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Hi Everyone,
Well the first week of January has already come and gone and the race to 2024 has begun. Yes, I know it is 51 weeks away, but have you noticed how fast time flies of late? Next year will be here before you realize it. In the meantime though, I do plan on enjoying every part of 2023 one day at a time. What better way to start the New Year than cleaning? The drainage pipes to the milking parlor were completely clogged so Mom and Papa worked for hours digging the muck away from the pipes and digging out the drain field. Then Papa dumped barrel of water after barrel of water down the drain pipes at the parlor in order to flush the pipes out of all the sand and manure that had accumulated in them. Steve spent his day washing, waxing and polishing Papa’s truck. I spent most of my day in the courtyard—and when Mom was finished cleaning out pipes she joined me. We weeded the flower beds, mowed the weeds that grow where the grass grows in the summer, and trimmed the lemon tree branches back so that they didn’t hang over the sidewalk and trimmed back some of the roses. The two roses that I trimmed seemed to have more than their fair share of thorns and I once again realized that rose pruning season is here and I still do not own a pair of rose pruning gloves. By the end of the day things looked a whole lot cleaner.
Tuesday morning Mom and I milked the cows and then I bottled the kefir and headed inside. While Monday was spent cleaning up outside, Tuesday was spent cleaning up inside for we had company coming to spend the night. My Uncle’s Mother had passed away the last day of the year, and the funeral was just forty-five minutes north of us so my Aunt Patti (Mom’s baby sister) and Uncle Jimmy drove down from Tennessee on Tuesday. There were bathrooms to clean, furniture to dust, floors to vacuum—plus eggs to package and yogurt to make. Clayton arrived back to the farm around 2:00 after being home with his family for the holidays, and my Aunt and Uncle arrived around 5:00. Our dinner table was pretty full that night, and the fellowship was sweet.
Clayton arrived back on the farm just in time so that he could milk the cows for Mom Wednesday morning giving Mom the chance to visit with her sister before she had to leave around 9:15 for the funeral. As soon as the milking was done Clayton headed over to a friend’s house to do some mechanical work on his truck. We got the orders packed and Papa headed to Jacksonville to deliver the goods. Here on the home front Mom and I had a pretty relaxing day as it poured down rain outside. We were grateful for the almost inch of rain. The fields where Papa planted winter grasses are finally starting to turn a little green. That night I did the chores because Clayton was still gone being a grease monkey and Papa was still in Jacksonville being a milkman (delivering milk to customers). Sometimes separating the calves can be a little challenging and they can give you a run for your money—but to my delight most of the calves were standing at the gate ready to come out and get their evening treat of alfalfa pellets and their own portion of hay.
Thursday was spent on the sour side of life—at least two hours of the day were spent that way. We had a lemon juicing party—and I do mean party. We had three families get together with a total of ten people using five electric juicers, four hand peelers and lots of energy. In two hours we had juiced 14 five gallon buckets of lemons into 57 quarts of lemon juice and had peeled the yellow off of most of the lemons and placed them on the dehydrator to make ground lemon peel. The house has had a lovely smell with the lemon peels drying on the dehydrators. Truly many hands really do make light work. We started shortly after 11:00 and finished shortly after 1:00. Then it was lunch time and after lunch Clayton and Papa headed to the sheep barn to secure the barn so that the sheep couldn’t escape. The walls were rotting and falling off (that is what happens after a few years when you use particle board plywood as walls because a hurricane is coming) and had huge holes in the walls where the calves had eaten the plywood. Once the walls were secure Papa came back up to the house to get some alfalfa pellets and Clayton and I caught up some of the newest lambs and sat down with them while Mom took care of some customers. Then we all headed to the sheep field and spent the next thirty minutes trying to get the sheep into the barn. We needed to separate all the rams from the flock and pick out five of them to send to freezer camp the next day. We would get about 98% of the sheep into the barn—but the remaining 2 % would have a ram or two in the group, and in the time that it took to try to get them to enter the barn the other 98% would exit the barn and we would have to start all over again. We went round and round quite a few times. At one point Papa gathered up all the lambs and put them in the yard along with their mamas because they were causing the sheep to do more scattering. Once the sheep were successfully locked in the barn we then sorted out all the ewes and let them back out. In the end we ended up with 12 rams in the barn. We let the three nicest breeding rams out and then we picked five from the remaining rams and loaded them into the cattle trailer so that they would be ready for their journey the next day.
It has been very hard to get animals into the butcher these last few years and Mom and I have hinted around at harvesting our sheep ourselves. Clayton came to our farm with some butchering knowledge and so he was more than willing to help make this idea a reality. We have some friends with a little more skill than we have so the plan was to be at their house as early Friday morning as possible—but too early isn’t very possible when you have cows to milk. So Clayton and I got up Friday morning at 5:00 and headed outside to milk our 19 cows and fed another seven of them. Mom and Papa had breakfast ready for us when we came inside a little after 8:00, and it was a little after 9:00 before we were finally ready to head to our friends. Mom and I had supervised the butchering of a ram lamb a few years ago, but we didn’t have any hands on experience. I was amazed then, and amazed this time too to see Scripture come to life where in Isaiah 53:7 it prophesies that the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, “was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” It is amazing that a sheep does not fight you and does not make one sound when their time comes to “lay down their life”. We all agreed that there is not another animal on earth that goes to its death so calmly. We learned how to skin the sheep and gut them. On Monday we shall go back to cut them up and package them. I did say that we were amateurs right? It took us about five or six hours to process five sheep and clean up the place. Once we took about 15 sheep to the butcher and we were afraid that he wouldn’t be able to process all of them in a day—because we assumed that it would take about an hour a sheep. The butcher was done by noon with all 15—but we were right on when we thought that it would take “us” an hour per sheep. We finally headed home a little after 6:00, and since we hadn’t stopped to eat lunch we were very hungry and exhausted after such a long day. As soon as I got home I quickly cooked dinner—French toast and eggs. It was food, and it was quick, for as soon as dinner was done Clayton packed up and headed south to his family for the weekend before he leaves for his next adventure. Clayton has taken a job at a Mennonite Dairy farm in Pennsylvania for a year, and he leaves this Friday. He shall be greatly missed, but we know that this shall be a great learning experience for him.
Saturday morning found me more than exhausted!!!!!!! Getting up was much later than 5:00—more like 7:30! Thankfully Saturday’s start a little more relaxed. We fixed breakfast and then headed outside to milk the cows and do the morning chores. Once the cows were milked Mom bottled the milk while Steve washed the equipment (because Penny was at her mother’s). I packed the Gainesville order and then I bottled some of the kefir until Mom could take over so that I could go and finish the receipts. Early afternoon Hannah (a young mother who I used to babysit when she was a child) came over with her three children to let them see the sheep, the cows, the heifers, the tractor, the ducks, the chickens, the goose, and the cats. To see a four year old sitting in the tractor seat acting like a BIG farmer was so very cute! They managed to catch two of the little lambs and enjoyed holding them—something their Aunt Rachel used to love coming over to do. Before Rachel got married she would come over during lambing season and help bottle feed the lambs.
Later that afternoon my sister Nichole stopped by on her way home from work. We had a good visit and when she left it was time for dinner—but I was still so exhausted that I delayed much longer, so dinner was a little late, but thankfully not too late so that I was able to get ready for bed early and go fast asleep since we had to wake up at 5:00 this morning in order to get to church on time. Thankfully this journal is done early too—for we have to get up at 5:00 tomorrow morning in order to spend the day packaging lamb.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare