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Hi Everyone,
Well it happened again—we lost an hour of life. Most people lost an hour of sleep, but I lost an hour of reading. I changed my clock a few hours before I went to bed, which meant I climbed in bed old time 9:00—an hour earlier than normal for me. I have to say that I prefer the old time—I want the sun up by 6:00 in the morning and it can be setting by 7:00. Papa sure doesn’t like it in the summer when he has to wait until after 9:00 to go out and lock up the chickens—because they don’t go to bed until it gets dark.
Usually I will tell people to grab a cup of tea and find a cozy spot to curl up and read about our life here on the farm last week—but this week you may need a strong cup of coffee, and forget the cozy spot because you will probably be sitting on the edge of your seat biting your nails to find out what happens next!
We got up at the crack of dawn Monday morning and the first thing we did was eat breakfast and head outside to set up for milking. The concrete truck was scheduled to show up at 10:00 and we needed to be done with the milking before they arrived. The builders showed up at 8:30 to get the area prepared. They were concreting the floor in our new lean-to on the side of our hay barn and they were expanding the concrete area where the cows wait to be milked. For the last few weeks Mom has been taking little videos of the barn lean-to and Monday was the last day to film. We needed a place to get some of our equipment out of the weather, and we needed a new place to store one ton tote bags of chicken feed—besides in our garage. We spent Wednesday editing videos and you can watch the Barn Lean-to here! Once the concrete was poured under the lean-to, they headed over to the milking parlor and poured a 13 ft. x 32 ft. concrete pad beside our milking parlor so that the cows do not have to stand in the mud anymore when it rains—which was really nice Saturday morning after we got an inch of rain Friday night. You can get a glimpse at our milking parlor and the new concrete addition in our video “Adding a product called “Mud-Be-Gone” to our Milking Parlor!”
Once the concrete fun was over we branched off into different directions as we divided and conquered different things on the farm. Mom and Steve worked in the courtyard weeding along the fence line. I headed to the greenhouse where I potted up some mullein, parsley, thyme and sage. Then I started two new trays of lettuce—so far two-thirds of one is coming up, the other third and the other tray have not played peek-a-boo yet. They may not either for they were old-free seeds. Papa mowed the back yard—which was never mowed last summer because the lawn mower was broke and once the lawn mower got fixed we never had the time to mow and rake up all the grass. Once Papa got it all mowed then he and Steve raked it up and loaded it into the back of Papa’s truck and carted it down to the compost heap. Then Papa worked on putting some purlins on the roof of the cattle shade he has been working on for the last few years—hopefully he will be able to get it done by the time it gets hot this year.
The concrete was not hard enough for us to set up hot-wire Monday afternoon, therefore we could not use the new concrete pad Tuesday morning—but I was determined to be able to use it Wednesday morning. Yet, I wasn’t too sure how to make that happen because Tuesday’s are usually so busy. As soon as the milking was done in the morning I bottled the kefir and then I worked on putting the orders together. Then it was lunch time and when that was over I had to finish making the yogurt, and then it was 2:00 and I needed to head over to the milk house for the egg packaging party. Mom got out of packaging eggs that day—but I think that she would have preferred eggs over dealing with grease and sour milk. You see, that morning when she was milking the cows gave her more milk than she was used to getting and once the milk tank was full the extra milk was sucked up the air hose and into the vacuum pump. The vacuum pump has a large PVC pipe that the milk will enter to keep it away from the motor—it is a cautionary catch tube. Once that tube is full though it also overflows into a hose and straight into the motor—and that is just how much Mom overflowed the milk tank. That meant that the air hose had to be cleaned out, the PVC pipe taken apart and washed out—which was greasy and grimy because a few drops of milk usually end up in their everyday just from the suction power not from overflowing. Then the hose needed to be cleaned out and the motor had to be cleaned out with diesel fuel. That job took hours! The old air hoses were brittle and grimy and they needed to be replaced and the concrete pad needed to be cleaned off of all the weeds. When I finished with the eggs it was going on 3:30. I really needed to harvest the garden greens for the Wednesday delivery—but I wanted to set up the hot wires around the new concrete area. I also needed to grind up some more cayenne peppers—but I wanted to set up the hot wires around the new concrete area. Surely it couldn’t take more than 30 minutes! So I threw common sense out the window and headed to the barn to get the push mower so that I could mow down the weeds—especially the nettles that were growing where we needed to string wire. Once everything was mowed Mom was done with the vacuum pump clean up and Papa headed to town to get some ice for the Wednesday’s delivery. Mom and I had no idea how to hook up the hot wires—but we did know that we wanted hot wire all the way around the concrete pad, where we wanted our entrance gate and where we wanted our exit gate. We had lots of hot wire to work with that had been around the milking parlor waiting area. We decided to start with what we knew—since we didn’t have much of an idea of what to do. So we grabbed some t-posts and put in the entrance gate. Then we grabbed a strand of hot wire and some step stakes and ran it around the perimeter of the concrete starting at the milking parlor and going around to the gate. When we got the end destination we had some wire left over and it ended up being just enough to go from the other side of the gate up to the end of the concrete. Then we grabbed another strand of hot wire and found out that it was long enough to start at a far fence and go around the concrete twice and still have enough left over to run another strand from the other side of the gate to the end of concrete pad. Then we grabbed two more strands of hot wire and made an exit lane to keep them out of the dirt (or mud when it rains) and get them back out to pasture. It was going on 7:00 when we finished. It was time to cook dinner—of which I was thankful for some left over chicken meat of which I added some gravy and put it over noodles and had some green peas on the side (quick and easy). It was too late to harvest greens and I had to make all the receipts for the next day’s delivery, so no cayenne pepper got ground either.
