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Hi Everyone,
Last Sunday as we were heading to church I saw something that made me smile—actually it made me more than smile, it made me extremely excited. I was seeing tender green leaves dotted throughout the branches of some pecan trees! They say that we get our last cold snap at Easter—but when Easter arrives the middle of April that doesn’t give you much hope of getting a head start on your garden. The old-timers also say that the pecan trees do not leaf out until after the danger of frost has past—they are very protective of their new growth! The same goes for the wild grape vines too. This morning as we drove to church I once again took notice of the pecan trees—and they were bursting at the seams (branches I mean). Therefore, I am pretty sure that we are out of danger of having another frost or freeze—but I am not making any promises because I am not in control of the weather at all. I can say that starting tomorrow I shall begin planting the spring garden. There will be squashes and pumpkins, cucumbers and melons, flowers and herbs, and definitely more lettuce—but first we must get the rows and beds weeded.
We had some nice young helpers helping us in the garden on Monday. They were good little helpers. We all weeded some, and then some of us put compost around roses and then two of the boys worked on mulching. I wanted the ginger bed mulched, but to my dismay I found an elderberry plant sprouting up in one section—and we had just dug up that bed a few weeks ago. I began to dig up the plant and followed its root very carefully. I soon found another shoot under the dirt and another. I had to dig down the middle of the bed until I reached the growing tip of the spreading root, and then I followed the other two sections and one ended on one side of the bed and the other ended on another side of the bed—they went underneath and into the walkway. We pulled back the mats and to my horror there were all kind of elderberry roots crossing the walkway heading for the other beds. One root we caught just as it was going under a bed, but another root had already entered the bed. The elderberry is nothing but a nightmare that we do not seem to be able to wake up from. I was hoping to just be able to take the broadfork in there and dig them all up—but there is a giant oak tree about eight feet away and mixed in with the elderberry roots are the oak tree roots (big ones too). We did manage to get all the roots out of the ginger bed—and get it mulched, but I feel like we are fighting a losing battle as the elderberry takes over more and more of the garden. We fight it—but it is pretty aggressive.
We have dried off four cows now, and milking gets done a little quicker—so quick that Steve barely finishes his morning chores before it is time to bottle the milk. Milking fewer cows isn’t the only difference, there are chickens in the field and now Steve has to move 4 to 6 pens every morning. Since Steve has more chores, and our milking is going a little faster, I bottled the kefir on Tuesday. Once we were done there we headed to the garden to weed the mullein plants and a rose plant and then we mulched around them. The weather was so beautiful that we wanted to spend the rest of the day in the garden—but there was yogurt to make, eggs to package and piano lessons to teach. Then when all that was done I took care of some business, watered the green house and then it was time to cook dinner. After dinner I did manage to make it out to the garden—I had to harvest Swiss chard and collards for Wednesday’s Jacksonville delivery. When I got back inside I put together the orders and made receipts—and then it was bedtime!
Have you ever heard of strawberry milk? No I do not mean the kind you buy where they flavor the milk with strawberries. It is a farmer’s term for milk that comes out of the udder on the pink side—this can occur two ways: 1) after a cow has a calf, sometimes some of the blood vessels in the udder rupture turning the milk pink; and 2) a cow uses her head or horns to punch another cow in the udder, or steps on the udder causing a bleeding wound inside the udder. Last week one of my favorite cows, Sally, came in to be milked and I noticed a section of skin hanging down on the back of her udder—it was only skin deep. It really didn’t look bad, but Mom suggested that I check her milk before I hooked her up to the milk tank. Sure enough—it was pink (strawberry milk). That meant that I had to milk her by hand—thankfully the other three teats were good and I could hook them up to the machine to milk (for Sally has a lot of milk). When a cow’s udder is damaged it may or may not heal. She is very susceptible to getting mastitis and her milk cow career being over. I prayed for Sally, and I gave her minerals to help prevent mastitis and after that all I could do—was wait. Thankfully the strawberry milk only lasted one day, but the blood clots lasted a week. Every few days I tested her for mastitis—and I praise the Lord that her milk stayed perfectly healthy. For about ten days I milked Sally out by hand, and every day she got extra alfalfa pellets because she would always finish eating before I could finish milking her out—and if she didn’t have food to eat, she would chew on the air hose to the milking claws. The first five cows that come into the milking parlor are all “hams”. The bull is our gentle giant who gladly comes in for food—and sometimes he even licks the molasses off of the spoon. When he leaves he likes to stand at the end of the concrete sidewalk waiting for his girls to join him, and when the first one does he opens his mouth wide, hangs out his tongue and bellows—it isn’t a moo. America is another one of the hams—because I treat her like a pet and she likes to have her ears scratched, and just stand around watching us milk (being in the way). Then there is Ellie Mae who barges in and then wants to go into every empty stall before she leaves making sure that there is no food left at all. Sally chews on the air hose or turns her head and watches you milk her. Then there is the new one—Macy, who likes to enter all six stalls (but last week I learned to rope off #5 and #6 so that she couldn’t go into the feed rooms and eat out of the cans). Yes, the first five cows keep me hopping.
