Do you remember last summer when our buck Leroy suddenly developed a mantle? He was born last March, a beautiful beige baby. Late in the summer, his coat began growing a black streak around his shoulders and on his throat. Last week, when we were feeding the goats in his pen, my cousin and I noticed how his mantle has continued to grow. Jan said, “maybe he’s actually a black goat”.
I looked it up on-line. It’s fairly common for goats to change color as they mature. Horses change color as well, and because of that many horses aren’t even registered until they’re older.
I’m used to dogs and cats, who stay the way they were born, coat-wise. Leroy’s changes over the months have been stunning.
Here he is minutes after he was born. He's the baby on the right, his sister, Lydia, is on the left. (Lulou, his mom, his licking them).
And here’s how he looked this past summer, with Roger in the background. (Roger is now Harper's wether). It seems as if you can see the incipient black fur coming on in this photo. But the difference between this photo and today's photo is really dramatic.
Meanwhile, it seems as if every day another one of our new hens starts laying eggs. They’re laying them in the old coop, in the new coop, and in the feral cat shelters. Luckily for us, the rate of egg-laying is still slow, because the days are still short. Egg laying has everything to do with how many hours of light we get in a given day.
In this photo, the top two eggs are from our new flock, the bottom two are from our old flock.
Around the winter solstice we were getting only two eggs a day on a good day. Now we’re up to five or six eggs nearly every day. By summer solstice we anticipate we’ll be getting three dozen eggs each day. We’re looking into donating them to a food pantry. Seriously, I’m not sure we thought through the fact that having forty fascinating and entertaining chickens would lead to so many eggs.
When I feed the new flock in the morning, certain hens linger on their perches, waiting for me to pet them and tell them how lovely they are before they go out into the yard to start their day. It’s hard to explain how wonderful I feel, bridging the mammal-bird divide.
The big excitement this week is that my shampoo bars, which I’ve been working on since last March, are finally available on my website. Check it out: https://www.serenasoaps.com/. You’ve got to scroll down to the shampoo bar section.
The history of shampoo is fascinating. We get the word “shampoo” from India. The Hindi word “champu” comes from a Sanskrit word, chapyathi, which essentially means “to massage or press”. Around the world people have, from ancient times, ground various flowers and herbs into pastes which they have massaged into their scalps.
During the Renaissance in Italy, women washed their hair with lye soap, and conditioned it with bacon fat mixed with licorice. That’s an aroma festival that leaves my mind reeling.
Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian entrepreneur, brought shampooing to England in the 1800s, opening the first “Vapour Bath” in Brighton in 1814.
Liquid shampoo was invented in 1927 by Hans Schwartzkopf in Berlin. In 1930 Dr. John Breck created his own version of liquid shampoo in Springfield, Massachusetts, eventually founding the Breck Shampoo empire.
In the 1960s, chemists discovered how to suspend polymers in shampoo, which they claimed filled in damaged areas on hair shafts. In the 1980s, they figured out how to put silicones into shampoos, which are also left behind to coat our hair.
At this point, we’re used to a certain kind of lather, and a slick-feeling when we shampoo our hair. When I read about all the chemicals in commercial shampoo, I become overwhelmed. I started making shampoo bars so that I wouldn’t have to throw away a bunch of plastic bottles. But, when I read about sulfates, formaldehydes, DEA & TEA, paraben, and petrochemicals in our shampoo, I’m glad to have a simple, home-made alternative. Those chemicals make peoples' heads itch.
Finally, another note on the beauty in our area. Because of the needs of our chickens, we are acutely aware of both the sunrise and sunset here. Most mornings we watch the sun come up over the mountains to the east, and most evenings we watch the sun set over our neighbors’ trees to the west. Almost every day it’s a spectacular display of wild colors. Here is yesterday’s sunset:
There was a Breck Girl hall of fame in Phoenix Arizona, with portraits of all the past Breck girls. (There were about 150 of them!) I always wanted to go there when we went to Phoenix for Club Dent, but we never did.
Sadly, now it is too late. The Breck Girl Hall of Fame has been dismantled, and the portraits all sent to the Smithsonian, where they are currently in storage, so you can't see them.