About - Nest in the West

Welcome to Nest in the West

Hi. I’m Sarah. Mama to Charlotte, Bea and Teddy, and wife to my best friend Zack. We live on a two acre homestead in Arizona, where we homeschool our kids and raise most of our own food. The life we are living now is one we dreamed of for years. I am so grateful. I love gardening, caring for our animals and cooking from scratch in my little handmade kitchen, but most of all I love making cheese! All of our milk, yogurt and cheese comes from our herd of beloved dairy goats. They roam our small pasture beneath the mountain and fill our pails with warm and foamy milk each morning. Over the past few years I have learned to fit dairy processing into the rhythm of our everyday life, and you’ll often find me hovering over the cheese pot with a loaf of sourdough in the oven, yogurt culturing on the counter, and teaching a math lesson to my girls with the toddler underfoot. It’s a full-to-bursting sort of life we have built here, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m passionate about flipping the narrative that goats are a nuisance or aren’t a “serious” homestead animal. We love our goats’ personalities and the abundance of delicious milk they provide us. With the milk from three goats we have enough to drink ourselves, sell to friends, and turn into creamy yogurt, crumbly fresh cheeses, and artisan wheels of hard cheese to stock the fridge. If you’ve always wanted to learn how to make cheese with goat’s milk, or are wondering how on earth you could possibly fit dairy processing into your busy day, go check out the course I just launched here!

Goats are the perfect fit for our small homestead. Two of our children can’t digest cow’s milk, but thrive on the creamy, sweet milk our goats produce. Goats are excellent browsers, and depending on the breed and genetics can produce a large amount of milk on much less feed than a cow. You can read more about the breed of goats we keep and why we love them here.

So welcome to my little corner of the internet! Here you’ll find farm-fresh recipes, blog posts on keeping dairy goats and dairy processing and cheesemaking tutorials, all tied up together with the bits and scraps of our everyday life. I teach homesteaders how to add cheesemaking into their daily life, and from one very busy homeschooling homestead-mama to the next – you totally can do it too!

You are so welcome here.