Farming on the Glasgow Farm

Danny from New Zealand enjoyed his visit to the farm and watching our goat be milked.

I dreamed of living on a farm since I was a little girl. Our family would visit my Uncle Bob and his family who lived on a farm, in Markle, Indiana with his little white house, animals and acres and acres of crops. They didn’t have a lot of money, there was no air conditioning in their home and they only had one bathroom with six children (add our family of 5 to that). But what they had, I wanted.  The unconditional love of Christ filled their home.  Their table was always bountifully spread with food from the fruit of their labor and family was sacred to them. I tucked those memories in my heart and vowed that one day I would live on a farm and my home would overflow just like theirs.

Dale and I found our old white farmhouse, land, and barn I had dreamed of 17 years ago. When we moved here we didn’t know a thing about farming or gardening. Boy, have we learned many things the hard way and we’re still learning. We farm to feed our family not to make money off of it, we’re not professional nor do we have all the answers but what we have learned we love to share. It’s just plain rewarding, healthier, and cheaper to grow your own food, milk your own goat, gather your own eggs and put it on the table everyday.

Farming is something you learn by doing, so while we’re farming, I welcome you to learn while we learn. I’ll be posting the current things we’re up to. I hope you’ll feel at home while you visit our farm here on the blog.

My favorite part of farming is our goats.  We raise Alpine goats for milking. Oh my goodness, there is nothing better than unpasteurized milk for making cream, cheese, curds, whey, and yogurt. We (Dale and I) milk our goat twice a day.  The first milking is at 7AM.  The second is at 7PM. Most farms do it much earlier I’m sure, but I’m not an early riser. Dale feeds all the other goats and animals and then sits down and we talk while I milk the goat. She gives us a little over a 1/2 gallon at each milking.  That’s a little over 8 cups twice a day. Yep, that equals a little more than a gallon a day with one goat. Our second doe is due to have kids any day now and we’ll have double the milk! The milk is unbelievably good and makes the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

We currently have 19 chickens and one happy rooster. That’s plenty of eggs for our family. We have a terrible problem with foxes getting our chickens, so dale made a movable chicken coop that contains them, keeps them safe, has a nesting area and free range area for them to hunt and gather bugs, etc.  It is totally confined, so predators can’t get them, but movable so they can have fresh grass and insects every day. Dale’s tractor pulls the coop around the farm-yard. The eggs are huge and the yolks more yellow than any free range eggs you can buy in the store.

We also grow organic blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, concord grapes, apples, pears, figs, asparagus, rhubarb, mulberries, and a full organic vegetable garden every year. I’ll be posting weekly our newest adventures on the homestead. If you don’t want to miss any of the fun, you can subscribe for posts to be sent to you when I post them.