Goosed!

Goosey Goosey Gander where shall I wander,
Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber
There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers,
I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs.

Yesterday, Androo and I went to an Amish farm near Nappanee and picked up our geese.  Andrew got two ganders and a goose, I got a pair.  We stopped at my place first and managed to wrest the pair out of the cage in Androo's car.  Driving 35 miles home with five geese in a cage was an experience.  I will spare you ALL of the details, but it was noisy!

My two geese took off, wandering around and honking mightily.  It scared the calf.  I had buttoned up the chickens first, since I didn't really want to deal with a poultry competition.  The two of them seemed okay.  I let the dogs out.  Tashi ran at them, but I commanded "leave it" and she left them alone, came back to my side.  Then the geese headed down towards the creek.  One took off to the east, the other to the west.  

I didn't see them again.

I slept poorly, waking up several times and wishing I had put them in the barn just for the first night.  This morning at daybreak, I heard a goose honking.   I think it was the gander (the guy).  He was honking at his reflection in my sliding glass door onto the lower level patio.  I went outside and he ran from me, but hung around the patio door for about a half hour.  Then he disappeared again.  I suppose he is looking for his mate. 

I hope they find each other.  And that they both find the farm!!

Oh, happy day!

This morning at about 7:15 a.m., Blackie gave birth to a healthy heifer calf.  Mom and babe are doing fine. Note that Daddy Sam is in the top picture.  Aren't genetics funny?  Daddy is a Guernsey, Mom is 3/4 Dutch Belted (but without the belt), and along comes daughter with her own unique markings!  So much white on her - big surprise!

She is already running.  She has gotten shocked by an electric fence.  Sounds bad, I know, but if she hadn't, she would be running around in the wetlands about now, as that is where she was headed.  If she had made it under that fence, we would have had a merry chase on our hands!

Kathy came down to help me get her moved to the nursing pen.  I will check hourly today to make sure that the calf suckles. We will keep an eye on both of them there for three days.  There is a small shelter in the nursing pen just in case it rains.  But this little darling is so big and so robust that I think she will just dance in the rain!

More sad news . . .

We have been waiting anxiously for Lucky's calf.  We raised Lucky from a calf - she is out of Rosie - and were anticipating becoming "grandparents."

Saturday morning, as I was nearing Madison, WI to attend a raw milk symposium, I got a call from Androo.  He told me that Lucky had had her calf, but he feared it was dead.  The body was getting cold.  Even though I knew it was hopeless, I told him to try to clear the calf's throat, breathe into its mouth and call me back.

He did all three.  There was a blockage in the calf's throat, which he removed.  He covered the nostrils and tried to get some breath into it.  He called to tell me he was sure the calf was dead.  It was a very large bull calf.  Perhaps if one of us had been there as Lucky was having the calf we might have saved him, but it was not to be.  Androo buried him near the creek.

Rest in peace, little boy.

The bias against raw milk.

Eighteen people in southern Michigan recently became ill with campylobacter.  All 18 of them had drunk raw milk from a CSA that gets their milk from a farmer in Middlebury, IN.   "CSA" stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  The CSA members are shareholders in the dairy herd that provides the milk, and so can legally drink milk from their own cows.

There are 900 families in this CSA, representing a few thousand people who drink this milk.  Let's say that each family consists on average of three people.  That is 2700 people getting this milk.  Eighteen people got campylobacter.  Two thousand six hundred and eighty-two of them didn't.  The milk was immediately tested.  It tested negative for campylobacter.

As usual, the government inspectors, in all of their wisdom, said, "It's the raw milk.  Case closed."  Even though there was no campylobacter in the milk, even though the vast majority of the people who drank this milk remained healthy, it had to be the milk.

Of the 18 people who were ill, eleven of them attended a potluck where Caesar Salad, made with raw egg, was served.  No eggs were tested.  As I said, the case was closed, the culprit identified, and no official looked any further.  It is said that as many as 70% of supermarket chickens contain campylobacter.  We all know to cook chicken thoroughly, but what if the cutting board isn't properly cleaned and then is used to cut up an onion for a salad, or a knife is accidentally used without being thoroughly washed after touching raw chicken?  None of those things were looked into.

Between 1990 and 2004, a CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest) report shows a much greater risk from consuming the following foods:

31,496 illnesses, 639 outbreaks from produce (38%)
16,280 illnesses, 541 outbreaks from poultry (20%)
13,220 illnesses, 467 outbreaks from beef (16%)
11,027 illnesses, 341 outbreaks from eggs (13%)
9,969 illnesses, 984 outbreaks from seafood (12%)

And yet raw milk remains the "problem child."  

Here are some more statistics I looked up after this latest attack on raw milk.  I was interviewed by a local TV station, I read these statistics during the interview, and they were ignored of course.  Why did I think it would be any different?  Anyway, chew on these figures.

Since 1992, here are some causes of death in the US.

