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Hi Everyone,
Life isn’t always peaches-n-cream, and right now on the farm life isn’t very peachy—but it is pretty creamy (for we have lots of milk to cream). It is much easier to write about the “romantic” side of farming, but that is not always reality and sometimes reality can be very hard.
Monday started out pretty normal. Once we milked the cows, moved the cows and sheep to new pastures, and fed the chickens—Steve bottled the milk and then he helped me hang the curds and whey. Mom took the mower to the field that the heifers had just come out of, and Papa began to weed eat around the drain pipes to the milking parlor. The contractors were due to come back on Tuesday to pour concrete around the drain pipes to prevent the dirt from flowing into the pipes during a storm. The grass around the pipes was waist high and very thick, so Papa grabbed the weed eater with the saw blade on it and began to cut down the grass. He didn’t get very far before he came in contact with something. He ran out to the pasture to call Mom down from mowing, and the next thing Steve and I saw was them driving past the window in the golf-cart with a little calf who had a bloody nose. Everyone was in shock! Papa did not see the calf hiding in the thick, waist high grass. Mom spent the next two hours on the phone calling one vet after another trying to find someone who would stitch up our wounded calf. Our normal cow vet was on vacation—and so was his back up vet. They suggested using a small animal vet (dogs and cats)—but they all turned us away. Each vet said, “Sorry we don’t deal with cows, try this vet.” So we called that vet, and got the same answer. One vet said, “The person that would have stitched up the calf just died.” We kept calling—and praying that someone would have mercy on this three day old calf that belonged to our cow named America. In the midst of this chaos, our workers came over and told us that the brush that is used to clean out the milk hoses had broken off the wire—inside the hose. UGH!!! Papa spent the next thirty minutes trying to get it out—and then trying to figure out how we were going to clean the hoses. We ended up having to send our workers home, and then once Papa was able to semi fix the brush; I helped him clean the hoses. Finally a horse vet that is an hour away said that they would gladly take on the challenge of stitching up Liberty’s nose. It was 2:00 when Mom and Papa loaded the calf into the back of the van and headed south to Newberry. I spent the afternoon working on our new online store, and getting jars washed and dried so that when Mom got home she could fill them with oatmeal and vacuum seal them when she got home—and then I headed out to the garden to harvest cayenne and okra, and to get some pictures for the online store. Steve had spent his afternoon mowing the garden. Then we headed out to the pasture to finish the mowing that Mom had begun, and Steve raked up the grass. Since Papa was gone, Steve gathered the eggs and locked up the ducks before he headed home. I worked on laundry and dinner. It was 5:30 by the time my parents got home. Liberty needed 25 or 30 stitches to close up her wound—but she didn’t let those stitches get in the way of her getting her dinner. She went right to her mama and nursed.
By the time they got everything set up for the calf—a little hoop house to keep it out of the weather, it was 6:30 and we had a meeting with Barn2Door to discuss our new online store. During that meeting we made the store “live” even though not every product was loaded up. I was frantic to get the rest of the products loaded on the website before I went to bed—for the emails were already coming in from people who couldn’t find things that they knew we had for sale. The funniest email we got was when one person told us that the cream was priced at $1250! I forgot the period between the 12 and the 50 which would have made it cost $12.50. Before I could work on the computer though—we had to eat dinner, do the dishes, and finish packaging the raisins and oatmeal in the jars so that we could vacuum seal them. Mom had dumped 25 pounds of oatmeal out on the kitchen island that morning to let the oatmeal acclimate to life outside of the freezer. She did not expect to spend her afternoon at the vet—therefore, when she got home the oatmeal was staring at her. I was glad that I had gotten the jars already—but to my dismay I nowhere near had enough jars cleaned. The rest just had to go in a big Tupperware bowl until the next day.
