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Hi Everyone,
WARNING: If you are fixing to attempt to read this journal while someone around you is trying to sleep—you just might wake them up laughing!
Yes, I have some stories to tell! The week started out with two birthday’s in our family—my Papa’s and my sister Samantha’s. Papa officially became a whole year older—but he would tell you that really he was just one day older on his birthday. If you were to spend a day with him on the farm you would never guess that he was 72. Papa’s favorite cake since he was a little boy is Angel Food Cake, so as soon as I finished milking the cows and harvesting veggies for some customers I headed to the kitchen to bake a cake. The egg whites had just reached a soft peak and I had turned the speed up and added the maple sugar when a friend showed up to pick up some mullein plants I had grown for him. Needless to say I couldn’t leave the kitchen until the egg whites had reached a stiff peak and I could add in the flour and remaining sugar—and if you have ever whipped egg whites to a stiff peak you know very well it doesn’t happen in seconds. So we had a good visit talking over the noise of the blender—for I didn’t dare leave the kitchen for a minute because I knew from experience that when the egg whites got pretty close our blender was known to start slinging batter all over the kitchen if you didn’t readjust the roller. I am sure that it was close to twenty minutes later when the cake was finally in the oven and the mullein plants were turned over to their new grower. When the cake was done we ate lunch and Mom and Steve mowed and I worked in the walk-in cooler putting names on the claimed chickens and then organizing them all into the freezer. Around 4:00 Mom and I headed to the garden to harvest the first batch of green beans this spring. We planted the beans too heavy and they grew nice and lush—and are sprawled out in the walkway too. To make matters worse the next bed over has zucchini in it and the zucchini is three feet tall and four feet wide—taking out the walkways too. You can see a picture on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/shepherdshillfarmfl. So there is no sitting down leisurely harvesting green beans. We had to make a space in the greenery every time we moved one of our feet. I even had to help Mom move her left foot forward a few times because she couldn’t get it picked up high enough and keep her balance. It was quite hilarious the trouble we had to go through to harvest green beans. Thankfully we managed to get enough beans for Papa’s Birthday dinner. I also pulled up a few carrots and grabbed a stem of parsley to season the carrots. For dinner I baked a chicken that I had cut in half and I seasoned it with salt, pepper, dried lemon peel, and garlic powder. Then I rubbed olive oil and kosher salt on the skins of some of the red potatoes that we had just harvested from the garden and baked them in the oven too. I cooked the green beans in butter with salt, pepper and fresh garlic. I sliced the carrots into coins and then sautéed them in butter with salt and parsley. For dessert—well we ate Angel Food cake of course. We topped it with thawed strawberries that we had sliced and frozen. My sisters came over for dinner and dessert, and we had a lovely visit together after dinner. Actually we had an adventure too! As we sat at the table we were discussing our cats: Catalina, Catapus, and Sunny Boy. Catapus is a HUGE gray tabby cat, and she weighs a ton. I asked my sister if she had ever picked her up and she said “no”. So we all headed outside to find Catapus so my sister Nichole could see how big she was. Catapus was not in the barn—we called and called but she never came, which was unusual. We were looking around the out buildings when I noticed that the light was on in the tool shed so I stepped on the porch to turn it out. Just as soon as I got on the porch I heard a cat scream—a scream that told me she was not alone. I climbed off the porch and looked underneath just as Catapus headed out the back end and behind the Poultry kitchen. So we headed behind the building but she turned around and went back under the tool shed. I crawled around on the ground looking underneath until I saw her—or thought I saw her. I looked down one section and saw “her” and then I looked down another section and really saw her. I ran for a flashlight and came back and checked out the view again. This time I could for sure see that Catapus was definitely under the left section, and a stray Siamese cat was under the right section. People think that farms are the best place to drop off unwanted animals—but Mom is not a happy camper about all the cats. She says that three is enough. At the moment though we had two extra cats who insist that we are their new home: an orange and white tom cat that Steve calls Tommy Boy—he even hangs out with Steve sometimes during lunch break, and the Siamese cat that I will call Muffin—because my Grandma had a Siamese cat named Muffin. Now if they would go to the garden and eat all the rats, I think that they would be fat and sassy for a little while at least.