Raw milk - 2
Radish sprouts - 3
Spinach - 5
PASTEURIZED milk - 620
Automobile accidents - About 680,000
Alcohol related illnesses - About 300,000
Alcohol related accidents, homicides and suicides (some of these are included in auto accidents) - About 400,000
Deaths related to smoking - About 7,225,000

If you are worried about drinking raw milk because you think it might kill you, I will ask if you are driving a car, if you smoke or spend time around people who are smoking, if you take a drink every now and then.  I will also ask if you are eating produce, poultry, beef, eggs and seafood. And finally, are you consuming pasteurized milk, spinach and radish sprouts?  If you can answer "no" to all of these questions, then I suppose maybe you had better stay away from raw milk.

Now I am going to the kitchen and having my morning glass of homemade raw milk kefir.  Ah, the stuff of life!

Losing things

I bought a great new camera that has been taking the pictures for this blog for the past three months.  It is lost.  I cannot remember the last time I had it, but it would have been fairly recent.  Thank goodness I upload my pictures frequently, so if it never shows up again, at least the pictures are safely copied to my hard drive - except of course for the last few pics I took.  I wish I could remember what they were.  It might give me a clue.

I will have to lose something else in order to find it.  My Nourishing Traditions book has been lost for a couple of months.  I found it tonight while looking for the camera.

So I will need to lose something else that is equally as important, and when I am trying to find it, there will be the camera - I hope.

Tonight's picture was taken with my old camera.  It isn't dark because of any fault of the camera.  It is that it is late, and the light isn't very good in the greenhouse.  It is after 10:00 pm and I just got in the house.  Both Androo and Allen helped me tonight.  Even with their help, there is still a long way to go.

There was only one compensation.

Tonight the neighbor brought me 86 bales of straw to use for mulch in my garden.  He gave me a good price, and included delivery.  I told him I would have someone there to help unload it.  Allen said he could come over and help.  It was a good thing, because Androo was milking tonight, and it was the first time since the milk cows, the three pregnant heifers and the yearlings were all together.  How would he sort out the five milkers from eleven animals, he wondered?  I told him I would help.  And of course, that was the exact time the neighbor showed up with the straw.

I went down to the garden and showed Kevin and Allen where to put the straw.  I walked over to a spot south of the compost heap and pointed with my toe.  Then I joined Androo to bring in the animals.  By the time I got down to the garden, they were on the last few bales.  They didn't stack them where I indicated they should go; the neighbor, in his infinite wisdom, decided to stack them within a few feet of the fence - a fence that was installed to keep the chickens out of the garden.

The pile of bales is about five feet tall; the fence around the garden is about six feet tall.  There were several chickens running around on the bales of straw.  Why none of them went over the fence I will never know.  I went to the house grumbling to myself.  Then I decided that the bales had to be moved - and right now.  If just one chicken figured out that the bales were a great launching pad to get to the dinner in the garden, it would be all over.  They can easily fly over a six foot fence, but they have enough to eat without that much effort.  But now, of course, they were provided with a beautiful ladder of straw!

I went down to the garden and began moving bales.  Androo came down and helped with the last dozen or so.  I was really grumpy.

But then I came in the house and steamed the first stems of asparagus out of my garden while I whipped up some homemade Hollandaise sauce.  Yes, that was compensation enough at the end of a frustrating evening.

Exhaustion is setting in . . .

There seems to be no end to the work.  I don't know where to begin - or when to stop.

I truly do try to make Sunday my day of rest.  I didn't do too badly.  Went to church, then visited with a good friend afterward.  She has the most wonderful strawberry bed, and mine took a hit during the winter of 2009, with temperatures reaching 26º below zero.  I left her place with about 30 plants.  Okay, that is another job, isn't it?  But when I came home, I didn't plant strawberries because I realized that I had forgotten to plant more basil on the last "leaf" day.  I had a half hour before the calendar said it was time for "fruit," so I ran out to the greenhouse and put in enough seeds for about 200 pots of basil, three stems to a pot.  By the time I was done, calendar had flipped to "fruit" and I began potting up tomato seedlings.  I had to print up labels and then was interrupted by another leak in the water line that had to be dealt with immediately.  In the end, I only got 60 tomato plants potted up.  There are about 1,500 more waiting for me.  Sigh . . .

Potatoes will go in Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, root days.  I'm going back to Phyllis's for our monthly handwork circle, a pleasant time, always.  I'm knitting a pair of socks - well, I'm only knitting ONE sock right now.  Two at once would be quite a feet - I'm mean feat - wouldn't you say?  Androo will be planting the last of the Ailsa Craig onions that we started in the atrium in January while I am relaxing with my friends.  There have to be a few days like that, hey?

It is raining a bit again.  Perfect weather for all of those plants we put in on Friday.  While I wish I could call on the elves to plant and seed while I sleep, I will settle for the continued cooperation of Mother Nature.