The Scent of Farmlife
There are so many wonderful smells on a farm such as the sweet scent of fresh hay, the cozy smell of newborn baby goats, and all the fragrant flowers blooming outside. Not all smells on a farm are good though. It's surprising how stinky you can get working on a farm. Wether its from cleaning out the barn, burying rotten eggs, hauling compost tea, or in our case, handling Otis, farmlife is just full of smells!
Otis, the Daddy goat in our herd, is now our very loving buck. When we got him he was traumatized and terrified of people. Honestly, I (Olivia, chief of barn operations) thought it was hopeless to tame him but after months of gentle handling, he started to get used to us and he is now very friendly. Too friendly really! One of his favorite things in life is to come up and rub his head on me as I pet him. It's really sweet but it's also a big problem during the fall when he is in rut!
Full sized goats only breed during the fall and during breeding season the bucks come into rut and get really stinky! If you've ever had the pleasure of being around a goat herd in the fall, you probably clearly remember the smell.
Well, during the fall, whenever I have to handle Otis I come in smelling awful. My family will plug their noses and demand that I get a shower immediately. Usually in order to get rid of the horrible odor I have to soap up several times, which gets annoying since I usually handle the goats at least twice a day! Last fall, when Otis was at his stinkiest, I decided that we needed to come up with a good deodorizing soap.
Coffee is known for its natural deodorizing properties so we brewed some super strong coffee and used it in our normal soap recipe. We didn't add any essential oils because we just wanted to get rid of the smell and not try to cover it up. After what seemed like many long weeks waiting for the soap to finish curing, I was finally able to try it out. I still had to scrub up pretty well but it did seem to work better than our other soaps that I had tried. We also use it after watering the garden with super stinky compost tea. You may not be accustomed to handling bucks and compost tea but it can also be used for getting rid of strong onion smell and other stubborn odors.