Tuesday I finally got around to working in the green house to pot up the Roselle plants I ended up with 19 of them. I also managed to tidy up in the greenhouse—getting the used trays emptied of their left over dirt and put back where they belong. Before I could pot up the Roselles I had to bottle kefir, and when I was done potting up the Roselles I had to make yogurt. Lately I have been able to make 40 yogurts a week—but we are very low on milk right now due to the lack of rain, cooler temperatures (grass doesn’t grow until it in is the 70’s at night) and having to dry off cows so that they can prepare their bodies to calve in two months. Then to make matters worse I lost a perfectly good milker because I didn’t realize that the milking claws were having trouble and they created blood blisters on poor Rosy’s teats. We tried to milk her by hand so as not to have the strong suction on them—but she kicked so bad that we realized that for our safety we would have to just leave her be and let the teats heal. Our hope is that the teats will heal before she completely dries up and we can go back to milking her—but time will tell which comes first: healing or no milk. If she dries up then I guess she will have a four month maternity leave—for we would be drying her off in two months anyway. The good news is that last week we had three new calves born and they are all heifers: Ella had Ellie, Saturday Bella had a nameless girl, and today Emma had a nameless girl. Ella and Bella were both one week late—but Emma was two months late (according to the calving calendar). This morning we were milking the cows and feeding the feeders when Emma (who just eats as she was on maternity leave) finished eating her food and backed out real quickly and barged through all the cows who were congregating on the side walk. We thought that maybe she had gotten choked—but she wasn’t coughing, and we had never seen her so determined to leave the parlor and get past all the cows before. It wasn’t until later when Papa was putting all the cows back out to pasture that we realized that Emma had just given birth to a little heifer. I guess she felt the labor pains come on as she was eating and felt the urge to push and therefore was on a mad dash to get some place all alone so that she could have a baby in peace.
Anyway back to Tuesday. Once the yogurt was made it was time for the egg packaging party. It is always a nice time of fellowship with the Tavernari family that helps us. Their three year old son even knows how to package eggs point side down in the carton and when an egg is too small to sell, or to big to fit into the carton. When the eggs were done Steve and I headed to the garden to harvest, and Mom went to weed. We had to harvest lettuce and collards to fill some orders, and then we had to harvest the rest of the cabbage before they all split or the worms ate them. As we were harvesting one of the cabbages I saw a small rat run out from under it. Then on the second row of cabbages I found a huge rat hole. So once we had everything harvested I grabbed the wheelbarrow and pulled up the leaves and the root stalks that were left behind after we harvested the cabbage heads. I wanted to make sure that the rats had nowhere to hide—but a few days later while giving a garden tour we saw a rat (a nice fat male field rat) hanging out in the celery and parsley and then disappeared into the thick over growth of green beans. So the garden tunnels are rabbit proof, and deer proof—but how in the world do you rat proof a garden?
Wednesday afternoons are relaxing times for Mom and I while Papa makes deliveries to Jacksonville. Last Wednesday we headed to the garden with baskets and clippers in hand. We then set down beside the chamomile patch and picked off the flowers to dry for cups of hot chamomile tea later on. The sweet applelike smell of the chamomile makes it a delightful place to spend a cozy afternoon. Then we picked some fresh flowers—pink and mauve and dark red snapdragons. We also harvested a head of lettuce for dinner.
Thursday morning when I looked out my window the first thing I saw was a lamb waking up his mother so that he could nurse, and the first thing I heard was the noise of a rooster crowing. It was a new day with no clouds in the sky and the sun had not yet peaked above the trees. It was a little after 6:30 and I had barely risen out of bed for I was running late—well, truth be told I wasn’t running at all for I was on the tired side of life. I did not know what the day would behold—for I had jotted nothing down in my “To Do” book for Thursday, but it didn’t take long for the day to start to take shape. Of course there were cows to milk before anything else could be done—but that is quite relaxing and since I had dried off two cows last week, and lost Rosy for the time being, I only had five cows instead of eight to milk. That will change this week as we now have two freshened cows and since I am only milking five cows that means I will have an empty tank to milk the cows with the colostrum. When milking was done Thursday morning Mom, Steve and I headed to the garden. Steve helped Mom weed so that Mom could transplant some zinnias, celosia, and rudbeckia into the flower border of “Martha’s Vineyard”. I grabbed all the dehydrator trays that we own and took them to the garden and filled them with mullein leaves. I have been amazed at how big the herbs grow under the garden tunnels. The mullein growing in the cottage garden is nowhere near as big as the mullein plants growing under the tunnel. Last year I saw the difference between parsley and catnip growing under the tunnel versus growing in the open gardens. After lunch Papa and I did a “crash” farm tour for one of our customers who was in the area but only had about 35 minutes to see the whole farm. Then I headed to the garden to help Steve and Mom weed the middle circle in “Martha’s Vineyard” because we finally decided where to plant the pumpkins this year. We got the area all weeded, then we dumped a few five gallon buckets of cow manure/leaf mold compost on the area and a bucket of top soil/mushroom compost mix on the area. Then we broadforked it all together and I planted the seeds. When Mom was in the garden Saturday night checking on her zinnia transplants she saw a very disturbing sight—deer tracks. Thankfully zinnias are deer proof—but pumpkins are not. Deer happen to really enjoy having pumpkin plants, fruit and seeds in their diet—but I do not care to feed the deer!!!!! We can cage the pumpkins when they are small—but they can cover an area thirty to fifty feet wide. I do not know what we shall do—but somehow we need a deer fence. Maybe we just might try what an old-timer said: “string hot wire waist high, attach tinfoil to the wire and coat it with peanut butter.” Then you hope that they are not stubborn and determined deer! After we planted the pumpkins Mom and Steve went back to weeding and transplanting and I worked at weeding the row of yellow squash in the East tunnel. I planted close to 20 seeds, and only four sprouted. I also planted them the same day that I planted the zucchini. The zucchini are three feet high and four feet wide and we harvested the first two zucchini’s tonight. The squash are only a foot tall and haven’t even started to flower. Since I weeded and mulched them though they do look a lot better. I am glad about the zucchini though for I haven’t had success with zucchini in a good five years or so.
