[Previous entry: "Winter Updates"] [Next entry: "From Pig to Plate"]

01/08/2008: "Mid-winter"

The demands of the holiday season have made it difficult to travel to the farm, but I have made a couple of trips in the last month. Most recently the girls and I traveled down to the farm on New Year's Day to do a couple of little chores like put up storm windows on the kitchen windows and fix the broken door in the utility room. I also got my first chance in 35 years to milk a cow.

When I was about 10, my family took a winter trip to Pennsylvania to visit some former neighbors who had moved out of the suburbs of Chicago and taken up country life in NW Pennsylvania. I still recall how wild and rural it all seemed to me - people told me there were turkeys out there, but I never saw them. While we were visiting someone poisoned one of their calves - apparently not everyone in the neighborhood welcomed new-comers. We took showers on a pallet set up over a running spring in the basement - brrr! We made butter in a jar, and that took seven forevers. And we got to participate in the milking, which I recall didn't go all that well for me. I barely got a squirt out, as I recall.

Although we've had Aura for the better part of a year, I've kept my distance from the milking. My early experience made me think that perhaps I wouldn't do well. But Nate and I have talked about the need for having back-up milkers and relief for the weary farmer, so it's important that I be able to fill in on every area. So, on this recent New Year's Day trip I asked Nate if I could have a go. He was very supportive, and gave me some important pointers, which I'll share with you, dear reader.

First of all, the grip is obviously thumb-up, no surprises there. And the sequence of squeezing is obviously top to bottom - thumb and index finger, then middle finger, ring finger, and pinkie squeeze. This kind of goes against the natural tendency of closing one's hand from the pinkie on upwards, but it can be mastered. One Nate's important tips is to begin the thumb and index squeeze pretty high on the teat, actually up on the udder itself. This get the milk from the udder down to the teat, and then the lower fingers squeeze the jet of milk out of the teat itself. Aura's udder has some hair on it, and there's an earthy warmness being close to her while milking.

I got some good squirts, and I didn't get kicked off the non-existent milking stool by Aura. The whole situation is somewhat complicated by Rainbow, who by convention suckles at the starboard teats. However, Rainbow is a wily character, and if you don't keep both hands on Aura's port side teats, she reaches under and suckles on your side! This makes the teats pretty slobbery and difficult to work with. Also, Rainbow suckles quickly on her side, and then does quite a bit of punching of the udder with her nose, trying to free up more milk. This also makes it hard to hang onto the teats and get the milking done. With practice, and fewer demands by the calf, milking looks like a skill I could master, despite my misgivings from long ago.

This was a short trip, mostly a social visit, but I also got some weatherizing done. The door from the utility room out onto the deck doesn't fit its door frame well, and as a consequence the wind whistles around through there. Nate says that its a good temperature to keep potatoes in, but it's not the kind of situation you want when you are trying to keep the rest of the house warm. Last summer I re-hung the door that goes in the opening of the utility room into the kitchen, but it was still missing a window. Later in the summer I brought down a pre-cut piece of glass to install in the door, but I never got around to installing it. Finally, on this trip I carefully disassembled the window frame in the door, put in the window, and reassembled. Now the utility room can stay cold, and the kitchen can stay warm.

Bill T. has gotten his junky old camper truck running. However, he's lost the title, so it sits in front of the cottage for now. He's been cleaning out his trash, but he's really been annoying the neighbors with his burning practices. Someday he'll be out of there, and I'll get my shop back totally.

Speaking of which, one of the earlier trips in December was to pick up wood from my friend Bobby's place, and transfer it down to the farm for eventual use in re-siding the barn and shop. Here's the pile of wood as it looked last summer in Battle Ground:



And here's the same wood, stowed more or less neatly in the shop. It's all part of the plan to occupy enough of the shop that Bill has to move his junk out! I'll tell you, it was a long, hard day, moving that wood. I rented a 16 foot truck, loaded up in Battle Ground during a steady drizzle, and then drove down to the farm. Thank goodness Nate was a willing helper on the unloading side; I guesstimated that there was about two tons of wood there overall. We put it all away in the shop by the light of a single LED headlamp.



Finally, the pig is nearing his date with destiny. He's a hungry critter, and doesn't seem to be getting much larger on what we're able to feed him, so butchering day is not far off. I have mixed feelings about it, as anyone raised on the Safeway diet would; we could contract it out to one of the butchers in the Valley, but I think Nate and I agree that if you're going to be an omnivore you have to face up to the realities.