Posted on Leave a comment

We have Milk!

We have Milk! Been a very bust time down at Ganders Farm, the Ice Cream production room is up and running and our little Ganders Goat Gelato Ice Cream Wagon is out and about selling some fantastic flavours and super tasty treats that have half the fat and calories of other (cows milk) ice creams, not to mention how good it is for those of you who have a lactose intolerance! You can find out where we will be next on the events page or you can even hire us!
Out at Market!
Out at Market!

Pheew! What a busy busy month or two (or even three!) it has been down at Ganders Farm. First we started off with our older set of girls kidding, we have been very lucky and only had to assist on a couple of them. Each of our original girls now has two or three new kids, so our gorgeous girls did really well this year. If you would like you can see some of the videos of the girls giving birth and keep up to date with their naughty antics on our facebook pages, but here is a run down of what happened!

Enjoying the sun
Enjoying the sun

Foggy was the first too drop this year with a single female who has been named Nimbus, sticking with the weather theme! Misty gave us a strong set of triplets, as did Pale Face and Carrie. GG and Shandy, the last of the old timers gave us twins apiece! Our new girls were a mixed bunch Dotty, Socks and Gobo gave us some very pretty twins and proved very early on to be great mums especially Gobo. Last of the new girls were Stockings and as previously mentioned Foggy who gave us healthy big strong single kids. And finally bringing up the rear were the girls born on the farm, Niki who is Carries daughter from last years kidding gave us a very handsome boy and a pretty girl. Shandy’s girls, Caramel and Debbie gave us three between them.

Just Born
Just Born

So if that wasn’t enough to be getting on with we have been lambing our Badger Faced ewes. In fact we are still lambing and this morning we had another set of twins! Lambs tally so far 7 boys 1 female (not including this mornings). Its been heavy on the boys this year but they are all good lookers, great markings to a high breed standard, so we made the decision to leave them entire, this means they still have their boy parts and their tails have not been docked, something that if they were being sold at market we would usually do. This is because sheep with long tails tend to be more prone to fly strike, getting a lower price per head, not something we want! Fly strike is where the flies smell the excrement around the bottom that has got caught up in the wool and lay their eggs, these in turn hatch and begin to eat the sheep (yuck! And OW!). But we are going to keep them entire as they grow better and get to a good size quicker, for example lambs from last year that we castrated and docked are still on the farm, close to being excellent condition for sending but now are no longer ‘Lamb’ they are now ‘Hogget’, if we left them another 9-10 months they would be ‘Mutton’.

 

So here we are, busy but very happy with all the new additions! We have been taking our ice cream along side our wonderful to sensitive skin goat milk soap to our regular farmers markets for about a month now. We have had great feedback, even when it had snowed on the first morning that we took it out!

fresh milk each day
fresh milk each day

Ganders Goat now make your inside feel great as well as your outside! How about a bath with our soap and a tub of our ice cream on the side of your tub?! Head over to the online shop for your soap and find us at your local farmers markets and soon in some excellent stores (please keep those fingers crossed for us, we are in talks with some great places!)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.