Jennie Grant lives in urban Seattle. But her backyard is anything but downtown. Besides the small kitchen garden, she has several chickens, a pair of goats with kids, and a beehive. Just down the block is a park full of blackberries. She invited me over to make ice cream using only these backyard ingredients. I did a little radio documentary on the process for a radio show called "The Splendid Table" (search for the September 13 episode
here, if you're curious).
Every step of the way we created waste products, and Jennie folded them right back into her little self-contained system. For example, when milking goats, you discard the first two squirts of goat milk, since bacteria linger in the teats. This gets fed to the chickens. When picking blackberries, you can bring home a few blackberry vines and feed them to the goats. We generated large amounts of skim milk in the process of making cream for the ice cream. What to do with that? Heat it up on the stove, add rennet (or vegetarian equivalent), drain in a cheesecloth, salt and voila, you've got skim chevre. I went home with a container-full. My family ate it on home made pizza. It melted up nicely.
Chickens in the city are fun, but goats are the next frontier. I'm hoping to set up a "goat co-op." The goats will live in someone else's yard, but several interested neighbors and I will "buy shares" of the goat pair. We neighbors will be in charge of milking the goat every weekend, so the landowner can sleep in.
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Excellent pictures. Man, I want to live in your neighborhood and buy a share or two in the goat coop. We have two rabbits, who produce a lot of poop for the compost pile, but that’s as far as I’ve gone in the livestock direction. No, I’m not going to eat them.