4th September, 2023

Joey is now eating muesli after his milk, hopefully Star will watch and copy. I pulled all the baling twine out from around the old bales in their corner of the hay shed, calves will chew on anything. I also fed them in the hayshed tonight, carting everything down to them, as it was raining and I didn't want them to get cold and wet.

I checked the hops plants, and about half of them are showing shoots. This coming weekend I will prep the trellises and clear the grass from around them so there's less competition.

I went for a paddock walk and checked the power on all the fences, mostly sitting around 5.2 which is good enough to make the cattle think twice. Despite the fact that the sheep should be able to walk under the single line splitting the main paddock, they seem to be respecting it.

I fixed the loose palings in the fences of both cottages and the loose panels on the implement shed. There's still a couple of battens on the chook shed to do. One of the chooks lays an olive green egg, she started back up after a winter break today. She's not a prolific layer so that tells me that they should all be picking up soon.

I also took Poppy into the shade next to the greenhouse and spent some time brushing her. She has a dense coat that is shedding right now, and has a bad habit of laying in mud. She needs to be brushed for about 15 mins a day to keep her coat in order but can't be brushed when her coat is wet. The fur just stretches and knots. With the ongoing wet weather and her personal habits, days when she is dry enough to brush are few and far between. Maybe over summer we'll get her in order.

I looked up slow cooker recipes for milk caramel, the dulce de leche ones were all for using a can of condensed milk. So I looked for cajeta recipes (which is caramel made with goat's milk) and because you don't get canned condensed goat milk they actually showed how to do it in a slow cooker from liquid milk. 

I have a small slow cooker in the cupboard, about 2 litres, so I did an experiment with 500ml of milk and cooked it down to about 200ml of caramel sauce. Normally I do 4 litres in a saucepan. It takes about 2hrs that way and the slow cooker was about 8 hrs, but you have to stand with the saucepan and stir while the slow cooker is turn on and check once an hour.



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