Chicks!

Here are Whizzie's new chicks! The Speckled hen went broody and gave Whizzie this nice present :)

Not much to say really...

Well, the second pecorino has been cut open and I liked it very much, Tom and Kevin did too and our neighbors are simply crazy about the ricotta. The second time I tried mozzarella it was a lot better but it is really difficult to keep, its shelf life being very short. I make it for fun tho, just for the pizza Saturdays.
The blue looked very interesting when I put it in the cellar, my sheep gorgonzola could be a big surprise.
The milking stand has been redesigned and improved for simpler and easier use. I should post some pics but let's say that now the sheep simply jump on it, the whole milking experience has improved a lot for them and I, and possibly for P when she'll be milking in August. I'm going to enjoy some time off. I surely need it, I look like a relic.
I have been busy for the past 3 or 4 days trying to fix the floor of my mobile home which was about to collapse. Mission accomplished but what a pain in the butt. If I were a bit larger I wouldn't have been able to crawl under it :(
And finally, for something completely different, here are some pics of my friend the hare!

Midges

Jeez. I forgot about the midges. Because last summer was so humongously shit, we didn't get many midges. But this late blooming spring has brought them back altogether (with the ones from last year too it seems!). As it happens, milking falls right within the time of highest midges activity. This means that my face is covered with bytes. And my wrists. Also part of my arse, my shirt is too short!
This morning I was awaken at 6.30, not by the usual sound of my alarm, but rather by the four sheep bleating VERY LOUDLY right behind my wonderfully sound insulated window of the mobile home. What was wrong with them? Were they just playing a bad prank on me? I could swear I saw one of them smiling devilishly... but no. Their faces, legs and udders had changed colour, they were black with midges!

Anyway, on a different note, cheesemaking goes on. No midges in the cheese yet. I did try one blue and I might try another one in a couple of weeks, but mainly it's still pecorino and ricotta because I feel that the recipe is right. I have a confession to make, I did open the first tiny pecorino I made and I ate it all. It was good, very good. Considering that it was young (below 4 weeks) I was very impressed.
I should post pics but every time I come up to the old house for the cheese I forget my camera and I still don't have one of those fancy smart phones. I promise some more pics. Enjoy the video of the happy ram, sorry about the annoying music in the background.

CHEESE OVERLOAD! THANK GOD FOR THE PIGS!

Well the workload has increased sensibly since I've started milking the 4 sheep. The lambs and Mr Fecker are almost care-free and I only need to re-fence them with the electric netting every so many days.
I basically milk 8 liters per day and process therefore 16 liters every other day. The mobile home seems to cope with all this cheese making and is still pretty tidy, but surely it's not easy to eat 5 Kg of cheese every other day :) Well, actually most of it keeps piling up in the old house (pecorini to age). Still no proper aging facilities, so I'm using my old modified fridge as a cellar and plastic containers. I'm pretty happy with the cheese/ricotta duo, although the ricotta is the only one we tasted and frankly it is amazing. The pecorini look good but we'll see how they score at the taste bud test.
The ladies have transformed themselves into munching machines and to be honest the amount of grass on the fields at our disposal is not great. The spring is late and temps have been really low for the time of the year but today it's warm and we'll be in the 20s celsius for the next 7 days! :)
I have also tried mozzarella, failed miserably on attempt number one and succeeded satisfactorily the second time around. I would like to try a blue tomorrow.

On the milking side again, surprisingly the best sheepy is Selvaggia, she has the prettiest and better shaped udder among them all and stands still forever while I milk her, one wonders if she stands paralyzed in fear but I believe she's actually very cool, strangely enough.

As the title says, thank god for the piggies, lots of whey and cheese for them from my experiments, if Whizzie didn't have them I'd have a very fat dog by now. 11 liters of whey every other day are just fine for the 2 pigs but it would have been a pain if I had to dispose of it otherwise.
off to milking in a while, more soon.

Sheep shearing and weaning.

Spring seems to have finally kicked in, although I shouldn't say it too loud. Sure for Italian standards the maximum temperatures are still a joke, but not so much if you go around in a 6 Kg wool jumper and you cant take it off.
It was time to shear the sheep and I was a bit worried about it because I never did it before and surely not with hand clippers! It did go alright though. I did Boss first, she is always very cooperative and it took me 1 hour and a half, would you believe it? The poor thing was about to die of shock. After I released she lied down for an hour or so to recover and I did the same. The other ones went a lot quicker and I managed to get good fleeces out of them, in one piece and clean.
In the meantime I have also weaned all the lambs in two different rounds. The last one went in the day before yesterday. P had prepared these lovely bras for them to help weaning without having to separate them from their mothers (they can't suck), but in the end I ended up separating them for 2 reasons, the first one is that the stable is a lot less busy, the second is that Little Fecker has some company and he's very happy about it (check the picture at the end!).
Finally, I have been making cheese! I have tried of course the Pecorino and ricotta duo, it took me a while but I think I got it straight in the end. The pigs are very happy with the whey. Tonight I'm going to try mozzarella and in a couple of days I'll try a bigger pecorino. So much happening, so little time.


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