Aquaponics - Goats really are fun

My goat broke my automatic feeder today.

I guess it tasted good, but it might have been more polite to just eat the fish feed and leave the switch alone.

And so far the only gold I have found in all that gravel was this.

It's an interesting crystalline substance that, up close,  looks like plastic gold jewellery, mixed with crushed glass.

I've never seen fools gold before.






I don't feel foolish.

Other than that, everything at the auction I went to was selling for way too much so I'll forget buying a purpose built fish tank, and go back to the original plan of buying some IBC's.

IBC's are how we humans move our ever growing numbers of litres of liquids needing transport across the world. They are generally white(ish) plastic and take the form of a cubic metre drum in a cage on a pallet.

Make sure you know what was in them before you buy them. There is a stack of toxic stuff moving around the globe in these things on any given day. Luckily, many of them carry things like soft drink syrup. Many are not food grade plastic, and its a good idea to check for cracks and flexibility as they become brittle after too long in the sun.

Aquaponics - Goat

As useful as Granger was in helping me to make home made goat dung volcanic growing media, it turns out goats have no place near plants and gardens.

I thought I had him safely blocked from my small aquaponics test system, but people often think things like that when it comes to goats, and are often proven wrong.

This is what my grow bed looked like before the attack (actually this picture is older but you get the idea).

And this is the same plants now.

I walked into the back yard and saw my goat chewing a mouthful of strawberry plant, with an expression of surprise that I seemed to be upset.

I replied by turning on the hose, running around shouting, and trying to squirt him.

He seemed to think it was all great fun and promptly did what goats do when you chase them around squirting them with a hose. Head for the hills.

That's him on my roof.

Laughing at me.

My grow bed looks like this now.

I managed to save the rosemary, two strawberry plants (one with two runners forming), and some celery.

Cheese - Legend

It turns out cheese isn't complex magic after all.

Cheese is made from milk, and the interesting bits of milk are it's fat, and it's protein. Cheeses also often contains rennet. Rennet is found in young mammal stomachs. Which is odd because young mammals don't eat cheese. It seems the rennet acts on a protein called "casein" within the milk, causing it to coagulate. Perhaps the young mammals use it to digest milk.

Vegetarian rennet is made from some microbe or another.

As with many of the yummy things in life, I've read that monks are thanked for their input into making cheese as we know it, but before that it may have been discovered that if you milk a goat and store that milk in an animal stomach you get a cheese of sorts. Apparently, in the Middle East, there is a legend of a Nomad doing just this and discovering the beginnings of cheese. It's also possible that cheese was first discovered by me in the delicatessen section of a supermarket, but from my research I find fewer facts, and only one anecdote supporting this history.

Pictured here is our goat Granger. Granger is male, and as such, has no place in the legend of cheese other than having some rennet in his gut as a kid.