Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 6 March 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Good morning and Happy Monday! It's another beautiful morning on the farm today. All of the animals are doing really well. The sheep are starting to wander away from their hay and pick at the green grass that is showing up. The grass isn't growing much just turning green and the sheep can't resist. We had a great walk/ride through some of our woods that we don't visit often. In fact, we took the chainsaw and cleared an old logging path as we went so the side-by-side could make it up the trail. We visited one of the wildlife ponds and paused for a few minutes to just look and listen. We've only been to the pond a couple of times and I showed you a pic of it frozen over the last time we visited. This time, after all of our recent rains, the water was a couple of feet further up the bank and there were a couple of dead trees floating. When we stood still and quiet, we began seeing things moving under the water. There are quite a few tadpoles scurrying about a couple of weeks from being frogs. There are a few minnows and more than a few crawdads. The bottom line for us is that the pond is not a 'dead' anaerobic pond but is alive with critters. That led us to decide that we will stock it with fish. We will start with menhaden or some other bait fish and then put in some bass. In a few years, we should be able to occasionally add fish to our harvest report. While out riding around, we also cut a tree that had fallen on a fence and cleared some brush. We finished arranging the garage, painted doors, and made cheese. We also pulled some of the garden soil that was migrating down the hill back into the garden and put a perimeter of logs around it to hopefully contain the soil. Here in this part of the Ozarks, gardens don't grow well in the native soil so we paid to have organic compost hauled in and we don't want it moving out. Today we will make more cheese, paint more doors, and clear more fence line. The pics are of the field to the east of the house. As the grass starts waking up, we are amazed to see the strip of green. That strip is where we had the meat chickens last spring. They were in a 12x12' pen that we moved about 12.5' every day onto fresh grass. Within that 24 hour period, the grass would be gone and it looked like bare dirt and we were concerned that the birds had destroyed the grass. On the contrary, you can see that the grass is doing very well and the undesirable Broom Sedge is much thinner in that strip. Another regenerating win!
Well, time for another My-Bad. NSTFS, there we were in the milk parlor yesterday evening. Backing up a bit, every week we completely disassemble the milking machine tubes and bring them in for a thorough cleaning. We clean them every time we milk, twice a day, but we like to do a deep clean also. So yesterday morning we brought all of the hoses and such inside for our cleaning ritual. That went off without a hitch and we even got started milking a bit earlier yesterday evening so we had time to get everything put back together without rushing. Well, we got it together and while milking Happy, things just didn't sound quite right, like air was being introduced into the system somewhere. The machine worked well, we got the standard amount of milk, and all looked fine...it just didn't sound perfect. So after milking, we began investigating. All of the hoses were connected, all of the seals looked tight, the tubes were tight. We let Happy out of the parlor so we could focus on the machine. As we began to disassemble things, I pointed out that we should clean everything first so that we wouldn't be dripping milk everywhere. Critical step...prior to cleaning the machine, you must first pour out the milk you just worked the last few minutes to get into the bucket. You guessed it. I said "Let's clean it first." We both expeditiously went about cleaning it, the first step of which entails dropping the milking cups into a bucket of soapy bleach water. One second, two seconds, then three seconds pass..."YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!" I blurt out. Shelley immediately knew what we had just done. Yep, soapy bleach water into the bucket with the milk. Some of you may not know, but I am a little bit of a perfectionist and that was enough to cause me to step aside and just shut down for a bit. Shelley quickly dumped the bucket into the yard as there was nothing else to do with it. She came back into the parlor to me still sitting basically catatonic and said "Are you going to get over this?" After another few moments, I decided that the 1 gallon of milk wasn't worth ruining the rest of the day and snapped out of my disgust to help finish cleaning and putting things back together. We ended up taking a couple of things apart and putting back together and all is now working fine. You better bet that this morning, I made sure I poured the 4 gallons of fresh milk into our lidded pails before cleaning the machine. My-Bad!!
Shelley's YouTube Short today continues the Farm Sounds theme: Cows Enjoying Supper
Local Farm Report for 5 March 2023:
Harvest:
33 Chicken eggs
10 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
4 Gallons of milk
Sales:
N/A
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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