Cheesy

Cheese, cheese, cheese.  I have made cheese every day this week to fill orders for feta at Tim's sale tomorrow.  I don't know what to call these events:  farm sale, open air market, possibly just an excuse for a get-together once a month.  Cam brings eggs, I have cheese, the vet's wife makes wonderful bread.  Tim and Kathryn provide the main dish and the rest of the attendees bring potluck side dishes.  I did have one batch of cheese "blow up" on a particularly hot day because I let it drain too long.  It didn't go to waste as the chickens love cheese.  Feta needs a few days to mellow out the salt, so today I'll make chevre.  Because it does not have salt for preservation, chevre must be fresh.

Pricing my product, be it cheese or any other craft, has always been a problem for me.  I rely on my daughter to make the decision on cost as I tend to underprice the items.  She does a lot more shopping than I and is able to price my product competitively.  I hesitantly put a $14/lb tag on feta, and gasped when I got orders for six pounds this week.  To me, that's a lot of money.  However, I just went on line and found that some producers are charging $11 and up for 8 oz.  I do know that the price of feed has gone sky high.  Alfalfa has risen from $6/bale when I started with goats up to nearly $20, especially at this time of year, and I'm not buying the premium stuff.  A bag of grain is just shy of $24 and lasts less than ten days.  The girls go through a bale of alfalfa a week.  Not taking into account the labor involved in milking or making the cheese, I guess that $14 a pound isn't asking too much.