This past weekend Allison (Trillium Trails) and I traveled to the Portland OR area. Our primary reason was to visit Ariel Mars of Hidden Creek, the first herd of registered Miniature Nubians. About 18 months ago I was able to meet her and her herd of 100 goats! (at that time). I believe I fell in love with her...well and her goats! the first time we met. What a lovely interesting woman. She has been decreasing her herd due to aging, as she does not want to leave anyone with the responsibility of dealing with her herd if she were unable to care for them. She is now down to about 30 older does a few youngsters and her gorgeous bucks. I was hoping to bring home a doe for my herd, but that did not happen on this trip. One of her SR does decided she wanted to have kids again and found her way to the gorgeous buck! So maybe she will have a doeling for me this June.
We had a couple other favorite adventures planned for our trip. A visit to the wineries in the Willamette Valley that either produce Wines that have no added sulfite, or that produce wines from organically grown grapes. Our favorites include Cooper Mountain, Sokol Blosser and Amity. In search of another tasting room we had not visited before in Carlton, we found our way to Sileston for a taste and a hot tip about the little Jam shop around the corner. We ended our day with an Artisan Jam tasting including salad with strawberry balsamic jam dressing, turkey meatball with apricot jam, a yummy ganache with meyer lemon jam and cheesecake with cherry black pepper jam. OH YUM! So...if you are ever in the Willamette Valley near the charming town of Carlton stop by the Republic of Jam...tastings are every Sunday.
Our next stop was the Bob's Red Mill store and restaurant an adventure in itself. Healthy delicious lunch and a shoppig bag full of hard to find whole grain products we made the most of that visit.
Our final stop was Shipwrecked Beads near Olympia...a warehouse size bead store that would be a half day adventure if we were not already exhausted and it wasn't closing time...going back there again for sure.
I returned home to find Rose in heat (finally) and put her and Blacstrap together for a honeymoon.

February 14, a special day for the
Valentine Farm. Tomorrow I hope I am able to breed Rose who has now had two lutalyse injections to try to get her to cycle with this breeding I hope  I will be breeding my last doe for the season, several have been coy and difficult to get settled.  I am absolutely certain they have their reasons..as do I! 
friend Julie of Animal Crackers Farm was kind enough to bring her ultrasound machine over to take a look at the girls bellies. We think we have two girls with triplets, two with twins and at that reading two unbred. Have been working on that problem the past couple weeks. Gracie as too soon to tell (update she is in standing noisy heat today (15th). She had mastitis, the first time that I know of on the farm It was only picked up as the milk was abit more difficult to filter. She had a positive CMT test so we gave today in each side 2 times 12 hours apart I will probably slowly dry her off after sending a milk sample to be sure I treated the right organism. We did not ultrasound Brown Sugar the Nigerian dwarf but she probably had triplets or quads and is due  in the first week of March! correction to previous post.Every one is healhy and happy for the time being.Feeding lots of hay and just slowly adding dairy goat grain to te evening feed. Now that they have figured this out they rush the human! We are in the process of evaluating different types of grain ration. I am currently reading about this after taking class on the rumen at the country farm Expo last month in Stanwood. More on feeding dairy goats in a future blog.....
Valentine's blog