Milking Cows and Time Management

 "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' Into the future..."  - The Steve Miller Band

Time is a very precious commodity.  Every minute squandered is something you can never get back.  There are countless books on effective time management, telling you how to make the most of your time.  There are apps that help you budget time, computer programs and websites that teach you to effectively plan, and efficiently structure your life so that you can be organized and at your best.

Oddly, saved time is not something you can quantify or 'bank' to use for recreation or earmarked for leisure.  Somehow or another, all our best-laid plans and efficiencies result in more time that we fill up with other busyness.  Like a dog chasing its tail, we're in a vicious cycle.  it's not a bad thing in and of itself, but we are always looking for better, easier, faster, more efficient ways to do things.

Milking cows is not one of those things.  One might say, "Hey, instead of waking up and milking every morning, why don't you stay out longer on Monday and do all your milking for the week?  Then you could do other things Tuesday - Sunday."  It doesn't work like that.  Cows must be milked every day.  They moo.  You milk.

Don't get me wrong, we do have a process and we've honed it over the years, but it's not something you rush.  Especially when the weather is nice, it is a pastoral, quiet, peaceful time to enjoy.  It is a great time to pray, to be thankful, to appreciate the sights, sounds, and (yes) smells of the barnyard.

We'll put the cow in the milking stall and have some bermuda hay in the hay rack for them to eat on while we prepare the feed bucket.  In the feed room, we mix some sweet feed, alfalfa, diatomaceous earth, molasses, and minerals in a bucket.

We hobble one of her back legs with a dog leash wrapped figure 8 around a boat cleat.  This keeps her from kicking over the bucket of milk.  Yes, that's happened a time or two.  We'll use a length of baling twine to wrap around her tail.  If you don't do this, you run the risk of getting a urine-drenched tail swishing across your face.  

We dab a little vaseline petroleum jelly on the cows' teats to serve as a lubricant.  It makes the milking process smoother and easier.

Then we pour the feed in the trough.  The bucket sits on the ground directly underneath her bag.

Then we begin milking.  Tricia and I use different techniques. She uses the 'thumbs tucked in' and I use the 'thumbs out' technique.  Different strokes for different folks.  In twenty minutes we're done.  If the cow finishes eating before you're finished milking, she'll inevitably back up, making the process stop until we throw her another cup of food so we can finish up.  (Sometimes I wonder if she doesn't try to eat very, very quickly so that I will have to get additional food to finish milking.)

We carry the buckets of milk inside.  As you can notice, we cover the top of the stainless steel bucket with muslin cloth.  We milk through the cloth, using it as a filter.  The milk runs through the muslin cloth, catching hay, dust, mosquitoes, flies, and hair so that it doesn't contaminate the fresh milk.

We pour the milk into gallon-sized jars and put them in the fridge.  The cream will rise to the top.  Once chilled, the fresh milk is ready for drinking.  It's an investment of time, for sure, milking cows.  It's like putting time in a bottle.

"But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do, once you find them

I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go through time with"

from

- Jim Croce "If I could put time in a Bottle"

Curing and Weighing the 2021 Sweet Potato Crop

To finish up the sweet potato post from last night, we'll tell you that once you dig them up, you're not quite done!  The hard work is done, but you can't kick your feet up just yet.  We gather all of the harvest together and use different tubs or containers to sort and grade the sweet potatoes into different sizes.  We sort them (from smallest to largest) from the small ones deemed "Cattle Feed," because the cows love 'em, to medium, to large 'bakers', to Jumbo.  

We separate them and pour all the ones for human consumption into onion sacks.  Onion sacks are breathable mesh and allow air flow to dry them out.  You don't want to wash them - leave them with dirt on them or they may start to rot.  I hang them up in the garage and will leave them there for 2 - 3 weeks.  During this curing period, the starches will convert to sugars, the scratches and scars on the sweet potatoes will heal, and the skins will get a little tougher.

Here are the JUMBOs!  It is hard to see perspective, but these guys are big - too big for any one person to eat.  We cut these up for eating.  Jumbos are the largest in size, but smallest in number from the crop.

Here are the large 'bakers.'  These are the classic, traditional size you see in the produce department.  They are the perfect size for baking, cutting open, and putting a big pat of butter to melt inside.  Maybe you like to sprinkle a dash of cinnamon or two.  We got one full sack of these - the second largest volume grade we harvested.

These are the medium sized ones.  We got two sacks of these - the largest graded amount harvested.  This is the size we primarily peel and mash.  They make great Mashed Sweet Potatoes.  We also cut these up to make Sweet Potato Fries.

And that concludes the sweet potato harvest of 2021.  We'll eat on these for several months.  It still amazes us that we never have to plant them!  They continue to come up every year on their own and bless us with lots of good food.  Oh, before I forget.  I always put them in a tub and weigh them to see how many pounds we harvested.  This year, we harvested 121 pounds of sweet potatoes!  

Sweet Potato Harvest 2021

For the umpteenth year in a row, the sweet potatoes came up on their own and invaded almost a quarter of the space in the garden.  The vines, coaxed by the fertile soil, warm sunshine and an abundance of rain, grew so fast you could almost watch it grow!  The crop originally started from a Beauregard Sweet Potato we buried in the compost pile maybe two decades ago.  It subsequently sprouted and spread across the garden that year and every year since.  Probably 5 - 10 years ago, we planted a Tennessee heirloom sweet potato called, Golden Wonder, and it has done the same.

Each year in October, we harvest the sweet potatoes.  We NEED the space in the garden to plant the fall crop, so the sweet potato vines come up and get fed to the cows.  The sweet potatoes themselves get dug up and then the ground gets worked and seeds get planted - all in one fell swoop.

I might also mention that sweet potato vines have pretty blooms that you can see amongst the vines.

Here is the leaf of a Beauregard Sweet Potato.  It was developed right here in Louisiana.  You can see that it has a readily identifiable heart shaped leaf.  We like these the best.  The flesh is deep orange and sweet.  The tubers are long and fat.

And here is the leaf on the vine of a Golden wonder sweet potato.  Their leaves are more spiked than the Beauregard.  True to its name, the Golden Wonder has flesh that is golden to yellow in color.  The tubers can be long like the Beauregard, but many are more rounded in shape.

The first step is to pull the vines.  Sometimes, the sweet potato will pop right out of the ground.  As the soil improves, that is what is supposed to happen.

Our process works like this:  We pull back the vines for about a four foot by 15 foot area and toss the vines over to the cows and goats to eat.  Those critters love them some sweet potato vines.  They must be sweet because they eat all the leaves first and then devour most of the vines, too.

When the vines are pulled back, sometimes you can spot the sweet potatoes like below:

These are simple.  You give them a tug and most of the time, they pop right out of the ground.  Many times, though, you can't see them and have to dig up the entire area so you don't miss them.

This is just a beautiful Beauregard Sweet Potato!  I'd like to tell you that they were ALL like this, but I'd be pulling your leg.  We'll show you a little more on the different sizes and how we grade them in the post tomorrow.

Here is a Golden Wonder.  Tricia has a preference for the Beauregard variety.  Next year, we will discourage the growth of the Golden Wonders and allow the Beauregard variety to proliferate.  Right now the Golden Wonders are overtaking the Beauregards.

We had a nice harvest this year and will have plenty sweet potatoes to eat over the winter.  They store nicely, so we don't have to worry about them going bad.  Tomorrow, we'll document our grading process, our curing process and document the total weight of the 2021 harvest.

Another Seven Years

When I was a young man growing up on the farm, a guy named Joe worked for my Dad.  He was larger than life in so many ways.  He spoke Cajun French and taught me quite a few words - some I remember today and some of them he probably shouldn't have taught me and aren't fit for polite conversation.  He always had a big wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.  He would mix Levi Garrett with Five Brothers Pipe Tobacco, stick it in his cheek until it was gone.  Serious.  I rarely saw him spit.  He would teach us things like how to be a man, how to be tough, how to work hard.  

He drove an old Ford pickup truck that had a big rusted spot on the door because he would drive with the windows down resting his wet, sweaty arm out the window.  His truck had a spare tire in the bed with a bunch of empty Dr. Pepper cans and assorted tools in the back.  Riding with him, you'd hear the crinkle of aluminum cans moving because he would pick up numerous turtles in the ditches and they would climb slowly around in the bed seeking to escape.  He'd drive to a country store and come out with a honey bun and a Dr. Pepper for us.  

