It’s getting hot

It’s been about 90 degrees the past few days here and I managed to burn myself pretty badly while out hauling hay. Lyndal and I managed to roll 7 bales of hay across the field in one day which was pretty damn exhausting and then filled and moved two trailers worth of hay to fill a hole that a fallen willow tree left that swallows goats. I haven’t had a day off (although I did have to sleep in til 8:30 one day) since I got here. Lyndal hasn’t had a day off in 6 years so I really can’t complain.

incredible succulent

We had farmstay guests last night and made a really nice dinner and had conversation with them all night. They were a couple and one was a chef at a local restaurant and the other was a student at university studying marine biology. We made pork, a potato and carrot dish, meringues, a pavlova, fruit and nut cheese truffles, and a couple other things.

Fromage blank log with walnuts and rosemary rolled in cranberries, and rosemary plum filled truffles rolled in walnuts and cranberries

mozarella style cheese with beet, smoked salmon, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar

We’ve been noticing some of the goats have been looking a lot thinner, and have been having pretty bad diarrhea, so yesterday we collected fecal samples of all of the ones we’re concerned with and did fecal worm counts. This involved wetting the feces with a saturated saline solution, straining it, and putting it into a slide and looking at it under the microscope. Some of the goats had numbers in the thousands which is really bad so unfortunately we had to drench a few of them to de-worm them. This also unfortunately means that we have to milk them still, but have to throw away all of the milk for 35 days 🙁

fecal worm testing

lancelot

I found a solid piece of furniture in the shed that could be used as a kitchen cupboard for the tiny house that Lyndal and Steve are planning to build eventually so I started sanding it down so I can paint it and fix it up for them. Theres also a couple of other projects like that I want to do, but I haven’t had a lot of free time so far so we’ll see if it gets done… I also spent a few hours sowing seeds of a variety of different vegetables that I’m growing in the potting shed to put in the dinner I’m going to make before I leave.