We spent Thursday morning cleaning up the poultry kitchen—making it all fresh and clean for the first chicken processing of the season on Friday. The floors were mopped, the walls scrubbed, the scalder cleaned up, the sinks and tables washed down, and old junk thrown out (for some reason a back corner became a storage area). We had totes for storage of packaging bags, boxes of juicers for when we juice lemons, a grinder, grey tubs for processing, and a few other things that really need to go on a shelf instead of the floor or a table—so Mom and I went down in our cellar and stole the shelfing unit from there and put it in the back of the poultry kitchen. It looks so much better all organized back there. Then after lunch Papa and I headed to town. Shopping isn’t my forte and I will admit that since Covid we have gladly made more use of online ordering. Yet, there are still somethings that you just cannot get delivered to your door. We needed some wheels to make dollies for the chest freezers in the poultry kitchen. They sit on the floor, but when water gets under them they leave rust marks on the concrete. Then we needed a new hose for the de-feathering room (I stole the old one when mine in the greenhouse started to leak all over me when I used it). Next we needed some disposable gloves for gutting, and then I needed some groceries. Once that was all done we headed over to pick up my sister Samantha. Her husband has diabetes and when a wound on his foot got so bad he had to go the hospital—where they ended up transferring him out of town in order to do surgery on his foot. My sister doesn’t drive so we needed to help her get the car back to her place and then we brought her home for dinner and so she could get some laundry done.
Friday went so smoothly. We got our morning chores done and then at 11:30 we headed to the poultry kitchen to set up for chicken processing. We had ordered 50 birds back in February, but due to some really cold weather in shipping we lost half of them. The bad thing was that we had orders for at least 25 whole chickens and the parts to 20 cut up chickens—but we only had 24 chickens. We packaged 15 of them whole, and then we cut up 9—and they were all gone by Saturday afternoon. With so little chickens to do, we were done by 2:30 and we took advantage of the early day to lie around and relax. Mom and I had been reading through the Little House on the Prairie books and we were on the last book, so after watching a few YouTube videos we sat around and read. Mom even read to me while I cooked dinner. Saturday ended up being a rainy day and once again we spent our afternoon reading—I did manage to get my ironing done while Mom read though.
The morning was spent milking the cows and while we milked we had company—a couple who is buying one of our pregnant Jersey heifers had come up to see the cow. They were very enjoyable to visit with, and you could tell that he wasn’t lying when he said that he had read every word on our website and watched every video on our website and YouTube channel—because he knew all about Ellie Mae (the famous cow who comes running when you call her name), and how we got into farming (because of Mom’s health), and a few other things—that you only learn from reading and watching. If you are interested in learning more about our farming you might like to attend our “You Can Farm in Florida! Seminar”. Get your tickets here: https://youcanfarminflorida.rsvpify.com
Well, that is that for this week. I think that I shall go get a bedtime snack while Mom edits my journal—if she doesn’t fall asleep reading it like she has fallen asleep reading the book that is in her lap.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare