The cow and the girl

Now that John is working even further North, with an even longer drive to and fro, Lady Astor and I are back to milking alone.

She is very well behaved now and I find myself sinking into that lovely alone time that is induced by the quiet noise of the barn and the one little light in the ceiling of the cow shed and as the sun goes down the cow and the girl become more and more isolated from the world. The young people are rattling about in the kitchen. The dogs are lying quietly in their corners. The cats watch from their customary perches and the peacocks are in the rafters gently positioning themselves for sleep. The animals are making their beds and circling their tails and gently the cow and the girl go about the ritual of milking. The pump hums along and the milk flows with through sparkly clean hoses into the tank. After we are done I let Lady back out into her field with a satidfied pat on her rump and then I divide the milk up.

One bucket is for the plonkers (this one is taken to the house to be mixed with all the leftovers from the dinner, a dozen eggs and a good portion of yoghurt and fed on the ‘morrow). One pot of milk is for the house.   The basins are filled for the cats and Boo, who waits with such patience for his portion. He makes sure that NO cat sticks her dirty face into the house buckets or the pig bucket.  He is very strict about this. He does not growl or anything he just moves his head in the way, glares at the cat, the cat backs down and Boo sits  again waiting for the proper basins to be filled. Two small blue feeder buckets await the calves ration. Little is big enough to have a bucket now, once a day (and he is eating much better out in the field and I think his cough is less) I place left over oats from Lady Asters treats into the bottom of each calf bucket and pour in the warm milk. This way they spend quite some time over their dinner and forget to try to steal someone else’s allowing me to get back to the work of cleaning up the cow shed.

Once all the lines have been cleaned and the milking bucket and paraphernalia are sterilised I take the house milk up to the house, strain it and pop it in the fridge.  The next day I skim off the cream and pour the skimmed milk into the glass bottles I keep for the house milk.

I like the milking. I like the focus of it. Even when the soles of my feet ache from a day on them – when I am milking every ache disappears, every other thought is gone. It is just the girl and her cow now.

The Plonkers eat huge lunches at the moment. 

and are growing fast. They have ransacked their field, in the spring it will be replanted in alfalfa for the next team of Plonkers to have the following year.  

I hope you have a lovely day.

celi