Milking
The homesteading fantasy so often doesn’t align with the homesteading reality but this morning it was pretty good.
The goats are dry now. We’ve been milking them almost a full year and they need a chance to recuperate before kidding season starts in February and this morning I poured the last drops of goat milk into Willow’s tea. For the first time in a year, we have absolutely no milk in the fridge.
Our jersey cow, Lucy, hasn’t been milked (by humans) since January but she has had her steer, Charlie, nursing (yes, he’s two years old and much bigger than her but he still nurses) and it’s been over three years since she last freshened. As we knew that we were almost out of milk, we separated Lucy and Charlie last night with the intention to milk Lucy this morning and see if she was still making much of anything or were we actually going to have to buy milk. I had hopes but I was also trying to keep a realistic perspective so I wasn’t expecting much.
It was cold this morning as we did our morning chores, the frost painting everything a glistening white. All the animals were happy to see us or, maybe more accurately, their breakfast, and everyone was in the pen or pasture where they were supposed to be (this is usually the case but we always check and we’re always happy when it turns out to be true). Charlie was in pasture 2 with a heavy layer of frost on his thick coat and Lucy was standing in the corner of pasture 1, waiting to come up for breakfast even though the last time we did this routine was in January. She walked up to her stanchion like she’d been doing it every day and patiently ate her breakfast while we gave her udder a good scrub, stripped her teats, put on a thin coat of udder balm, and proceeded to milk her. She wasn’t even remotely full but she was still producing. It only took about 3 or 4 minutes until we had her emptied and this sweet girl that hadn’t been milked in almost a year and hasn’t freshened in over three still gave us almost a gallon of milk. I really love this cow. After milking, we backed her out of the stanchion and walked her back down to the pasture as the smell of wood smoke drifted through the air.