439
Hi Everyone,
Farming isn’t always as romantic as the books and the movies portray it to be. Some weeks everything goes very smoothly and picturesque—other weeks are full of character building, adventure, and interesting turn of events. Last week was one of those weeks.
Monday morning the phone rang at 7:40. It was our worker Penny (who comes in every morning and washes all the milking equipment for us after we get finished milking). Poor Penny had come down with the flu and was too sick to come into work—and that meant that Steve, Clayton, Mom and I would be on KP duty for the rest of the week. We all missed Penny greatly! We realized just how efficient she is—for she can have most of the equipment washed before we can even get it taken apart and put in the sink of soapy water. The milk equipment is made up of four milk tanks and their lids, along with four sets of milking claws and all their parts (somewhere around 70 parts all together). Penny has a very organized way of placing all the parts on a towel to dry so that she can easily count and make sure she hasn’t lost any parts. We were totally unorganized—we tossed them on the towel in piles, but thankfully we never lost any parts. Tuesday morning I told Mom at the breakfast table that we would need her help in the milk house to wash the equipment that morning because I had to bottle kefir which would slow down the wash time, but when it came time to wash Mom happened to ask Papa when he wanted to start training Bonnie to come into the milking parlor to eat (she is due this coming Friday and I have only been reminding everyone for the last few months that she needs to be trained before she calves). Papa decided to start training her on Tuesday—so Mom spent her morning in the milking parlor helping Papa with Bonnie. They accomplished their goal. The first day took Papa and Clayton to pull her in. The second day took just Papa to pull her in. The third day Clayton pulled her in, and the fourth day Clayton semi-pulled her in and semi-walked her in, and the fifth day—Mom was able to bring her into the milking parlor with only a little bit of pulling.
Monday afternoon we found ourselves pulling two more hoop houses out to pasture and moving the Thanksgiving turkeys from the brooder house out to the fresh air and green grass where there are bugs to eat. Since the feed ration we feed the turkeys is really formulated for broiler chicks (not enough protein for turkeys), we always supplement their diet with kefir and sometimes hard boiled eggs. I poured a half gallon of kefir in a bowl and set it inside some feed pans and held the contraption as we rode out to the pasture to set up for the turkeys. I was trying my best to keep the kefir from sloshing out of the bowl and since when you rest liquid on your lap it is more apt to slosh I would hold it in the air if the road was too bumpy. All was going well, and then my arms started to get a little tired so I told Mom to just hurry up and drive while I held the kefir in the air. Mom sped up and then I took my arm off of the arm rest—and immediately the bowl slid to the back of the feed pan and sloshed all down the front of me. Ugh! When we got back to the house I sprayed my dress down in the hose and then I decided to head inside for a shower and my third outfit for the day—for I had to change my dress after milking because when I went to dump the poop bucket into the manure spreader I dumped it with too much force and it splatter up and all down the front of me. Once I was all clean I decided to head upstairs to my sewing room where work was clean.
Papa has been busy fixing things around the farm of late. Monday afternoon Clayton helped Papa put new wire walls on the dog house. The walls have been lacking for quite a few years and we haven’t been able to lock up the dogs when we needed to—which is resulting in Yasha roaming around the farm when Papa moves the chickens from one field to the other and Aliya was having to spend her days in a hoop house in the back yard. So Papa and Clayton took off the old damaged wire and replaced it with new wire. Now we can lock the dogs up to move them to new fields and Aliya can spend her days in the field with the chickens—so that she can learn to watch them and not chase them. Then on Tuesday Papa was still working on the hay baler. We really want to make hay this year but Papa keeps running into problems with the hay baler. He just did get the parts back to fix the hydraulic cylinders, but now the gears are messed up and need to be fixed. Once the baler is fixed, then there is the fluffer and the rake to make sure they are working.
