How was your Thanksgiving? I hope everyone enjoyed theirs and there’s plenty of turkey soup on the menu this week, ha! Unfortunately, I had a migraine headache that day – and several days prior to that – which meant that we did not make it out of the house that day. However, we did manage to salvage a small-scale meal of extravagance for ourselves. We roasted one of the chickens which we raised earlier this year with lemon, sage, and thyme. Also on the menu were George’s famous fried potatoes, a small roasted Carnival squash, sweet potatoes, and homemade whole cranberry sauce. It was delicious, and we are thankful for another year of growth here on the farm.
Speaking of growing, our goat herd has grown! We are pleased to introduce our two new LaMancha goat doelings, Hannelore and Marigold.
They have been bred by a LaMancha buck, and we will find out if they are pregnant over the next couple of weeks. “How will you know”, you ask? It all depends on whether they go back into heat. And we’ll know if they go into heat, because MaryMan, our polled intersex doe, will start trying all her best moves on them, including “Goober Face,” “Weird Grunting Noises,” “Urine Tasting” and “Dry Humping.” But we are hoping that they are, in fact, pregnant. The need to get the rest of our girls knocked up so that they will be in milk next year is growing more urgent by the day, because typically, standard dairy goat breeds are only in heat from roughly August through January. So we are working on that, too!
“You have such strange names for your goats!” We sometimes hear that. It’s worth noting that if we chose the names, there is usually a reference behind it, whether it’s a pop culture reference, mythological in nature or some other reason. MaryMan, Ginger, and Lovie are all taken from a certain Sherwood Schwartz TV series. It may surprise you to know that Heidi does not come from the Swiss children’s book, but rather, because her coloring reminds me of my beloved pet German Shepherd I had as a child. Gidget’s name was inspired by the television series. Veronica is from the Archie comic book (and her personality is actually kind of similar!) Inara, River, and Badger are all characters from Firefly/Serenity. We kept Lily and Molly’s names from their original owner. Which leads us to the newest additions. Where did we get the inspiration for their names?
We both really like the webcomic “Questionable Content.” Which sounds like it would be naughty, but it really isn’t – it’s about a bunch of geeky kids in their 20’s and 30’s, and is quite addicting to read, really. We like two of the geekiest girls in the comic, Hannelore and Marigold, and hence, our new goats are their namesakes.
So, many thanks to Jeph Jacques for such great names! I wonder if he ever imagined that goats would get named after his characters?
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