I did manage to get myself out of bed 15 minutes early Wednesday morning which allowed me time to get ready for the day and spend a little bit of time reading my Bible before I headed to the garden at 6:30. I managed to get the broccoli, Swiss chard and collards all harvested by 7:00 when I needed to be in the milk house setting up the milking equipment. Breakfast was at 7:30 and then it was all hands on deck to get the cows to go through the new gate and onto the new concrete pad. Have I ever told you that cows hate change? I mean really hate it! If the poop bucket is orange today, and then tomorrow it is blue they will be too scared to come in to be milked. This change wasn’t a little change like the color of the bucket—it was a BIG change like a new entrance and a new floor. Yesterday the gate was here and the floor was dirt, and now today the gate is there and the floor is concrete—I AM NOT GOING IN THERE!!!! That is how cows think! Mom grabbed the camera and climbed in one of the feeding troughs to get a good view and to guard the camera from the wind. Papa went after the cows and I got the troughs full of alfalfa pellets. When the cows came into the area a few acted like they would come in with no problem—but acting and doing ended up being two different things. I grabbed a bucket of alfalfa and was able to coax Rosa in on the concrete, but when I went to get another cow she left. Then I was able to get Paisley—a heifer in training. She followed me all over with the feed bucket. I was afraid to lose her also so we went ahead and brought her in to the parlor and fed her. Then I went back out to help Papa. We coaxed and called, pushed and shoved to no avail. Papa finally decided to open the wires in the corner where the cows had been coming in for the last week. We saw instant results. Sunshine came in, and was soon followed by Abby. Then a few more came in and then they left. The bull was being bully, and so when he came in I decided to go ahead and feed him to get him out of the way. As soon as I opened the wire and he started to come through the gate Mom yelled at me, “Don’t let him in!!!” Mom was standing in the bull’s feeding trough. I looked in horror as my Mom began to scramble out of the trough and up and over the metal pipes just in the nick of time—but there was no food in the trough and Dijon was not content. I quickly dumped my bucket of alfalfa in his trough and all was back to normal. You can watch the whole episode for yourself by clicking “Running from the bull!” I then went out and helped Papa shoo in the rest of the cows. We ended up opening the hot wire really big and then shooing them all into the corner and slowly closing the hot wire up behind them. It worked and we accomplished getting all the cows up on the new concrete. No more standing in the mud! The next morning Papa and I used a long yellow rope to herd the cows in through the new gate. Then Friday morning Papa used the rope by himself, and come Saturday morning he just chased them around a little and they finally went in by themselves. Sunday morning was the best though—they walked right in with no problems!
As the grasses turn green with the spring rains and warm weather the animals begin to eat less and less hay. They still need hay to keep their weight on them, but they would rather eat ice cream than liver and onions (and I cannot blame them)! So on Thursday we moved the heifers out to the winter grass pastures—and boy did they buck and jump all the way there. The garden area is getting overgrown with weeds and we needed to mow—so we decided to bring in 70 little self-propelled mowers. Not only do they mow the grass down but they also compost it and turn it into fertilizer really quick. The sheep were very eager to munch away at the clover, Carolina geranium and all the other weeds growing up in the garden area. I then spent the afternoon doing housework and Mom spent the afternoon moving plants around in the courtyard. Papa was a little out of commission as he had pulled a muscle in his back with the ice chests the day before.
Friday there were cows to milk, kefir to bottle, yogurt to make and lots of paperwork to take care of. That afternoon we sold the last heifer that we will have available for a year or two—besides the two that are spoken for but are waiting to be bred this summer. The last two months the Lord has been sending person after person here to the farm. They all have one thing in common—they want a family milk cow. Some bought bred heifers, some bought weanlings, and some bought week old calves that they could bottle feed to make pets out of. Knowing that some of our milk cows are getting older we knew that we could not sell every heifer we had—which was very hard for the demand was there. God used the sales of these cows to give us the money that we needed to build the lean-to on the barn and pour all the concrete. The sale of this last heifer will help to just about pay for closing in the new feed room in the new lean-to. We delivered that calf today. The people only lived about 20 minutes away from our church (which is an hour away from our home), so we took the heifer with us to church today. Everyone enjoyed getting to see a cow. Getting “Stormy” (because her mother’s name is Gail) dropped off was the easy part—getting off the people’s property was not so easy. It was a little hilly, with a good amount of trees—and fallen leaves and sand. Going in was downhill, but coming out was uphill and since we had to maneuver around some trees and go through a narrow gate opening Papa couldn’t really get a “running” start. We got a little way through the gate and then our wheels started slipping. Papa backed the van and trailer up and tried to get some momentum. Although we got a little further through the gate the tires once again began to slip and spin and bury themselves in the sand. We went forward and backward a few more times—but it was useless. They tried putting wood under the tires, but that didn’t help either. We were officially stuck! The lady ran over to their neighbors and he came back with his brand new red Massey Ferguson tractor. He backed up to the van and handed Papa a strap. Papa hooked the strap up to the van and to the tractor and climbed back in the driver’s seat. We then began to move forward—up and out of our sandy holes and through the gate, up the hill and around the trees, onto harder ground. We were very grateful—and I think that the neighbor was happy for an excuse to use his new tractor.
It is now 9:40 as I bring this journal to a close and the rain is falling outside once again. We have gotten an inch of rain so far tonight—along with the inch of rain we received Friday night. How nice that we will not have to deal with mud at the milking parlor tomorrow morning.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare