You know it's time to weed when...

The pigweed no longer counts as a weed because it's the size of a small sapling. It took me an hour, but I finally found all of my onions in the garden and thinned my carrots. Unfortunately, I also accumulated pricked fingers because my garden is not only producing a bumper crop of veggies but also an even bigger crop of thistle plants. I can usually get them early enough that they don't have any pickers but a few managed to sprout several inches tall and now have terrible spines on them. It was just my luck that those few were also the ones hidden in the copious amounts of quack grass that is also quite abundant in my garden this year. Still, it's a gorgeous day, V slept the hour I worked in the garden, I got five rows weeded, and a gallon of baby carrots so the poked fingers are worth it.

Baby Daze

V is SIX months old now!!! Yikes!!! Where did that time go? My little man is able to eat some food (sweet potatoes are a fave), is constantly practicing his sit-ups, knows how to roll over and scoot a tiny bit, is teething, and grabs everything he can get his hands on. My baby is growing up.

From Our Farm: Part 2

This is a milker. When the cows come into the parlor, we wash their udders with an iodine-based solution to clean off anything that might be on the teats. Then we put the milker on. The milkers are designed to mimic (as closely as a machine can) the action of a calf suckling in order to get the milk out of the cow.


Once the milk is in the milkers, it is pumped through a pipeline, a holding tank or 'jar', and our plate cooler (which cools the milk down) before ending up in our bulk tank. (This one is in our winter barn.) The bulk tank is essentially a very large cooler with a paddle inside. It keeps the milk between 35 and 38 degrees while the paddle stirs the milk to help keep the milk at a constant temperature.

From Our Farm: Chore Time

Twice a day, we bring our cows into the barn for milking. We have two barns-one is a stall barn with an attached parlor used in the winter and the other is just the milking parlor on our 90-acre irrigated summer pasture.


This is our winter parlor. This parlor is a Double 7, meaning we can milk seven cows on each side with a milker for each. We bring the cows in from the holding pen through the two doors on the right. The cows face away from the center aisle or 'pit'. The chore people stand in the pit and put the milkers on between the cow's legs. Once done milking, the cows are sent out the far door and back out into the barn where they are fed hay bales and TMR (a mixture of grain, minerals, and corn silage) in the feed lane. They also have access to the winter pasture.


This is our summer parlor. We bring the cows in through the system of gates you see at the far end of the parlor. As you can see, this is a much bigger parlor. It is a Swing 14, meaning we can put 14 cows in on each side but swing the milkers from side to side as the cows finish milking. The exit doors are not pictured. The cows go out of the parlor and walk back to their pasture until the next milking. We feed the TMR out in the pasture.