When Mom had returned home from the vet she had made the comment, “If anything else goes wrong today—I am going to cry!” While we were doing dishes that night the water quit! We went outside to tell Papa that we had no water. He went down to the pump and found a broken part—and thankfully he already had the replacement part so he was able to fix it. To our dismay though—we still had no water. It was 9:00 at night and Papa tried to call a well man—but it was useless. By 10:00 I had done all that I could to get the rest of the products loaded up to the online store—and I was bed ready. We were all hot, sweaty, and dirty—but we had no running water. All I could think about was “Where can I find water?” I would have gone to the windmill hand pump, but the weeds and grass were so thick that I couldn’t walk to it (in the dark), and the lane had deep trenches so I could not take the golf-cart to it either. We were out of bottled water—because the last time I went to Publix their shelves were empty. Our reverse osmosis was full of water—but Mom said that we couldn’t use it for anything but drinking since we feared that we were going to need a new pump. I headed to my room and saw on my dresser my Grandma’s old water basin and pitcher. I thought, “Perfect that is just what I need!” Then I remembered that the problem was not needing something to put water in—but not having water to put into the container. Ugh! Then I remembered that Papa had just filled up a clean tub of water for America—and the grass was mowed to there. I grabbed my rag and my flashlight and headed for the cow trough a little after 10:00 at night. I got my rag wet and headed back inside to get ready for bed. We all slept real well, but we still had no water when we woke up. We managed to get breakfast fixed and then Papa was able to get ahold of the well man—and the man helped Papa find the problem and we had running water again.
We have had twelve calves born in the last month and we are getting more milk than we can sell—which means that two to three days a week we are creaming. The cream tastes so good, but it creates so much more work—which prevents us from getting done some things that are very necessary (like weeding the garden and planting clay peas so that our cows have milk making food in the fall). On Tuesday and Friday our day was so busy dealing with milk. Papa spent hours going round and round on the tractor fertilizing the fields with buckets of skim milk. In the milk house we were busy creaming the milk (which takes and hour), then we had to bottle the kefir, and make yogurt. On Tuesday we had an egg party, and then I had to bottle the whey before my piano student arrived at 3:30. On Friday we needed to hang more curds and whey after we had creamed and bottled the kefir—but time was running out. Mom and Papa had to leave at 1:30 to take the calf back to the vet for a checkup. I wanted to go—but I still had the yogurt to make, I needed to harvest the pumpkins, and I needed to empty the dirt out of Papa’s truck. There was one more thing to do too—when we creamed the milk that morning the cream came out very fast and thin. We usually get about 9 pints of think cream, but we got 15 ½ pints of thin cream. Mom said that it would make great ice cream—so I immediately called our fellow farmers who are known for delicious ice cream and made them a deal (we supply the cream, they make it, and then we split the ice cream). Therefore, I had to run the cream over to their farm—that was after I made the yogurt. When I got back I headed to the garden to harvest the pumpkins, and then I emptied the dirt out of Papa’s truck. On Thursday I had filled it with half a yard of top soil/compost mix. Last December when the first heavy freeze was fixing to hit, Mom and I harvested all the lemons off of the Ponderosa lemon tree. I knew that 25 degrees could kill our lemon tree, so I took a slightly rotten lemon from off the ground and took it straight to the green house where I had a large metal wash tub full of dirt. I took all the seeds out of the lemon and planted them right away—and they all sprouted too! They grew bigger and bigger. I ordered 3 gallon pots to transplant them into—but I never could get around to getting dirt to fill the pots. A few weeks ago Mom and I went to Lowe’s to look for bags of dirt—but that was going to cost and arm and a leg. We decided to buy in bulk from a local store—and got plenty for just $25. So after lunch on Thursday I spent my afternoon filling 32 three gallon pots with dirt and a little bit of chicken compost. I will admit that I found out real quick that I am not a nursery woman—my attention span is very short. I persevered though, and when I reached for the last bucket I found out that I had already filled it. Once the pots were full of dirt I started separating the lemon trees out of the mass that they were growing in. Their root system was so healthy, and they potted up nicely. Once they are established in the pots I plan on selling them—and if they do not sell, then we might have a large lemon orchard.
My parents got home from the vet at 5:30—and I was glad. I had gotten caught in the rain harvesting the pumpkins, and then I had raked the dirt out of Papa’s truck—and I was dirty, but I realized that it was Friday night and we need to get some more alfalfa before the feed store closed at 6:00. I had grabbed the checkbook and was fixing to head out when Papa drove up and went for me. I was glad to not have to head to the feed store looking like a “pig." I then headed inside and had to cook dinner. I had to laugh when I found myself wearing an apron for the “wrong” reason. Most people know that you wear an apron to keep your clothes clean—but I found myself wearing an apron in order to keep my food clean. Hey, it worked that way too.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare