things fall apart--or--finding a balance between blue go-gurt and hand-milked, handmade organic goat butter

well, it's been a long time. for the very few of you who read this blog, that is almost always a sign of trouble. I had a bad spell this late summer. things started getting bad near the end of July and got really bleak in August. I was doing so well that my MD and I made the decision to go off one of the anti-depressants in May. It seemed to go great, at first. Then I started to have sleeping trouble, did a bunch of stuff with the ND to help with that. Some of what we did was helpful, but not great and then things just got bad. I felt like it was nervous breakdown the revenge plus a horrible fibro flare at the same time.

Of course my brain and body fall apart at the height of the harvest and the height of the summer. it was just bad. once i hit bottom and had the sense of how bad it was, i went back on the meds I had been on 3 months earlier--when things were good. that made all the difference in the world, but took weeks. the depression med turns you into a zombie for the first weeks and it is just hard to function. a good deal more challenging if you are milking twice a day, spending 6-10 hours doing hard garden labor a week, and trying to preserve all that food for your family. oh, and, did i mention, your husband is only home long enough to be fed and your child demands your constant attention.

somehow we got through it. It was bad for me, but really bad for all of us. Lillian said to me that maybe I shouldn't have a daughter. that is the kind of thing that makes your heart stop. the kind of thing that makes you feel like the world's biggest asshole. I can't always control my brain chemistry or the waxing and waning of this crappy pain, but I can not overextend myself to the point that the work becomes my life instead of enhancing our lives.

so, a lot has changed. we are no longer milking. 2 goats have been sold. the garden is winding down, of it's own accord, and I threw in the towel on the weeds a long time ago. the big change is the milking. it is incredibly time consuming and demanding. besides the milking itself, there is the prep, the cleanup, and then you have to deal with all the milk. even just milking one goat, we had more than a gallon a day. that is a great deal of milk for a family of 3. i miss it and truly enjoyed it, but value the freedom even more. I am glad we did it, but I think chickens and garden are more than enough farm work for me right now.

we have eggs!!!! we started getting eggs about a week and a half ago. I love having our laying hens. they are so easy to take care of and you get treasure every day. we get aqua, seafoam, pink, and brown eggs from our 11 Auracuana hens. we started with 1-3/day, but have built to 4-6 a day now and soon will have too many to deal with. Lillian will eat as many as I would give her and have to watch her intake.

so, i was in the health food store and saw a pound of goat butter for $6.99. of course, to the uninitiated that seems crazy, but I think it's a steal. I know that about 12 hours of labor go into that butter. If I buy it twice a year so may daughter can have buttercream on her cake, I think she comes out way ahead! so that's the balance i am seeking---no blue go-gurt but also no handmade goat butter.

on the locavore front, we are doing great even if we no longer have our own dairy prodcuts. I have canned pickles, honey-cucumber-jalapeno relish, eggplant caponanta, tomato sauce (not worth the effort), lots of salsa, peaches, peach pie filling, applesauce, pickled beets, and various jams. I am still doing small batches of salsa as straggler tomatoes ripen. I have dried tons of eggplant, beets, peppers, and tomatoes. I have also roasted, peeled, and frozen lots of poblanos and chuska peppers. Plenty of zucchinni got turned into bread and is in the freezer. I will still be doing plenty of more apples---dried, pie filling and sauce. I will make a batch of pear-cranberry chutney when it is time. I have lots of triamble pumpkins to bake and freeze. we have both a 1/4 beef, and half a hog on the way for the freezer and 10 chickens alrwady in there (from our own backyard). not bad.