swamp carpentry, hand-milking, and catching chickens

It's been a busy two days! I'm torn between wanting to write a bunch every night because I feel like I do so much and learn so much every day, and also not feeling like spending every night in front of the computer swearing profusely at blogspot (mainly the latter.)

Also, the pictures featured in this post will be taken from earlier here at the farm, because I uh...seem to have misplaced my camera in the space-time continuum. It's the darndest thing: last I remember, it was resting on top of my car, happy as clam. Then, after I drive back from the Creamery for lunch (sometimes a girl just really needs a hot sandwich), I can't find it! I mean, I obviously wouldn't be stupid enough to drive off with it on top of my car, but just in case I was I walked along the road for half a mile checking all around. No dice. Which makes me think it just fell into a small time warp and will show up sometime tomorrow, because it certainly hasn't been here the past few days.

In The Week Magazine that I get, there are always these little heart-warming stories at the bottom of the news pages because otherwise it'd be too depressing to read, and without fail every few months there will be a story about some guy that'll go like this "John Mitchell had $6,000 in a bag that he put on top of his car while he was strapping his kid in the child-seat which he then forgot about it. He thought he'd lost the money forever when some 17-year-old who was too stupid to take the money turned it into the police, thus reconfirming everyone's faith in humanity. Hooray!" and I always think "John Mitchell is an idiot. Who drives away with something on top of their car?" Well, now I'm one of those idiots.To all the John Mitchells out there: I'm sorry I judged you.

SO, to continue on like you all just didn't lose a bit of respect for me from the above confession (I could've lied! But I didn't!) yesterday morning instead of doing the normal morning chicken routine (let the chickens out, give them grain and water, take their eggs and clean them) we moved the chicken coop to a different part of the farm for the winter, with all the chickens still inside. To refresh, the chicken coop looks like this:

the thing on the left, not the thing on the right

Man, did they squawk. We only lost one egg in the process though! Quick fact: did you know that chickens eat eggs if they break? Gross, right? Sally says they are the poor man's pig.

The rest of the morning was spent harvesting beans--basically pulling the plants out of the ground to dry on screens over the next few weeks.

Then there was the aforementioned sandwich craving/camera losing, however you want to look at it.

Then in the afternoon, there was swamp carpentry! I mentioned this earlier but never expanded on it. There is a swampy stream on the far end of the garden and we are setting up a little boardwalk across it to have access to the woods back there.

the boardwalk

We are basically just screwing in boards on the sides of the separate components of the boardwalk so it kind of stands on stilts a few inches above the water.

a closer view

It's not my favorite work, we have to stand in the water which is quite cold and the bottom is slimy, and I was pretty bummed about my camera's disappearance, so I had a bit of a down afternoon.

It wasn't so deep in this picture, but yesterday we were up to our waist and it was pretty unpleasant. Luckily it's almost finished now. 

But then! Sally said I could do hand-milking! Dorie's milk isn't quite up to snuff and she's not producing much of it, so it was a perfect time to practice! But first, I had to call in the cows. I kind of always assumed that cows just know when it's time to come in ("until the cows come home"is totally misleading) but no, you have to walk out into the pasture and shake grain at them. So I did that, and they looked up from munching their grass, and looked at me and recognized me as the one that never knows what she's doing, and then promptly went back to munching grass. I shook harder and they ignored me. I tried to sweet talk them and they laughed. OK no not really but it also didn't work. What did work were the chickens! Little did I know that while I was facing the cows and shaking grain, four chickens were running full speed at me from the opposite direction. I don't know if you've ever seen chickens run, but it's pretty funny. But for some reason the cows believe chickens more than me, and then they all started to come in. (No pictures of this because my camera was on hiatus, sadly.)

So, for Dorie I did the typical teat washing and dipping in iodine (didn't get it all over myself--a marked improvement from last time) but then I just sat down on a little stool with a metal bucket started to hand-milk! I was pretty terrible at it. It's hard! As I mentioned before, you make a ring with your pointer finger and thumb and squeeze the top of the teat, then use the other three fingers to squeeze the milk out.  But my hands are a little big and so I have to scrunch my fingers on top of each other, and then the hole that the milk comes out of doesn't necessarily come out straight from the bottom, on one of them it kind of comes out the side so then it hits my fingers and just dribbles into the pail that way. So I had that to worry about, and then the angling, and right as I was building up a rhythm and getting a little bit accumulated in the bucket, Dorie kicked it over and I felt like a really old-timey cliche. So then I tried again, and I never really got good at it which I was a little disappointed about. Sometimes I'd be concentrating hard on my left hand so I didn't realize I hadn't released my right hand to let more milk into the teat. Poor Dorie, but she was a good sport. In the end I probably ended up with a paltry pint. I now have way more respect for bucket-milking (with the machines.) But Sally said that cows that are used to hand-milking would probably be better at letting their milk go and once you got experience hand-milking it wouldn't go so slowly. Stilly, I'm glad I tried it as it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. And I get to cross it off my Bucket List! Ha!

OK that was a lot of text that you may or may not have read in its entirety, so you deserve a picture of something cute:

Tigger! One of the cats.

I'll have a whole post sometime soon (probably on a slow day where nothing else exciting happened) that has tons of gratuitous pictures of the cats.

OK so the story of yesterday is STILL not finished because what happened after milking and after dinner, is that Sally came in and said there was a mini farm emergency. See, she was going to close up the chickens in their coop for the night, but none of them were there (I guess at dark they automatically go into the coop) so Sally checked the field where their coop used to be and, lo and behold, all the chickens were sleeping on top of each other in a big pile right where the coop used to stand.

So, we had to catch them and put them in the right place. It was a funny site, Sally, K, me and Sally's dad all tromping out to the pile of chickens to catch them. The first few were easy to catch because they were either asleep or sleepy, but they figured out what was going on pretty fast. See, to catch a chicken you quickly snatch their legs and pull them into the air. They squawk and might flap a bit, but then I don't know if they get woozy from being upside down or just petrified, but they don't make much noise after that. I caught four, two in each hand, then hauled them off the coop across the farm. When I came back from the first round it was just Sally and me (K the vegetarian "doesn't like holding them like this!" and Sally's dad was overseeing the chickens getting into the coop) stalking the remaining four. I handily got two before I heard a simultaneous thud and loud squawk, only to look over and see Sally lying on top of a chicken. She had tackled and captured it with great success. The last one we couldn't get, so we let it fend for itself for the night.

Running out in a pasture and grabbing chickens has been one of the more entertaining nights I've had here--though it kind of lost its farmy charm when I had to do it again tonight with four chickens that must have amnesia and not remembered the previous night's trauma.

I was going to try and write up today too, but I think this entry is long enough. Thanks for reading, if you read it all!