We would laugh and joke throughout the day teasing each other, making a hot, miserable day bearable.  When we did something wrong, he wasn't afraid to give us a good cussing.  In the rare occasions when we did something right, he'd praise us and would be proud of us like we were his kids.  He was very good to us, and I remember him fondly.

I was thinking about him this weekend.  Russ and I were working on a project Saturday at the church that involved moving dirt and working with shovels.  Working on a rice farm, you use a shovel every day.  We would go walking through the fields and cut levees with Joe when it was almost time for harvest.  Cutting levees is a tough job.  Now tractors do it, but back then, we did it with shovels,  He would get on the top side and I'd get on the bottom side and we would cut a ditch in the levee to allow the water to flow from one cut down to the next lower one.  We would continue so on and so forth until we had cut all the levees and the water flowed on out of the field so that the land could dry for harvest.

Inevitably, working together with shovels, he on the top side and me on the bottom, facing each other, our shovels would hit.  "Oh, no!" he'd say, punctuated with a term of endearment that isn't appropriate to write in this day and time, "You know what it means when our shovels hit, don't you?"  "It means we're gonna work together for another seven years."  My son, Russ' shovel and mine hit this weekend.  I instantly thought of that, and I told him the story of what Joe said it meant.  (I hope Russ and I work together for much more that seven more years.)

The old Cajun Creole superstition about working together another seven years didn't turn out to be true for Joe and I, sadly.  It's been a number of years since Joe died.  Dad called me and told me that Joe was driving the tractor and had a stroke and died.  We miss Joe!  The lone shovel stuck in the dirt in the photo above is my memorial to him and his memory.  I still smile when I think of the good times we shared. 

Planting Sugar Snap Peas

A favorite fall vegetable crop of ours is Sugar Snap Peas.  They are a staple in our garden from year to year.  They blanch and freeze well and are delicious in stir fry dishes, soups and Asian dishes and to just eat them raw out standing by the pea trellis.  Once I cleared out the beans from the trellis that were finishing up from the Spring Garden, I reworked one little row to prepare a nice seedbed for this year's Sugar Snap Peas.

I plant them one inch deep and four inches apart right beneath the trellis, which is simply a 16 foot livestock panel placed between t-posts for support.  The soil was covered with mulch and as I raked away the mulch, the ground worked up well, not compacted at all and had good soil moisture.

The peas are dried out, but upon coming in contact with the soil, they'll come to life!

Here is a better photo of the trellis.  If you look closely, you can see the peas in the trench, planted four inches apart.  It is important to have a sturdy trellis as these peas grow tall, exceeding 6 feet.  The plant can be heavy and will blow over in high winds.  Sometimes we have to tie the vines to the trellis.  Once the peas get about 5 inches tall, they send out tendrils.  We walk by and wrap the tendrils around the trellis to train them to climb.  Once latched on, there's no stopping them!

We thought we were all good to go, but then it rained.  And rained and rained.  We never thought it would stop.  All the peas in the ground must have rotted because only 1 sugar snap pea plant germinated!  But that won't slow us down.  As soon as the ground dried up, we replanted from the peas in the same packet.  This time they germinated.  Every last one of them.

The little peas are vigorous and healthy.  Cooler temperatures and beautiful weather have encouraged growth.  Before long we'll pull mulch around the base of the plants to discourage competition from weeds.  Then I'll add some fish emulsion and we'll sit back and watch them grow.

In addition to being delicious to eat, sugar snap peas have beautiful flowers that enhance the garden.  We'll show some photos as the pea crop of 2021 progresses.

Update on Rosie (And Her Injured Teat)

Well it's been two months since Rosie's no good, horrible, very bad day.  In this post: Watch Where You Step! you can see what happened.  For two months now, we've been having to milk out her one quarter once a day since she kicks and won't let her calf, LuLu nurse from it.  It has healed so that there is only a small scab.  She's come a long way, baby.  So you would think that she would let LuLu nurse off it now.  But, no.  She kicks her off.  Perhaps it is habit as we can't understand that it would still be that painful after two months' healing time.  Or the calf is too traumatized to even try after being kicked for two months each time she tries to suck off of that injured teat and now she doesn't even try.

Whatever the reason, we have to put an end to this.  Here's the plan and how it unfolded.  We figured that we would separate LuLu from Rosie all night so she was good and hungry.  Prior to putting LuLu with her, we would cover Rosie's other three teats, leaving the (slightly) injured one exposed, forcing LuLu to go after it.  Sounds like a good plan, right?

We used Tricia's flannel shirt draped over Rosie's bag as the barrier.

We worked to cover up the three uninjured and very full teats so that LuLu could not get to those.

We got some baling twine to tie the shirt tightly to keep it in place.  Not a pretty or professional job, but hopefully a workable one.

Here's where we test things out.  We let LuLu out of the stall.  She runs to her momma, at first confused by the shirt covering up her breakfast.  There's only one teat instead of four.  And it's the one that Rosie doesn't let her nurse on.  What a dilemma!!  Tricia helped to direct her to it.  Rosie kicked.  LuLu kept trying.

It was at an odd angle, so LuLu switched around to the back.  At this angle she was able to get it.  She nursed for a while and it worked!

Unfortunately, the very next morning we found that LuLu DID NOT nurse on the injured quarter.  We'll have to continue working with her.  Hopefully, we'll see a breakthrough soon.

Behold The Hyacinth Bean

Back in early May of this year, I posted about the Hyacinth Bean.  You can click on that hyperlink, if you wish, and read about how we got this interesting, beautiful, and deadly (Gasp!) plant in a seed swap.  We grew the seeds and they grew, slowly at first, but then they spread out, competing with the vines of the luffa gourd to cover the 'tunnel' trellis we created with a fence we bent over.

This would have been a beautiful tunnel, but the goats had other ideas than an aesthetic addition to the garden and promptly stretched their long necks with their feet on the fence and ate the hyacinth bean vines that got close to them.  So a half tunnel trellis it will be.  Thank you, goats.

The purple stems of the hyacinth bean and the purple veins in the leaves make this plant a knockout in the garden.  But the flowers of this plant are stunning, and I'm not a flower guy.

Ain't that something?!  The honeybees buzz around them doing their thing.  I should have some seeds of this beautiful plant to share, just as they were shared with me.  If you are interested, just let me know and I'll send you some.  

But that's not the only pretty thing about this plant.  Once the flowers are done, they put on pods.  Pretty purple pods that contain beans.  The beans are edible, I've read, until they are dried, with a few caveats.  According to THIS POST:

Important Note: Uncooked seeds are poisonous as they contain high concentrations of cyanogenic glucosides. They can cause breathing problems, vomiting problems, and convulsions. They need to be boiled for a long time, changing the water twice, to make them edible. Better to leave the cooking to someone experienced with them and save your seed for planting.

That information makes me pause a little before trying to eat them, but I am curious about how they taste.  If they are that pretty, they must taste good, right?  Sometimes, you gotta take a measured risk.  I think about the guy or gal that ate the first raw oyster.  Or boiled the first crawfish?  What culinary delights we would have missed out on if we allowed fear to guide our decisions?

The jury's still out on if we'll try to eat them.  I'll let you know when/if we do.  Until then, it's a crazy world out there, ya'll HOLD ON!  These two hyacinth beans being entwined by the tendrils of a luffa gourd beautifully illustrate that:

That photo also reminds me of a song I used to like in high school by .38 Special whose lyrics went like this:

You see it all around you
Good lovin' gone bad
And usually it's too late when you
Realize what you had

And my mind goes back to a girl I left
Long years ago who told me

Just hold on loosely
But don't let go
If you cling too tightly
You're gonna lose control

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Saving Okra Seed At Season's End

We're at the very end of okra season.  It seemed like a short season this year.  Usually they produce longer.  I asked Tricia not to pick some of the biggest, prettiest pods on the stalk as I wanted to save them for seed.  You know, that's one of the hard parts of seed-saving - Saving rather than eating the crop.

So we allowed the okra pod to completely dry out on the stalk.  These are Beck's Big Okra, an old heirloom variety.  I had never saved any seeds from them.  My favorite are Clemson Spineless and we also plant Burgundy Okra for some color in the okra patch.  You can see the okra pod is very dry.  In fact, it has split open, and you can see the okra seeds exposed.  If these had been left any longer, some of the seeds would have popped out on the ground, perhaps producing "volunteer" okra next year.

