reflecting

I am just realizing that the one person who lifted me, encouraged me, and put me priority above much in her life, is now no longer here and I feel her loss. In a selfish way, I miss her admiration of me, which really just served as an encouragement in my life.  I am finding much in my life is falling away in my 50's, which I am not super keen on. But when things fall away it makes room for new things.  This is a general rule in my home... before bringing things in the home we must first take some things out in order to make space.   

This life at 50 something is not what I had imagined it would be at all. I am disappointed if I do say so.  I have now lost my mother-in-law, my father, and the better part of my father-in-law. The best part about my 50's currently is the relationship Eric and I share. Our support and love and care of each other is life-sustaining even in the ache of loss.  I am his and he is mine.  We are and should be the most important person in each other's lives. The other pretty great part of where we are in our lives, is our boys and wives live relatively nearby - a parent couldn't ask for more.  

Even when I feel depleted, I am full. 

Jumping right into blogging again, in the middle of the year after not having written for months, years... feels wrong and disorderly.  However, this is where I am, and I am making peace with not being perfect and orderly; because let's face it... that is not my personality anyway.  

This year, 2018 has held many unwanted, and unwelcome happenings.  We have found ourselves walking through the news of poor health or unknown health issues in many of our family members, to divorce to death.  In a word, a not-so-nice word, it has been a shitty year.  If I were to stop there and just live there for a while I would not be worth much to anyone. So even though I do not understand any of it, I choose not to live in the mindset of thinking about how poorly our year has gone.  I must choose to count my blessings.

This past week we were invited to dinner with our oldest son, Robert  and his beautiful wife Renee to help celebrate a promotion he had just learned of.  We met them the following day at a favorite local restaurant to dine and celebrate.   Eric and I were given a gift to open as they arrived.   

YES!  We are going to be GRAND PARENTS!  What a grand thing!! We are freaking over the moon thrilled! 

Dairy Routine at Erilyn Farms

And POOF, just like that our lives changed again!   Seriously though. Those who think that farmers and farming life is all glamorous do not know the ins and outs of a farmers life at all. Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining. Just stating the facts.  We are up at 6:30AM each day whether we want to be or not.  Full udders wont wait, nor should they have to.  

Eric is the milk maid here at Erilyn Farms, I am simply his helper.  You can see the plumbing on the wall to the left of him - yeh he is a plumber as well.  Oh, did I mention he rewired the whole barn and installed new lights where none were before - yeh he is an electrician as well.   Oh... that table behind him made from reclaimed barnwood... yeh he is a carpenter as too.   The truth is I have a dear husband with MANY talents and gifts, he can pretty much do anything. 

The little calf is still with Fiona (the momma) during the day hours on pasture, but is sleeping in his own stall in the barn each night.  With this routine, he is no longer nursing after 7PM each night.  From 7PM until 7AM she is nurse free, leaving a full udder each morning.   Next Thursday (June 9th) he will be 4 weeks old and at that time he will no longer be on pasture with Fiona at all.  This change will take us to a morning milking and an evening milking.  The baby calf will still get nourishment from his beautiful momma, but through being bottle fed as well as forage in his own pasture.  On our morning milking we are collecting a little over a gallon of milk each day, and the baby calf cleans her up afterwards milking her out completely.   That amount will likely double once we take the calf off of her. 

WE are using the Kleen Flo Bucket Milker 

Little Man waiting in the stall for his sweet momma!

Our daily routine for milking only consist of :  sanitizing the milker, rinsing the milker, wiping Fiona's udder down as well as each teat, dipping her teats before putting her on the machine, preparing her food that she will eat as she is getting milked, getting her in the shoot and setting her teats up on the machine for milking, THEN  clean her stall out while she is being milked, clean and sanitize the stainless steel pail for transferring milk to the house for bottling, filling her hay baskets up, replenishing her water buckets, getting little man ready to nurser her out after we have completed the milking.  FINALLY - transfer milk from milker, milker has to be cleaned  and set aside for next milking.

Then we tend to our other farm animals. I would like for this to be done on a quicker time scale, but for now it takes us a little over an hour and a half.   We are so blessed!

Meet.... um... Baby Calf

A few days after our donkey, Gavin arrived here on the farm Fiona was preparing for her forthcoming calf.  For several days leading up to the birth of the little bull calf, we dreadfully set our alarms for every two hours throughout the night and into the mornings.  On Thursday EARLY morning on my third trip out to the barn to check on Fiona's progress I found her with a little hoof having been birthed.  I immediately called Eric to give him the exciting news!!  By the time he reached the barn, I realized we only had one hoof and a nose, not two hoofs and a nose as it should have been.

Yes, you guessed it, we had to intervene and help Fiona out.  We waited a bit to make sure she needed our assistance before scrubbing up and going in.   After pushing and making no progress we made the decision to assist.  I was a bit frightened because the little calf's tongue was hanging off to the side of its mouth and I had never seen this before. Of course, I was assured by our friend Bob, who is a dairy farmer, that this was perfectly normal!  Whew!   After some careful reaching around, I finally was able to feel the calf's other front leg.  I carefully pushed the other foot and head back so I could realign the two front feet along with the head so birthing could go smoothly. Once that bit of help was done, Fiona pushed on her next contraction and we had a baby calf on the ground!

Meet Gavin

We started our small farming efforts in 2010 here at our homestead in Northwest Florida with 6 tiny poults.   A month or so later we added 3 Californian/New Zealand rabbits to the mix and really from there I have sort of lost count and track of what animals have come and gone!   We went from just a few hens to supply our table to a large flock that now feeds not only us but many families who are seeking more wholesome clean food options.   Over the last few years we have had some loss to our flocks along the way.   These are the realities of farm life, as hard as it is sometimes.

We went out to the barn one morning this past month to find 7 of our beautiful plump meat birds slaughtered and laying all over their pasture - from corner to corner was carnage.   I was livid. I work hard to raise good clean meat for our freezer, for not only us but also our grown children and their families.  To have this kind of loss was unbelievable and made me heartsick.    Through the years of farming here at Erilyn Farms we have had to increase the strength of our fences, with a smaller mesh so predators were deterred; we even had a beautiful guardian dog at one time.  He was one of the sweetest, most loving dogs you would ever hope to meet.  He was not really concerned with guarding however. So soon we found that it was necessary to rehome him.   We have been without a guardian for our flocks since.  

In order to keep foxes, coyotes, and opossums etc away we made the decision to seek out a candidate for that job!  We found him!

Meet Gavin White Hawk, isn't he gorgeous?!  Eric and  I went to meet Gavin a few days ago, and surely we fell in love with him at first sight!  Today we brought him to his forever home, here at the farm.

Days of May at Erilyn Farm

Today as I did a walk about here at Erilyn Farm, I took my macro lens along with me and snapped a few pictures here and there. It is a lovely time to get some macro shots with so many things in bloom!  Our veggies are finally putting on fruits, the weather had been so strangely cool that the poor plants didn't know if they should grow or not.

We have some not so pretty news, but hopefully the allure of these gorgeous blooms will help balance it all out!  We recently moved our meat birds into one of our vacant pastured areas. All was well. THEN one morning when we went out for feeding, over half of our meat birds were all over the area... So all of that to say we found ourselves in need of some type of guardian for our farm.

We started our search for a donkey for Erilyn Farm and within a few weeks of not finding anything, I posted a LOOKING FOR post on a few groups on good ole FaceBook.  Within just a few hours, I had a response.  We are having the pleasure and privilege of taking in a beautiful gentle donkey!  More on him later!

We have a lot of exciting news that will be coming at you right here, very soon.