stepwise

Allen will be going off-island tomorrow, so the evening will be my first foray into milking. In the interest of having a clue about the whole thing, I tagged along a couple days ago to take pictures of how things get assembled, used, and cleaned. The contraption pictured above is the claw. I like to think of it as an octopus (note the eight black tubes), but really it’s the claw. Allen has milked the cows so many times (literally thousands) that when he does his routine it seems smooth and doable, but when you break it down stepwise, you realize the complexity. Keeping things clean and consistent is so important, every day in every season – it’s not for the faint of heart. Hopefully I can at least hold my own during amateur hour. I may not be the quickest on my feet, but having grown up with horses I’m not afraid of cows either, and that’s a start.

We now have three lambs on the bottle – one has a mother with mastitis, and the other two were rejected by their mothers. At first, feeding them was fairly laborious. You had to hop the fence, get on your knees in the sheep turds, snag a lamb, secure it between your legs, and coax it to sip from the bottle. The wee ones were not into this, to say the least, and it was hard to tell if they were getting enough. After a few days of this, however, they figured out where the food comes from. Now when somebody approaches the pen they start wiggling their little butts like dogs, bleating enthusiastically, and when offered a bottle they latch on like champions.

Despite a hard frost last night, the greenhouse exodus continues its steady march, with the help of row cover. Last week, broccoli raab, bachelor buttons, and peas got the boot. Also, for the record, those gardening authorities who tell you peas cannot be tranplanted tell you LIES. The ones I direct seeded in March, per the general wisdom, sat dormant and generally rotted in the cold damp soil. So we started the same varieties indoors, and transplanted out three-inch plants along our fencelines. So far, they look pretty good. As long as the hungry bunnies stay away, we should do alright.