Now that I’ve been milking goats for about a month, I can look back and see some very important things I learned. These are the things I would have told myself, had I been able to give myself advice before we started this adventure! Some of these are going to *seem* contradictory, but I think the good place to be is somewhere in the balance between those contradictory statements.

I followed (cough, cough) the recipe at FiasCoFarm.com for chevre. I made a mistake and while the picture doesn’t really show it, let me tell you what not to do when making chevre “bag-style”.

It’s been fun having raw goat milk in the house. Every day we get about 3/4 of a gallon, and it should go up when our goats acclimate more and their milk production gets to where it should. (We think.) Over the weekend, I opened up some cultures from CulturesForHealth.com – dairy kefir and villi yogurt starter. I also got some chevre going following a recipe from FiasCoFarm.com.

We bought a dairy goat yesterday! She is a 2 year-old Nubian doe who just gave birth to 2 does. The little does are 1 month old and we got them, too. We always planned on doing this, maybe next year, or whenever we get the barn totally ready and the cross-fencing done. But we decided to bite the bullet and start now anyway. Just couldn’t wait. This is definitely putting the cart before the horse. What put us over the edge was reading in Nourishing Traditions about the benefits of raw dairy and cultured dairy (and lots of it) as an essential part of a healthy diet. We figured, why put it off? Why not now?