Starting our goat herd
On Friday, we picked up our three new goats. We got them from Steve at Honaunau Farm and took them home right in the trunk area of the Jeep. All three are Saanans, a Swiss dairy breed known for its nice personality and producing large amounts of milk. They also have beards which is super cute!
We have one doeling (baby girl goat), one milker, and one old lady goat. Our old lady goat was free, Steve just needed a good home for her with lots of pasture so we figured we might as well take her too. The goats came with names, but we were really excited about naming our goats so we changed them.
We named our old lady goat O'Gloden after my friend Gloriann. Last year we were touring the Budweiser factory in St. Louis and we all received "Master Brewer" certificates for taking a tasting course. For some unknown reason, Gloriann's certificate had "O'Gloden" written in for her first name. It was hilarious and clearly a perfect name for a cranky old-lady goat.
Our milking goat is named Swarley after Barney on the tv show How I Met Your Mother. There is an episode where Barney goes to a coffee shop and they write Swarley on his cup instead of Barney. Just to go along with the theme of completely botched names, we thought Swarley would be a cute name for our bearded lady goat.
For our little girl goat, Doug was pushing hard for us to name her "Doug." I thought that was too confusing and for some reason was advocating for the name "Magda." We compromised and the little girl goat was named "Magdoug."
So far the goats have been great! I have been milking Swarley twice a day and getting approximately 3lbs of milk a day - which is about 1/3 of a gallon. Her milk tastes great and I am getting excited to make cheese out of it! I am going to wait until I have about 2 gallons of milk to make cheese though.
The dogs also love the goats - they are very curious and like to sit next to the goat pen and watch them.
I am not sure that they know the goats are not just another breed of dog because Bruce likes to play-bow to O'Gloden and keeps whining because he wants to play with them. Also, both dogs have been literally grazing outside of the goat pen.
It might be hard to tell from the pictures, but Bruce is actually eating the grass. What crazy dogs.