I arrived at the goat paddock in the morning to find the goat house no longer had a roof! Fortunately, we have a second, smaller goat house which was build a few weeks ago and which was rapidly adopted by all 6 of the goats in the main paddock. So they still have shelter. Once the storm has passed, we will replace the roof. We already planned to replace the old plastic roofing panels (recycled from an old conservatory) with roofing panels made from plywood and covered with roofing felt, recycled from a garage. This will be a big job involving a number of us as the panels are quite heavy.

Goose breast wrapped in bacon

We were given a wild goose by a friend recently so we stripped off the breast meat, wrapped it in our own bacon and grilled it. It went well served with vegetables and red wine gravy.