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Hi Everyone,
I do believe that the fastest growing thing in the garden is the pumpkin vines! Weeds grow pretty fast too, but those pumpkin vines are going to have the whole of “Martha’s Vineyard” covered in no time—which means that we are on a time crunch to get the area tilled and covered with cardboard, chicken compost and woodchips before the vines take over. I have now made three trips to town to get a truck load of woodchips—because try as we might we cannot get the roadside tree trimmers to drop their loads of woodchips at our house. I was also able to put those woodchips to work when I planted the cayenne peppers. I was fixing to plant them in one of the garden tunnels and then the Lord reminded me that two years ago I planted a row of cayenne peppers in the tunnel and they about died and I had to transplant them out in an open garden bed and they thrived there. The garden beds where we usually grow veggies are over grown with weeds and wild flowers. We plan on adding two more tunnels to them, and they are not deer proof—so they are neglected at the moment. The only place that was available was a section of the flower border in “Martha’s Vineyard”. So I weeded out what little weeds were growing in the area, added some cow manure/chestnut leaves compost, planted the cayenne pepper plants and mulched the area good—so that I do not have to weed it again.
Summer is here and the milk production is going up and down—but thankfully we are staying on the “enough” side. A few weeks ago we actually had extra and were able to spend a day creaming. I set aside some of that skim milk to replenish the supply of whey and to make some more quark. Traditionally quark is made by adding lactic acid to it—but I didn’t know that when I first began which is probably why mine only makes in nice hot weather. I make quark by setting a glass jar of skim milk on the counter—straight out of the cream separator and straight from the cow, so it is nice and warm. I put a lid on it and leave it alone for a few days. If all is going well by the second or third day the milk has formed a curd (like yogurt) and the whey has separated from the curds. I then strain it through a cloth and let it hang in the cooler in order to strain off all the whey. The curds make a soft cheese that is known as quark. It is used in many different ways, and can be used in place of cream cheese, ricotta cheese or yogurt in a recipe. You can make sweet dips or savory dips, cheesecake, use it in bread, use it as a base for salad dressings, or even make an icing with it. It is amazing what all can be made with quark—and even more amazing what all you can make with milk.
Tuesday morning as Mom and I were just starting to milk the cows Mom said, “Tiare, come here quick!” I ran over to her side of the parlor and there coming around from the front of the milk house was a pigeon. It walked down the sidewalk towards the milking parlor trying its best to find something to eat. I quickly ran to the feed room and got a small scoop of chicken feed and came back and dumped it on the concrete. The pigeon soon came up and ate and ate and ate. Then it found some puddles of water and stuck its beak in the water and used it like a straw to suck up the water. It hung out with us the whole time we milked. Anytime someone came up to the parlor it would fly up on top of the roof, then after they left the pigeon would fly back down and eat some more. It hung out at the milking parlor all day and the next morning when we arrived at the parlor to milk the cows the pigeon was roosting on the pipes above our heads. I kept a nice supply of water and feed available for it. By Wednesday night the pigeon had refueled and travelled on to wherever it was heading.
Thursday we got a new shipment of 200 laying hen chicks. Years ago we kept 400 laying chickens to supply eggs for all our customers. At first we had the problem of running out of eggs come the Holidays because the chickens would begin to molt and the days would get shorter so they would lay fewer eggs. We learned that if we bought new chickens every June then they would be laying by Thanksgiving—just when people were ready to start baking. This worked great for many years—and we never ran out of eggs. As the years went by we sold less and less eggs—so naturally we bought less and less chickens dropping us down to 200 to 250 chickens. Then the egg crisis of 2022 hit and we found ourselves out of eggs—it seemed that when people couldn’t find eggs in the grocery stores they decided to head to the farmer. Thankfully our new batch of chickens was just starting to lay eggs—but we had only ordered 100 (do you know how hard it is to predict the future of farming: today you can sell 100 dozen eggs a week, and next week you can only sell 30 dozen, and then the next month you need 200 dozen). So in March we ordered another 100 future egg laying chicks—but it takes 4 to 5 months before they are old enough to lay eggs. The good news is that this month the four months are up, and Lord willing they should be laying eggs by next month and the 200 new laying hen chicks should be laying eggs just in time for the Holidays. So it looks like we will be heading back to keeping 400 chickens again!
Farm lanes are important to a farm as they give you easy access to your farm—without them there may be parts of your farm that you cannot reach or sections that are more complicated to get to. Our central lane is out of commission do to four inches of rain in a short amount of time washing all the dirt down the hill and leaving our water pipes exposed and in some places a foot above the ground instead of two feet under the ground. The driving lane begins beside our hay barn and used to border the back fields and the garden—that is it did until some larger than normal potholes formed and they were too bumpy to drive through and they collected a lot of water when it rained and we found ourselves driving further and further out into the pasture instead of in the lane. So Mom fixed the problem by moving the lane to the other side of the field. Now we have another problem that was causing us to drive more and more out into the pasture. On the fence line of the garden is a large oak tree—and its branches stretch out over the drive lane. They seem to hang lower and lower to the ground preventing us from driving under them. Then they kept growing wider and wider—which pushed us out further and further into the pasture. Thursday Papa grabbed the tractor and the chainsaw and did some pruning on that big oak tree. You can actually drive under it now—and walk under it for some of the branches on the garden side had gotten so low that you had to bend over to walk past them.
We had a very interesting event happen last week—that has never before happened on our farm. Early one morning Mom went out to check on the Murray Grey beef cows to see about moving them to a new pasture. While she was out there she found a dead calf. It looked like it was dropped on its head during delivery. The next day when Steve was done with his morning chores he came over to the milking parlor and told me that there was another dead calf—it had never made its way out of its birth sack. That made two mama’s had given birth to two dead calves. We wondered what was going on that our calves were being born dead. Then Papa came up and told us that we had our first set of twins born on the property. It wasn’t two mamas with two dead calves—but one mama with two dead calves. Twins are not normal in cows, and things did not go well for our first set of cow twins on the property.
I didn’t get any sewing done last week—because the weather was too nice outside. That is if you count 98 degrees with a heat index of 119 degrees nice weather. Rain is a good excuse to stay inside, but hot sunny summer days are great opportunities to work in the garden.
I hope that everyone has a wonderful 4th of July. Not too sure what we shall do yet—but listen to some Patriotic music and go see some fireworks are definitely on the agenda.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare