Oceans of Milk

Milk with cream at the top!

 One of the things about Mattie losing her calf is the fact that she is still producing milk as though she  has a calf nursing.

I had planned on an easy summer where both the cows would be nursing, and I would be milking very little, just enough for my family.

Well as the old expression goes, don't count your chicks til the eggs hatch. Here I am milking Mattie 2x a day, with no calf.

Now don't misunderstand me, I know how lucky I

 am to have this wonderful resource. The thing is I have been really busy finding uses for all this surplus milk..

Which brings me to the topic of Cheese.
Making cheese is actually letting milk go bad in a controlled way. There are all kinds of cheeses  most require  cultures, such as rennet or mesophillic, which I don't have at the moment. However, Cultured buttermilk is readily available...

so... I made plain old fromage blanc. Literally "white cheese".

I put 2 quarts of milk in the pot and heated

 It requires only the following ingredients,
Milk,
cultured buttermilk
Lemon or lime juice
salt ( for flavor)
you also need a thermometer and a nice deep  heavy  pot
a colander
a cheesecloth or towel ( you can use old linens washed too)

Step 1:  Gather your ingredients

Step 2 :Measure one or 2 quarts of milk ( you will need 2 cups buttermilk to each quart of milk)

Step 3: .

I added 4 cups buttermilk

Step 3: Pour milk in pot and heat, gently stir while you heat milk to 175 degrees.

Step 4: When temp of milk is 175, add butter milk and about 1/4 cup lemon juice, or enough to cause
a reaction.

 I added the lemon juice after the buttermilk... I do it to sight

 Heres what I am talking about ....
Then curds will start to separate from the whey.


Let this sit undisturbed for about 10 minutes

lined colander all ready

 Get a colander and line it with a thin towel, place this in a bowl to drain your cheese.

curds and whey

Now it's time to gently spoon the curds into the lined colander, using a slated spoon

Cheese, wet.

The light looks a little harsh but this is what you get,







Cheese!

 It still needs to drain out.

draining

I usually put it in the fridge to drain for a few hours
( have you ever noticed cheese from the store has
"gum" in it? that's because the makers are in too much of a hurry to let the whey drain, so they add gum to thicken it... Yumm!, Gross)

ready to be seasoned and refrigerated.

Add here it is! cheese, I add salt now, pepper and maybe garlic.
Or.. thyme, honey and pepper
or.. japs ...
what ever you want!

By the whey (ha), you can use the whey to make ricotta, which literally means "to cook again"
or just feed it to your plants or animals.

Tomorrow my worms and I are going out on the town!
We have been invited to the Great Outdoors Nursery

Together we will be promoting vermicomposting, and Novellas Farms Worm Casting Tea Bags.

A few weeks ago 

I took some worm casting tea bags to 3 Austin Stores.
The Great Outdoors Nursery, It's About Thyme Nursery and Wheatsville Coop.

The two nurseries agreed to give them a try, Wheatsville
told me they did not have a garden area at this time, but in the Spring they are interested for the new store!

I am happy,  but the Great Outdoors said none had sold!
I feel sure it is because people are unfamiliar with how to use castings.

So..... I asked to come in and  tell people about how to use the castings. Turns out tomorrow the City is giving a talk about composting at the nursery so they thought
my worms would fit right in.

Very excited here, although I have no expectations...
Expectations can be a problem for me...but optimistically I am taking lots of bags to sell.

I figure at the very least more people will hear about Novellas which can only be a good thing, yes?

If you are in the area come by and say hello, I, and around 2,000 worms would love to see you!

Losing a Tail

What the heck is that?

 So the other day my husband came in holding a white piece of fluff.

"Do you want to save this?" he asked,
I turned and looked at it, "No...what is it?"
 "Lana's tail"

What!!!!
I first of all accused him of doing something cruel  to the calf....obviously pulling her tail really hard.

I freaked out, cows are not supposed to lose their tails, and there was even a bit of bone in it!

Gory

I expected to go out and find other parts of her falling off.
I expected her to be at least concerned about this terrible thing that had happened to her.

When I ran out to see how the poor girl was, I found her jumping around and playing, there was a bit of blood... and most importantly there was still a tail!

This whole bizarre event led me to do a bit of research and it isn't all that unusual for cows to pull their tails off! One story I read was about a woman
who tied her cows tail while she milked her because the cow kept swatting her in the face.

Still a good tail

When the milking was over the cow just walked out of the stanchion and left her tail still tied to the post!
The cow was nonplussed the woman was understandably upset.

As far as Lana goes, I guess she just had "extra" tail.
Thankfully nothing else has fallen off... and by the way Jasmine snagged the fluffy treat.

After Matties calf died, who by the way we named Dexter. We were all very sad. Some of more than others
but even the hardest of us around here was touched and showed Mattie a lot of tenderness in those days
afterwards.

Love all creatures

At one point I considered getting a newborn calf from another cow to let Mattie mother and adopt as her own. Of course the first place I went to begin my search was the internet.

I found all kinds of opinions about what animals feel. Do they understand death? Do they care about their young? You know what I'm talking about here.