Thursday afternoon we headed out to the garden to pull some weeds and to our delight we found the green beans were up and had nice big leaves on them—but the hardware cloth that we had them covered with to keep the deer out was resting on the leaves so we had to raise it up. Then that night I lay awake at night fearing that I had raised the metal fencing too high and I feared that the deer would be able to get their heads under the wire and eat the green beans. So Friday Clayton and I headed back out to the garden to check on the green beans—and to my dismay we found that half the leaves were missing. There were no deer tracks though, so it must have been rabbit. We then grabbed some fencing and fenced off the green beans to keep the rabbits out. I am determined to do whatever in order to get a crop of green beans this year. I just hope that it was rabbits and not worms!
We are selling some sheep to North Carolina this week and we needed them tagged and some health certificates—so we had the vet come out Friday morning. Papa and Clayton caught the sheep while the vet tagged them. Then we needed the vet to tag our calves so that we could figure out which mama cow they belonged to. A few of the calves were bulls, and we went ahead and castrated them to be raised for meat in a few years. As soon as we were done with the vet Clayton and I headed to milk the cows while Papa headed out to do his morning chores and Mom paid the vet. When all the cows were milked then Papa and I headed to let the calves out so that I could go around and see who was nursing on whom. Now I know which calf belongs to which mama cow—when they come out all brown it is hard to tell just who is who. Once the calves were settled then I headed to the milk house to help Steve and Clayton wash up the milking equipment. It was a little before 1:00 in the afternoon before we finished in the milk house and could head inside for lunch. As we entered the kitchen we were met with a kitchen and dining room table covered in dirty dishes from breakfast—the vet had arrived before we had time to do the breakfast dishes. I needed to eat lunch, but it was so hard to convince myself to make any more dishes dirty for that just meant more to wash. Hunger won out and I got a few more dishes dirty. Once I was done eating Clayton and I spent the next hour or so washing dishes in the kitchen. It was close to 3:00 when we ran to the garden for a little bit to save the green beans from the rabbits. When we came back up it was 4:30 and I headed to the greenhouse to start a few more seed trays before I had to start dinner at 5:00. Then when dinner was over Clayton and I did the dinner dishes because Mom was not feeling very well. So we laughed at the fact that we literally did dishes all day—you never know what a day on the farm will behold!
My sister Nichole came over with her family and my brother Charles Saturday afternoon to get two more sheep to add to their little flock. We expected them at 1:00—but they were a little late and happened to arrive just at it started to rain. At first it was only a light mist and Clayton wanted to grab his raincoat, but Mom told him, “It ain’t raining too hard we will be fine.” After a few rounds with the lambs it started to pour down rain and we had to take shelter in the sheep barn—so much for not needing a raincoat. The lambs are not used to being rounded up into the barn so we had many trips around the field trying to encourage them to go into the barn. My five year old nephew, Josiah, was my little buddy as we walked through the field hand in hand (so that he wouldn’t take off chasing the sheep). As we would get close he would whisper, “Here sheep, sheep!” In the end my sister caught one in the air and my brother did too, and we managed to corner one that my niece Makenna picked out.
The rest of Saturday afternoon I spent on the computer preparing for a garden talk that I was to give at a Weston A. Price Chapter meeting this afternoon (Sunday). The talk went real well. I talked about one of the biggest problems that people have with gardening in Florida—knowing when to plant. Vegetables, Herbs, and Flowers are planted at different times of the year in Florida than they are in the north or west and when people don’t know the proper planting times they plant a garden and everything dies. So I shared my planting charts and answered questions and then we headed home. It was a long day as we got up at 5:00 in order to milk the cows and feed all the chickens—and feed ourselves before we had to leave at 9:15 in order to make it to church in Jacksonville (an hour and a half away). Then after the services we drove one hour north to arrive at Hanna Park by 3:00. It was 6:30 before we found ourselves back home in the country on our peaceful farm where there is grass instead of concrete and asphalt, and there are more cows and sheep than cars. Truly there is no place like home.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare