Bye Bye Bossy

Because I grew up in town, even though I now live in the country, I still tend to look at animals as pets rather than just animals. I'm getting better and certain aspects of farm life no longer phase me. It's just that I get this little pang for awhile when we send a cow to the sale barn.

We sent one just this morning. She was one of the older cows in the herd, had developed a slight limp, had a high SCC number, wasn't bred, and wasn't producing as much milk as she used to. Still, for some reason, I've become attached to that particular cow.

Perhaps I was attached because she was one of the first ones I could always pick out when I first started milking. She just stood out in my mind. Maybe it was her placid temperament. (In other words, she went into the parlor first without complaint, had a nice big bag with large straight teats, and didn't kick at you or the milker.) It could just be that I liked that cow for no reason at all. For whatever reason, it was still bittersweet to say goodbye.

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.