We had snow this week. None of the animals were happy about it, except our brilliant herd-guardian dogs, who are Great Pyrenees. They were delighted.
Our goats, however, refused to leave their shelters, even for food. Here are Leroy and Roger, standing in the door, waiting for me to deliver their meal, like some sort of Uber Eats person.
On the chicken side of things, only Stripey was willing to venture out of the coop. Everyone else stayed indoors. We had to take their food and water inside their coops. (This photo was taken before we hauled the water in!)
Chickens hate snow because their body temperature is, on average, 106 degrees. But their feet are less insulated than the rest of their bodies, and much less tolerant of cold. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, in some areas of the country, chickens refuse to leave their coops for the entire winter. This is where we get the expression “cooped up”.
Normally, Albuquerque gets 9.6 inches of snow in a year. This week, most of Albuquerque got ten inches of snow. We also had the coldest temperatures recorded in any October in history. (OK, any October from which we have kept the data).
So, you can imagine how mad our goats were - they complained loudly, asking us to fix the outdoors for them. Goats don’t mind the cold so much, but they hate getting wet. They hate getting their hooves wet and they hate getting their fur wet, so our snow was not popular. Good thing snow just doesn’t last here.
We didn’t think Big Red was going to survive the big cold (which is over now). But she is still going strong. Her legs are completely useless now - she can’t move at all, except for a little bit of scooting with her wings. We carry her out of her nesting box in the morning, and set her in the yard, where she enjoys the sun and the other chickens. Then we carry her back to her nesting box at night. During the two cold days we left her in her box, but of course, the other chickens wouldn’t leave the coop anyway, so she had company.
I’m amazed at how interested she is in everything. Every morning, we open the coop wondering if she made it through the night. But, she continues to enjoy her life. We bring her chicken pellets and water, scratch and cat food. She eats with gusto.
My main activity this week was a push to get my goat milk soap website launched. The word "soap" comes to us from Mount Sapo, in ancient Rome. When it rained there, the clay that ran down the slopes was particularly good for cleaning. Saponification is the process of combining sodium hydroxide and oils to create soap.
In the process of writing copy for my website I stumbled upon some information that shocked me: most of the soap available at the grocery store is no longer soap! It is synthetic detergent. According to the FDA, it is perfectly acceptable to label these "syndet" bars as soap.
I was curious about when and why bars of soap changed. During WWI, Germany needed the oils used in soap making for food. So they developed the first large-scale commercial synthetic detergents.
In the 1930s, soap manufacturers were concerned with soap scum. If you lived in an area that had hard water (most of the Midwest) soap left residue behind that made a “bathtub ring”. They began making soap from petrochemicals that foamed well and didn’t leave a film behind.
The problem then, and through the 1950s and 1960s, was that the great foam they’d gotten with the early synthetic detergents wouldn’t go away. The foam remained as it spilled into waterways, disrupting all kinds of life there.
The issues with foam have largely been solved. Still, the synthetic detergents are hard on your skin, and hard on the environment, both from the point of view of putting surfactants into our rivers, and from the point of view of using irreplaceable petrochemicals in their manufacture.
I am so pleased to be making a product that has none of these problems. I think my website will be up and running by next week. Here are some soaps that'll be available:
The last thing I wanted to share this week is a report on accidental roosters. This morning, when we went to open the chicken coops at dawn, there was a strange sound coming from the young flocks’ coop. It kind of sounded like a human yelling, “Roo!”
Jan had told me that when the roosters first start crowing, it doesn’t sound right. They have to practice to get their “cock-a-doodle-doo” perfected.
In any case, we hurried to get the doors of the coop open, in order to find out who was doing the crowing. Was it the enormous featherfoot we’d suspected of being a rooster?
It turns out it was this guy:
He is truly the most beautiful of the ameraucanas. I wonder how long it will take him to perfect his crow? I look forward to hearing him practice every morning!