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Horn of Plenty

All of our milkers are now getting onto the milking stand! Jan’s campaign of patiently luring them with grain has really paid off. The does are going through a thin phase - their babies seem to be drinking their flesh away. So it’s important that we see that each goat gets several cups of supplemental grain every morning.


Getting onto the milking stand has other advantages beside getting grain and getting milked. A goat who will climb up there happily can have her hooves trimmed, or get vaccinated. It’s a great life skill for a goat.


Some of our mamas are never going to be milked. We’re not going to milk Maria, Elena, or Bella this year. Elena and Bella are struggling to make enough milk to keep up with their triplets. Maria just doesn’t have a great udder. But we’ve trained them to get up on the stand anyway.


The girls come into the milking parlor one by one. They have an order that they decide on. When one goat goes out, the next comes in. You can see the next goat in line eyeing the door, waiting to see when it’s her turn. This year the order is slightly different than last year, but the goats really stick to their order.


While they’re waiting to come in, they are in the breezeway between our houses, where we put down big bowls of shreds for them to snack on. Shreds are loose bits that come off the hay bales. When we take hay out to the pens in the morning and evening, we break the bales into flakes. The flakes are natural divisions - slices of the bale. But, in that process, bits of hay fall onto the hay barn floor. We sweep that hay into an enormous pile in the corner of the hay barn. We shovel shreds from that pile into big bowls that we set out for the milkers in the morning.


Everyone loves the shreds. They’re easier to eat than the flakes. The goats have to rip bits of hay off the flakes with their teeth. But they can just hoover up the shreds. Here’s a photo of a bunch of goats gathered around a bowl of shreds. The morning I took this photo, Rosa was grabbing a mouthful of shreds, picking up her head, and in the process, flinging shreds all over everyone. I don’t know why. Each time she did, she seemed to gaze into the distance in a contemplative manner. What goes on in her head? (She's the big goat at the right of the photo):



Kat and I are still spending time socializing babies every day. We’ve gotten twelve of them to enjoy being cuddled by humans - we’ve just got three more that we need to win over. The older kids are getting to be a big pain while we’re socializing. As we sit with the younger babies in our laps, the older kids run to where we’re sitting and try to butt the younger ones away so that we’ll pay attention to them instead.


This made me curious about the phrase “horn in on”. So, I started looking into the etymology of that phrase and got completely side-tracked with the fascinating story of cornucopias.


Cornu means horn (in Latin) and copiae means plenty. What I didn’t know was that the original cornucopia (horn of plenty) was a goat horn!


The story is that the Titan Chronos (Zeus’ father) was in the habit of eating his children. Rhea (Zeus’ mother) hid him in a cave to save him, and raised him on goat milk. When he was grown, Zeus broke the horn off the goat who had fed him and said that whoever owned that horn would always have plenty of everything - creating the first Horn of Plenty. (What a way to treat the being who had nurtured you!)


I’ve seen cornucopias decorating Thanksgiving tables most of my life. They’re usually a basket - some sort of woven affair filled with dried gourds or plastic grapes. I never would’ve guessed they were originally a goat horn! (Here's Zeus, with his goat horn full of produce):



This week Kat and I continued on our soap saga. Here we are, all geared up and ready to put soap into molds. I love Kat's nifty goggles, which she got for science class in college.



Here’s our first attempt at swirling in the loaf molds. We’re changing our old anise bars into blue anise bars. These are way better swirls than I made on the old bars.



We also got our first professionally printed labels! We found a local printer who would print on 100% post-consumer recycled stock, so we got labels and business cards.


And our sandalwood soaps have finally been properly aged, so we are now selling them on our website. Check it out at https://www.serenasoaps.com/



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