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Hi Everyone,
The week started off with us celebrating our country’s birthday. We are blessed to live in a country where we still have many freedoms and the chance to make a living doing what we enjoy doing—and in our case that is farming. We didn’t take the whole day off—but spent the day working on the farm. The day started off a little interesting. I was setting up the milking equipment and I heard what sounded like a bugle. I thought that Papa was blowing the bugle—but when he came out of the garage and I asked him he said that he wasn’t. Then I saw a woman walking up the driveway. She had hit one of the washouts on our road and messed up her truck. She needed to borrow our phone to call AAA. We finished with her a little before 8:00 and were heading inside to fix breakfast—when we should have been heading outside after eating breakfast. Well, someone was scheduled to arrive at 8:00 to talk a little business and to volunteer for a few hours. Wally arrived just as we walked out of the milk house to head to cook breakfast. We spent the next 30 to 40 minutes talking and then Wally offered to help with the chores—to get us “back on schedule.” So Steve and Wally started on the morning chores (set up the milking parlor for milking, fed the baby chicks, let out the compost chickens, let out the ducks and give them fresh water, give the heifers and the bulls some alfalfa and some hay, and feed and move the broiler chickens). Mom and I headed inside to do breakfast—of which we found that Papa had most of it prepared and the table all set (he had managed all that while we talked with the woman whose truck was broke). It was after 9:00 when I was finally able to head outside to start milking the cows. When the milking was done I headed back inside to answer emails—and cool off from the heat and humidity. Around 12:30 I headed over to the milk house where Steve and I took care of the curds and whey. When we cream the milk, we set some of the skim milk aside in a two gallon glass jar and let it sit on the counter for a few days waiting for it to separate into curds and whey—you know
“Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.”
We have made curds and whey for many years and the straining and hanging process is usually a circus. As we dump the curds and whey into a large bowl lined with a tea towel it never fails to splatter all over the room—or at least the person on the other side of the table. Then as we tie the towels to a wooden rod it never fails that someone pulls one end up too far and the curds run out of the towel and into the whey—ugh! Once the curds are securely tied to a rod then they are set to hang in a bucket while we take care of the second jar, and sometimes a third and fourth jar. Then we start the circus—carrying all the rods and their hanging blankets of curds into the walk-in cooler where they will hang for 24 hours while all the whey drips out of the curds. Two people are carrying the rods—one on each end, and sometimes a third person is carrying a big porcelain bowl and they all have to get through the door at the same time and straddle the ice chest and get the rods hung up—without spilling the bowl of whey or bumping the bags of curds and squeezing them out. May I say it has been quite comical at times? Well, last Monday something happened—perfection! I took out two large bowls and lined them each with a tea towel. Then while Steve gently held up one side I poured the curds and whey into the bowl—and there wasn’t a mess. We then tied the towels around the wooden rods and set the whole bowl off to the side while we dumped the other jar into the other bowl. Then while Steve held the rod and the curds up I was able to dump the whey in the bowl into a large bucket. Then we set both rods and whey cloths in one bowl and while I set up the ice chest Steve carried the bowl into the cooler by himself and we gently set the bowl down and hung the rods so that the whey could drain out of the curds. We looked at each other and realized that we had finally figured out how to easily strain and hang curds and whey—and we had to do it again on Saturday and we did it the same way and had the same perfect results. Yeah!
The afternoon was spent weeding and mowing in the garden. Steve left around 4:00 and Mom and I continued on as we were broadforking and planting summer cover crops in the East Garden Tunnel. We finished around 5:00 and then we headed to the house and cleaned up and fixed dinner and got ready to go to the fireworks in Branford, FL. We picked up my brother Charles and then we met my sister Nichole and her family on the side of the road in Branford. We set up blankets and chairs on the sidewalk and visited until the fireworks began at 9:30. They had a splendid show that lasted non-stop until 10:00.
Tuesday found us creaming again—and the curds and whey were ready to package. When the curds have drained out the product is called quark--a fresh cheese similar to farmer's cheese or cottage cheese that has a creamy texture and a slightly tart taste, similar to a mild sour cream. While I packaged the quark and the whey Steve and Mom worked on fencing in the garden. Papa was busy mowing some fields so that he could plant some iron clay peas for fall grazing for the cows—but he had a catastrophe. When Steve and Mom came in for lunch they found Papa in the barn with the mower deck hung up in the air by the tractor. While Papa was mowing he heard a terrible sound behind him and saw something slithering through the grass coming toward him—the mower had found a section of metal wire and was wrapping well over 100 feet of it up around the blades. Papa had to work to get the wires out of the blades—which was not that easy. After lunch it was egg packing time and then I had to finish making yogurt. When I was done with that my brother Charles popped in for a visit and we sat at the kitchen counter visiting for about an hour. It was close to 4:30 by the time he left and I had hoped to get some sweet potato slips planted in the garden. I grabbed the sweet potatoes, my tools and quickly headed to the garden—because the sky to the east was turning blacker by the minute. The weather was perfect in my mind for working in the garden—it was breezy and cool and cloudy. I wasn’t out there five minutes though before the wind got so fierce that Mom and Papa called for me to come back to the house—where we sat on the porch and watched the storm roll by.
Wednesday morning we had two young ladies helping us out at the milking parlor—but one had a rough time of it. The cows decided to poop and poop and poop. Thankfully she was in good spirits and instead of running out disgusted she grabbed the poop bucket and the shovel and helped clean it all up—after she cleaned herself up first. You never know what will happen on the farm—but you can almost guarantee that you will get dirty one way or the other.
Thursday Mom and I finally got around to planting the sweet potatoes. We had planted 100 slips back in June (50 of one kind, and 50 of another kind), but only 14 plants of each kind survived. Thankfully I had five sweet potatoes in a tray of water in the green house and they had produced quite a few slips. Mom helped me weed the bed and then she and Steve worked on putting in more fence posts while I planted the sweet potato slips. We worked in the garden until almost 2:00 and it was HOT. When lunch was over I stayed inside and cleaned up the kitchen and got myself cleaned up. Mom and Steve headed back to the garden and Papa headed back out to plant some more iron clay peas. The original plan was for me to have dinner done by 4:45 so that we could eat and leave by 5:15 to pick up our Azure order—but since we finished eating at 2:30 no one was hungry for dinner just two hours later. We decided to eat a bowl of rice cereal when we got home (hot rice topped with cinnamon, honey, apples, nuts, raisins, and any other dried fruit available with milk poured over them).
Friday we had acorn squash to can—for we harvested a bumper crop, and we had peaches to can—but exhaustion set in so heavy that neither Mom nor I could find the energy to do anything. We spent our afternoon relaxing instead—which was nice for it was a rainy day outside. Later on we did muster up enough energy to head to town to run by the bank and to go shopping for a new dishwasher. We went to Lowe’s and we went to Home Depot—but neither place had the type of dishwasher that we needed. We need a dishwasher that holds real stoneware plates, lots of pots and pans (because we cook everything from scratch) and can be ran at least twice a day everyday and sometimes three to four times a day. We came home and searched the internet–and found just what we needed but we cannot get it in Florida. It can be shipped to Atlanta—but not to Florida. If only we knew how to get it from Atlanta!
Saturday afternoon we managed to get the peaches canned—even though we had a late start because we had family visiting most of the day. Now we just need to find out how to get the acorn squash canned.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare