harleyfarms.com Blog

Julie as the Queen and Chloe on the left in Pescadero’s Chamarita parade, last weekend

I am not one of those efficiently scheduled mothers, with whole baseball teams of children packed into their clean cars. I know many lovely people with large families, but our five foot eleven, fourteen-year-old Ben seems quite enough on his own. Partly, that’s because we live in a village, and Ben and his friends have grown up in and around each other’s houses. Ben has a real presence on the farm - he feeds both the babies and older goats, and can answer your questions with authority. He has company, though, every weekend. We’ve known Jessica, our office manager Sharina’s daughter, since she was tiny, and she’s often at the farm. There’s Chloe, too, who perfected her Spanish working on the till at the gas station and tacqueria in town, and is all charm in our shop. Julie, sixteen like Chloe and a fantastic singer, works in the office. Occasionally, there’s the very reserved Felix, just to throw an extra English accent into the mix. Roisin, ten, makes our folk art wool designs. And our series of goat cards were photographed and designed by sisters Claudia and Ellen. Claudia’s twelve, but she’s got all the poise and style she’ll ever need. You may meet Fiona and Carina, too, if you’re visiting Tony’s pen at the weekends. The girls are local nine-year-olds who like to manage our petting time with the babies. I know, it sounds like a child labor camp! - but they’re talented and reliable, and I don’t even have to feed them.

They can’t wait to get at your ditch

People often ask about when we retire a milking goat. We’ll keep most of the goats for eight to ten years, and they’ll live another three or so years in retirement. So far, our elderly goats have moved next door. Our neighbor Pattie has provided comfortable browsing and shelter, but there won’t be room for the thirty goats retiring next year, so we have a “Harley Herd” plan! Our goat grannies will be your weedbusters!! We’ll be leading the retired herd to your difficult-to-clear land, keeping them on the premises with portable electric fencing, and polishing off the weeds, including poison oak and bramble. The Harley Herd will start with the local ditches next spring, and we’ll let you know when they’re available for you!

I arrived in the US for the first time as a teenage camp councilor. I’d flown into Seattle, to work at the YMCA camps on the San Juan Islands, and on the bus to camp was Teri, now my oldest friend in the US. Friends you met as a teenager are especially relaxing friends. Teri’s family became my family away from home, and for the next several years I always traveled into the US through Seattle so that I could be welcomed by my adoptive American family. Teri drew our original goat logo for Harley Farms, and she is working on more line drawings for our website, to make it both more gorgeous and easier to use. We will use just Teri’s original jumpy goat as our logo. I’ve been more than lucky to have met so many people who’ve contributed to Harley Farms as friends, or indeed as random visitors like the Journeymen.

Thank you to all our visitors who’ve admired the chicken tractors. Our hens are comfortable and our Alpine goats love the climbing in our flat fields. They were the inspired design of our long-time friend TFB, but built by two German Journeymen. We wrote about this at the time, but it’s such a serendipitous story we’ll tell it again. Our photographer, Paolo, picked up two oddball hitchhikers on his way to drop off some photos at the farm. At first sight we thought they might be mariachi men, but they were actually apprentice carpenters traveling through Canada down the west coast into Mexico with little more than their tools, although those had been confiscated at the US/Canadian customs. Journeymen spend at least two years practicing their trade, paid by the day, and these were the traveling sort. Well, they stayed for two weeks, borrowed some tools, built our excellent prototype chicken tractor, and went on their way to Mexico. We’d love to know where they stopped off next. Did they build more chicken houses? Let us know.

I may call Richard Branson soon, to request a small, but luxurious, direct flight from Old Royston to SFO. Tony, followed by Andrew, one half of my fabulous house designers, has now been followed by my father, Laurence. He’ll overlap for a week with Tony, who returns in May. There is a Busy List for my dad, and Tony. They are wonderful at making farm structures, and competent in finishing the thousands of small jobs – picking up basil, chicken feed, the new broom.. This week’s building involves three new “chicken tractors” for our hens. Now that the pastures are dry, we’re moving these mobile hen palaces out to the field. Designed by Three-Fingered Bil, they are both spacious, five-star accommodation and mini-Alp play structures for the goats.

As you may not know, the village of Royston, Barnsley, south Yorkshire, is picturesque and has a very successful nearby soccer team. So we’re lucky to have them!