I managed to climb out of bed on time Friday morning which enabled me to have a little bit of time to run out to the garden and harvest some of the lettuce before they got too old. Then I set up the milking equipment and headed back inside for breakfast. Then we milked the cows and another of our customers showed up for a detailed farm tour which I took her around on. When the tour was over I had to make yogurt and we ate lunch. Then Mom and I headed to the garden to harvest. First we harvested the rest of the carrots—the rats had found them. We just pulled them up and laid them on the ground to dry out. Then we harvested the yellow storage onions and the multiplying onion bulbs that were ready to be dried out to store until it is time to replant them next fall. The last thing that we harvested was the rest of the potatoes—the plants were next to dead and if we wanted to find them we had best dig them now. We then went back and clipped all the tops off the carrots and put them in a tub. We then went to the potatoes and wiped the dirt off of each one and put them in a tub. We loaded the tubs into the back of the Gravely and then we loaded the backend with all the onions. Our first stop was the barn where we unloaded the onions and piled them on the drying racks. Then we packed the carrots in bags and put them in the walk-in cooler. Finally we carried the potato tub into the garage and covered it with a towel. Then it was close to 6:30 and somehow I had to muster some energy to cook dinner. It took a good thirty minutes to gain some energy and some ideas of what to cook but in the end we did manage to have a good nutritious dinner.
The funniest part of the whole week though happened this morning just as we finished milking the cows. Actually, little Merry kept us entertained through much of the milking as she decided to come in and eat like a big cow, and then she kept coming in with us to give us kisses and get some good petting. AS I said, Bella had given birth to a little heifer Saturday night. She is a feisty little thing—for she ran in with the cows last night instead of Papa having to give her a ride in the golf-cart which is what happens with some newborn calves. I think that I can honestly say that the bull calves are lazier than the heifer calves. Anyway, Bella’s little calf came in on the concrete with all the cows as they were waiting to be milked this morning—and she found the one low spot where all the pee runs to which is right in the middle where the cows poop the most and there she curled up to sleep. When we were done milking Mom and I decided that she needed a bath. The calf is not any bigger than a German shepherd—so how hard could it be to give her a bath? Well-----let’s just say that she wiggled and squiggled and flopped down on the ground over and over and over again! We would get her all hosed off and then she would decide to poo—and her mama must have a lot of colostrum and she must be a very hungry calf for her poo was perfect newborn mustard yellow and there was LOTS of it!!! Then she would flop herself down and be covered in the poop and we would have to hose her off again. Once we got her all clean I grabbed a towel to dry her and I had her backed into my dress so that I could reach her better and have more control of her—but it didn’t help her to control her desire to go poop and I found the whole front of my dress coated in mustard poop (and LOTS of it)! Mom and I were dying in laughter. We were soaked from the water hose as we tried to hose off a moving object that kept flopping down, and then we were wet from having to hose our clothes off from the poop the calf had covered us with. In the end Mom ended up barefoot in order to keep the inside of her shoes dry. The whole ordeal lasted a good thirty minutes, and in the end we did manage to get that little heifer rinsed off—but not dried. Once she looked clean we happily sent her on her way. May I say that she can bawl pretty loud too—and her mama never came running to see what these crazy women were doing with her calf! If her mama had been Honey we would have been minced meat! As it was, Merry stood on the other side of the hot wire watching the whole adventure. She was probably jealous that the calf was getting attention and she wasn’t. I told Mom that we should call Bella’s calf Fiesta—for she sure was feisty. We ended up needing showers before we could head to church—and no we didn’t make it on time this morning.
Well, it is bedtime now, and my eyes are drooping fast so if I expect to get up in the morning with the cock crow I had best sign off.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare