Land Flowing With Milk and Honey

The lights are burning in the barn.  LuLu has been in milk for 14 months now.  We've finally weaned her bull calf, Nick, and he's in the back pasture that we call "the bull pen."  As the cows go into heat, we run them into the bull pen to be with Nick until after they've finished with standing heat.  Our goal is to get Rosie and LuLu bred and the big heifer, Elsie, bred for the first time.  

We're milking LuLu in the morning and at night.  She's not making a whole lot of milk, but we're trying to keep her cleaned out so that she doesn't get mastitis.  LuLu has been a pretty good milker.  Since Nick was weaned, she's making SO much cream.  Sometimes almost half of the bucket is heavy cream!

Here is our inventory in the fridge of LuLu milk.  It's all dated and we use the First in, First out method to make sure it doesn't go bad.  We get real creative with different things to do with milk when we have a good supply like this.

Cream rises to the top, so you can see what I mean about the rich Jersey milk from LuLu.  We skim the cream off the top and shake up the rest.  So delicious!

Lately, we've been making lots of butter and stockpiling it.  Butter freezes nicely, so we're building up stores of butter in the freezer.

We also have more fresh-churned butter in the fridge ready to slather on piping hot sourdough bread.

At some point here pretty soon, we'll dry off LuLu and that means we'll have a break from milking until the cows calve and freshen.  We're still milking Agnes, the goat.  Tricia plans on freezing some of her milk to make some goat milk soap.  We talked about milk tonight.  I've a story to tell you about honey, but I'll save that for another night.