The room had a long table of cheeses, from unctuously complex to simply accessible, and thirty dollars bought you as much cheese and wine as you wanted for the evening. Not surprisingly, it was packed with beautiful people and a great success. See you at the next one!

I abandoned a voyage exploring the Pacific coast for Pescadero 20 years ago, moved into a tepee, and worked for Three-Fingered Bil finishing furniture at his workshop out near the lighthouse. It was there I met my sister-in-law, Kathy. She was polished, charming – as business-like then as now. I had my punky bed-hair (the eighties – what can I say? Plus the lack of grooming opportunity in a tepee) tied back in a bandanna, but it didn’t seem to put her brother off, and I’ve got to know Kathy well.

So, she came round to the farm to drop off jam last week, and was tempted to pet the babies, who are gorgeously soft and love attention. Sadly, we were around the next corner struggling to help a mother goat deliver two large babies, and Kathy, who is petite, has the most delicate hands available for gynecological procedures. Despite her lovely clothes and Italian leather boots, she worked for three hours to deliver the breech babies from the exhausted mother. It’s an odd combination of brute strength but delicate maneuvering needed to remove babies without damaging their mother, and Kathy’s arm was dark with bruising the next day.

I’ve delivered goats for many years now, but still feel the gut-wrenching emotion of a difficult birth, and I know Kathy was terribly drained by the experience. Thank you, Kathy.

About this time of year, I have to call my mother. “Lisa’s in labor!” Four years ago, we had to call the veterinarian for an emergency Caesarian birth. Lisa, named for the vet, was such a sickly baby goat we couldn’t take her horns off, as we usually do. My mother, visiting from Yorkshire, raised the pathetic Lisa lovingly, to become our most bossy, dominant goat, now with the status of a favorite child. There are framed pictures of Lisa in my mother’s house…

Anyhow, Lisa’s had her babies this year. The mothers usually give birth close to the herd, but Lisa demands that we get into the pen too. She’ll wait uncomfortably until we’ve climbed over into the pen with the rest of the herd.

There are late nights at birthing season, but luckily we have Andrew and Griff on the farm. They are actually fabulous designer/architect people, here from London to transform our house, but instead of drawing up plans they are rolling up their cashmere sleeves for the birth of baby goat after baby goat, or ransacking the edible garden for our chicken eggs, or cooking us dinner while we wash off the afterbirth. It should all lead to an amazing understanding of the perfect farmhouse. Including more framed photographs of Lisa.

When you see a whirlwind of a woman strip and paint the Little League snack shack, and whip up home-made quesadillas, brownies, real coffee, and other snacks so delicious that even the owners of the famous local restaurant get in line, you can either feel idly sorry for her potential daughter-in-law, or hire her, quickly.

Looking back, we started to lure Maggie Foard to the farm about five years ago. Maggie’s son was in the local school’s production of Aladdin, and we’d loaned a week-old baby goat for the market-scene. Maggie – always up for a challenge – couldn’t resist taking home the goat, named Aladdin, naturally, and we kept in touch. Maggie has gone on to write a book of goat cheese recipes (published later this year), and is now our resident chef.

Our Fromage Fancies, new this February, are Maggie’s creation. They’re a moreish truffle of chevre and chocolate, and we’ve sold out in the shop both weekends. Give Maggie time, and we’ll have a line outside Harley Farms to beat that snack shack!

It’s nippy and pinched outside, suitable weather for woolly socks and looking forward to the future. December was such a party month, with our shop in full holiday dress, and our Christmas bazaar, and our annual staff dinner.

We held our bazaar for both weekend days, and the barn was jammed to the rafters with crafts and shoppers! My highlights were the fabulous goat photographs, and tiny Christmas tree fairies, made by local girls. They both approached me to see if they could bring their stuff to sell, and they both sold out. The bazaar was also honored by a visit from rarely-seen Three-Fingered Bil, of whom more later..

We ended the year with a county sustainability award – the cherry on the top of a really wonderful 2007. Sustainability is about using the best of our natural resources, and looking to the future. We cherish the past by maintaining our farm buildings, built so well almost a century ago, but we don’t aim to horse-plow the pastures, for example. Last summer we perfected a goat cheese paint, and after seeing how it stands up this winter, we’ll be ready to offer our paint for sale.

And, our staff dinner was a luscious beef bourguignon, from one of the three cows we raised in 2007. Many of us don’t eat much red meat, but this was a real feast and celebration of all we’ve achieved so far.

Finally, no baby goats yet this year, but we expect them to arrive very soon!