{"id":1779,"date":"2011-01-14T11:38:32","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T18:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2011-01-18T12:46:50","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T19:46:50","slug":"the-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=1779","title":{"rendered":"The Secret."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The milk fridge is full.\u00a0 And the girls keep right on givin’.\u00a0 Which is because, unlike a lot of farms, we have some goats who kid in the spring and some that kid in the fall.\u00a0 So we have sweet, fresh milk even through the dark winter months when a lot of herds are dried off.\u00a0 We can make cheese.\u00a0 We can make ice cream. We can make several batches of horrible, foul tasting yogurt and still keep experimenting with it.\u00a0 But even if I don’t know the secret to making good yogurt, I do know the secrets for keeping goats in sweet, delicious milk.<\/p>\n

For Josie, it’s a little room for tap dancing.\u00a0 Something about the sound of her hooves on the wooden milk stand is music to her ears.\u00a0 Put the bucket too close to her back feet and I’ll end up with a goat hoof in the milk.\u00a0 I used to think she was an awful milker because she jumped around the stand.\u00a0 I spent plenty of days trying to milk with one hand while holding the bucket up and out of the dancing zone with the other.\u00a0 I tried to hold her back hooves down.\u00a0 I considered a hobble.\u00a0 And then one day I just sighed,\u00a0 put the bucket under her middle, and milked from there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>That’s when I realized she didn’t have any intention of kicking over the bucket.\u00a0 And she wasn’t trying to protest the milk stand.\u00a0 She just needed a little room to beat out a tune.\u00a0 Let her rock out and she will tap away happily as she munches her grain.\u00a0 Sure, putting the bucket under her abdomen requires a little more aim on my part.\u00a0 But she doesn’t mind if you maneuver her teats to get them firing in the right direction.\u00a0 And the sound of her taps, along with the pings of the milk hitting the pail does make an incredibly sweet composition.\u00a0 What can I say, some girls just gotta shake their booty.\u00a0 Or their their hoofy.<\/p>\n

Julia, on the other hand, requires a little treat to be in the mood for making milk.\u00a0 Drop a handful of scratch in her grain and she takes position and lets loose.\u00a0 Her joy at the taste of that corn is so irrepressible that sometimes one squeeze to get her started leaves her milk flowing in a steady stream on its own.\u00a0 She even wags her tail as if she’s trying to put out a butt fire.\u00a0 Of course, this all makes her secret sound a bit easier than it actually was.\u00a0 Originally, I had no idea that Julia needed a little bit of\u00a0 scratch to feel at ease on the milk stand.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I couldn’t understand why I had to drag her flailing body into the milk room and force her floppy ears into the head gate.\u00a0 I figured she was afraid of the chickens who get a handful of scratch thrown down in a corner of the milk room each morning to keep them out of the way during milking.\u00a0 I figured that because, apparently, I am stupid.\u00a0 And I didn’t learn otherwise until the day Julia busted loose of my death grip on her collar, raced over to the chickens, thrust her head right in between their ruffled feathers and start gobbling up the scratch. “Oh,” I said, which is what stupid people say when they realize the solution to a dilemma has been staring them right in the face for weeks.\u00a0 Thus began the practice of putting a bit of scratch in Julia’s grain.\u00a0 And the beginning of her happily putting milk in the pail.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I have to admit that I don’t know Carmen’s secret.\u00a0 There is something in Carmen’s nature that makes her climb gracefully on the stand, nibble neatly at her grain, and release the sweetest milk on the farm.\u00a0 She stands there patiently even when the grain runs out.\u00a0 She stands there even when the head gate isn’t closed.\u00a0 She allows children who have never even set foot on a farm before to practice their milking skills on her.\u00a0 She treats the goat sitter with the same calm courtesy as she treats me.\u00a0 Everyone raves about her delightful temperament and her candied milk.\u00a0 Perhaps she meditates.\u00a0 Or channels white light.<\/p>\n

She is so calm and her teats so perfect that I usually milk her with one hand while giving Bruno his morning rubs and ear scratches with the other.\u00a0 Which may be why her milk is infused with extra sweetness.\u00a0 If you’ve been around a Great Pyrenees getting his morning love and adulation for keeping everyone safe through the night, then you’ll understand that the air is filled with molecules of happiness and joy.\u00a0 If you don’t have a Great Pyrenees, imagine the feeling you get when Southern Season puts out the chocolate peanut butter truffles for free tasting.\u00a0 If you don’t have a Southern Season with free chocolate peanut butter truffles, I am so, so sorry.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brianna, my herd queen, came to me from a family that didn’t know her secret.\u00a0 I managed to get this champion milker because she was so awful on the milk stand.\u00a0 And, she really really was.\u00a0 She would kick so fiercely that she put dents in the milk stand.\u00a0 If I actually managed to get my hands and bucket under her udder, she would sit on me. Literally sit on me, putting her teats fully into the few miserable drops of milk I managed to squeeze out and squashing my arms against the sides of the pail until I thought my bones would snap.\u00a0 I talked quietly to her.\u00a0 I sang to her.\u00a0 I yelled at her.\u00a0 I wept.\u00a0 I called my daddy.\u00a0 Who promptly informed me that the worst milkers could be tamed by tying a strip of linen around their middle.\u00a0 This seemed odd, but I pulled an old purple dog towel out of the linen closet, put Brianna on the stand, then put the towel round her abdomen and tied it in a bow on her back.\u00a0 I sat down to milk.\u00a0 She laid her ears back.\u00a0 She twitched her withers. Then she set to eating her grain and I milked her out for the first time since she had kidded.<\/p>\n

The purple towel hangs on a hook right next to the feed bags.\u00a0 We use it every time we milk her.\u00a0 If we ever forget, Brianna calmly lets us milk her and then, right before the last few drops hit the pail, she kicks the bucket over.\u00a0 Because as herd queen, it is her duty to keep everyone on their toes.\u00a0 There is a school of thought that this secret works because the towel tightens whenever the goat (or cow) prepares to kick or fuss.\u00a0 Since the goat doesn’t like the feeling of tightness around her abdomen, she decides to stand still.\u00a0 Personally, I think Brianna recognizes that purple is a royal color and she was just awaiting the proper respect to be shown for her position.\u00a0 But then I probably spend too much time with my goats.\u00a0 Anyway, long live the Queen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This spring Magenta will kid for the first time.\u00a0 Sometimes I wonder what her secret will be.\u00a0 But if she gets any fatter this winter it might be the need for a ramp just for her to get up on the milk stand.\u00a0 Meh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The milk fridge is full.\u00a0 And the girls keep right on givin’.\u00a0 Which is because, unlike a lot of farms, we have some goats who kid in the spring and some that kid in the fall.\u00a0 So we have sweet, fresh milk even through the dark winter months when a lot of herds are dried […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,96,97],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-goats","tag-milk","tag-milkstand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1856,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions\/1856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}