I brought the dried okra pod inside (away from the mosquitoes) and put it on a plate.  I peeled back the okra, allowing the seeds to roll out on the plate so they wouldn't get lost.  A few fell on the floor and rolled off, causing me to search like crazy to find.  I was doing an experiment to see how many okra seeds I could get out of one pod.

Here are a few of the seeds shown close up.  These seeds are very hard.  When it is time to plant them in the late spring, I soak them in water for a day to soften them up to reduce the germination time.

So when I counted all the seeds from that pod, do you know how many I got?  119!  One hundred nineteen seeds.  I'll put those in an old vitamin container where they'll stay dry and in the dark until next year.  I'll plant maybe a quarter of those next year along with some Clemson Spineless and Burgundy okra.  I need to plant a lot more next year to ensure we have enough frozen, chopped okra for "Gumbo Season!"

Coddled Country Eggs for Breakfast

Thirty years ago when Tricia and I were married, we were given a gift of a night's stay in a Bed & Breakfast outside of Leesville, Louisiana.  It was very nice.  For breakfast we were treated to something called Coddled Eggs.  They were delicious!  It seems to be an English dish and coddlers were produced by a company called Royal Worcester since the late 1800's.  Well, when we got back from the B&B we went shopping in Houston and found a porcelain coddler.  However, it was a display model with no box and they weren't discounting it.  We didn't get it!  And we regretted it.  Tricia did find two on eBay and bought them - they were the Royal Worcester brand.  So we were in business.  We enjoy eating making coddled eggs from time to time.

Last week a friend put five egg coddlers on FB Marketplace at a good price and Tricia snagged them.  She told the boys to come for breakfast Sunday before church as she was making coddled eggs and homemade cinnamon rolls.  The egg coddlers hold one egg in each.  The coddler in the center with the peach on it was one we bought on eBay and comes as part of a set - one is a 1-egg coddler and the other holds two eggs.

You can experiment and 'fancy' them up.  Tricia added cheese to some, cilantro to others.  Some she scrambled and some she did not.

If you notice there is a stainless steel threaded ring around the top of the coddler.

There is a cap for each that screws on and each has a ring on the top so that you can lift out of the water.

The egg coddlers are placed in boiling water for about 7 - 8 minutes and then removed.  Coddled eggs are similar to a poached egg.  The white should be solid, with the yolk runny, but unbroken.

Except...  I am particular about eggs.  I don't like them runny!  Tricia does.  My coddled eggs, (I know some will think I ruined them!) were more molded eggs.  The one on the left was scrambled before putting into the coddler with cheese, cilantro and seasonings added.  The one on the right was not scrambled.

I cut into one so that you can see what mine looks like.  How about that homemade cinnamon roll, too!

A delicious little fancy breakfast.  Hard to beat.  The best part of waking up... is egg coddlers in your pot.

A New Creature

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.  2 Corinthians 5:17

I was walking outside last weekend trying to relax.  Work has been on the stressful side lately.  To add to that, the happenings in our country, on both the social front and politically front, are hard to digest.  There have always been disagreements between people from the beginning of time.  The best I can figure, we progressed at some point and got civilized.  Civilization brought with it, the ability to agree to disagree, without duels or shoot-outs.  The classic liberal quote, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it" seems to be lost on us these days.

However, there is still peace out there if you know where to look.  I go outside and look at the Creator's creation.  God can minister to you there, if you listen.  I happened to come upon a neat thing.  We call them locusts, but most other people call them cicadas.  These are big insects that come out of the ground and undergo a metamorphosis.  You can see a brilliant green winged creature emerging from an ugly brown 'shell.'

The winged creature hangs from the shell of the old body that it shed and dries his wings.

The old body it has left behind is just a shell, a temporary dwelling place for the creature that is now moving on to bigger and better things.  The empty body will eventually return to the dust of whence it came.

The winged locust sets his sights now on higher things.  It leaves the old creature behind and focuses above.  He'll fly to the top of the nearest tree and sing.  Loudly.  

What a beautiful illustration of the Christian life.  Once we come to trust Him, we are new creatures.  The old things have passed away.  We were bought with a price by the blood of Jesus.  We are no longer relegated to an old, ordinary life, but a new, extraordinary one.  We will want to serve Him and serve others.  Like the locust, we sing!  We focus on things above, on things holy and pure.  Righteous and just, true and commendable and we sing praises to His Name.  Amen.