Not what I was looking for, I wanted to find out where to get a new born calf for Mattie, because I knew she missed her calf. She looked for him and mooed for him and then would go and lay down where his body had been before we buried the little guy.

I asked my vet about where to get a calf. He told me to go the auction.  I almost did, but for the wise words of my daughter. She said, "you can't really replace him and what if she doesn't want the new calf?"

I decided she was right, and in the end Novella, Sunny and Lana Rose have helped Mattie to come around.
She is doing well, and I will probably breed her in about 6 months with the smallest bull I can find so she can have a calf of her own next year.

One of the things I read about when I was looking for a calf was about a dairy in New York , where the new born bulls are taken to the barn and shot at birth. When I read this I started crying , and I apologized to my daughter for being such a sap, then we remembered how I always cry when I read "Blossom Comes Home". Have any of you read it? It's a beautiful story, of course about Blossom, a dairy cow who has given her whole life to a farmer and .... well you have to read it.

A beautiful book

Then I pointed out that she always cries, ( me too) when we read "Charlottes Web" no matter how many times!

Of course there are songs that make her cry too.
Any way after a few tears and hugs and time every one is doing better, and by the way we have decided we would rather be one of the cryers than not.


Thank you to all of you who wrote to say how sorry they were about the calf. It really does help to have other think about you.

Mattie Lost her Calf

Well last night was terrible.
Mattie went into labor, I was the only one with her.
The calf was backwards and I believe the cord had broken earlier, as I saw something I was curious about but now I feel sure that was what it was.

Any way we had to pull the calf  out with  chains, and the baby was dead....
I let Mattie lick him for just a few minutes and then we wrapped him up  in a big sheet and went to bed.

She is depressed and so am I.

Too sad to write about this.

Heros

Medal of Honor

I realize Memorial Day was yesterday, but I think it is appropriate to say a few words about the spirit of the day and what I feel it means.

In my family we had one WWII Hero, my Uncle Bill. He was my fathers older brother. He was a Marine.

When he was only 23 he was killed on the Island of Tarawa. His bravery was witnessed and reported by his fellow soldiers and he was awarded the Medal of Honor Posthumously.

My father, nor the rest of his family ever recovered. When I say never recovered, I mean Never. While my father went through the stages of his dying almost 2 decades ago, he was still mourning the loss of his brother. I feel confident in saying Uncle Bill's death in a sense killed the whole family.

Now, I am not saying the medal is not an honor for the family. It is.
 It is amazing  to think I may carry in my blood the potential for such bravery. When my father passed away I recall my Mother wrote in his obituary about "a hero gene" that she saw in her husband, that same gene that was dominant in Bill.

Fast forward to today.

My oldest son carries this gene. He is a life guard, put in his application to serve in the Volunteer Fire Dept.,
and is planning on getting his EMT Training.  I insisted he get the Medical Training because he wants to eventually join the Coast Guard. If he were to be deployed I want him to  be doing more than fighting

To think my son could be deployed gives me a little taste of what Memorial Day means.

 Really means

and it
terrifies me.

It is late, and it is certainly not enough, but Thank you to all of you who carry this Hero Gene thing. Thank
you for being willing to be on the front lines for the rest of us. Know we do appreciate and honor every single one of you, medal or no.
 

Thank You.

Matties Hooves

Well Mattie is due to have her calf any time now and she just looks so uncomfortable.
Her udders are so full, I am afraid when the calf comes they will almost touch the ground.
One thing is sure, on that day I am milking that poor girl totally out!

Mattie, of all the girls has hooves that grow the fastest. I have been wondering what to do to help her for a while now.

Normally we take the cows out to a guy in Stonewall who grinds their hooves down. Cows are not like
horses, they don't have those big strong hips, and they simply can not lift their back hooves for long periods.
So cows get put in lift  machines and their hooves are ground with a sort of sander thing.( this is a photo of the method used)



Now, as you can imagine this whole routine is traumatizing and I just could not see  having this done to Mattie in her condition, but she really needed help. She was walking funny and her "toes" were crossing over.. not good.

I originally thought I would just wait till her calf was born. The thing about that is how freaked out she would be to get in the trailer and leave her calf behind.


So... I decided to give it a try myself.

 First thing was to put her in the stanchion...



and get her to stand on a piece of ply wood.


My son helped for a while until he lost his patience with her. She just wasn't able to lift her hoof for long even with us helping her.. besides this particular son is a real hot head.
Eventually I sent him inside and worked at it myself.

I had to work from the top and she was good. Like she understood I was helping her.
I used a chisel and mallet and bit by bit "shaved" each hoof .

For the record, a cow's hoof is incredibly strong, like super hard wood....

I also cut what I could from the side and between the toes.....

All told the whole process took around 2 hours and my arms were very ,very sore.

I am pleased with the results and have decided to do their hooves from now on. I will do them a little at a time...

One girl down 2 more to go...


I never realized cows needed their hooves trimmed, until I got some....
they do.

A fun fact: when the covered wagons crossed through this country the oxen ( which is any cattle) pulling the wagons wore shoes. Since cow hooves are split the shoes were 2 pieces. When the oxen needed re shoeing along the way the people had to dig a sort of trench and push the oxen onto their side in order to do the shoeing.

Ok ,we are ready for the baby now.