Vacuum Pump and Pulsator Rebuild

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Mike

A little over a week ago we had a little problem with the new (new to us) vacuum pump that we bought for our milker. With some help from a very generous professional the pump was taken apart to find out what was wrong. Apparently the carbon vanes had broken. We cleaned up the pump, I ordered new vanes and while waiting for the part we milked by hand. The new vanes came UPS yesterday and I spent a little time installing the new rotor vanes in the vacuum pump. To my surprise it worked when I turned it on!

Pulsator Going Back Together

Pulsator Going Back Together

Unfortunately, when we tried to use the milker this morning the pulsator did not work for some reason. When we bought the milkers I also bought a kit to rebuild a pulsator. So I sat down this evening and following the instructions I took the pulsator apart, cleaned it, replaced the worn out parts, and put the whole thing back together without any extra pieces being left over. It was very interesting to see how the thing was made and put together. After putting it all back together I put the pulsator on the milker, hooked up the vacuum pump and turned it on. It worked! Tarena helped me test it by putting her fingers in the inflations and each time the inflations squeezed she would say “Ow”. “Ow…Ow…Ow…Ow…” and we have ourselves a working milker again.

My plan is to rebuild the second pulsator tomorrow, I would have done it tonight but I ran out of Brakleen for cleaning the pulsator parts. We will then have two working milkers, with new rubber, and newly rebuilt pulsators. One milker for regular use and one in reserve in case of breakage or emergency. Now if I can figure out a good backup for the vacuum pump I will be set.

Posted in Equipment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Our New Milker Sucks… Really Well

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Mike

Vacuum Pump

Vacuum Pump

When we first got our cow we tried milking by hand. Milking by hand was a good experience. Now we know how to milk if there is no power, it is also very easy to clean up since you only have the bucket and the filter to clean. Unfortunately it takes a lot of work to do the milking, and while you are milking there is a lot of ways to get stuff falling into the bucket, like cow hairs, mosquitoes, and cow pie bits. If certain things fall in, it does not matter how many time you filter it you just won’t want to use it, making the whole milking a waste.

We decided this time when the cow freshened that we would get a milker. When the cow did freshen we were not ready to buy the milker, but a neighbor was kind enough to loan us their milker for a while. Having the milker through the winter was great. It did a great job keeping the milk clean, but the milker was difficult for us to clean. Our neighbor has a sink in his barn where they milk and they are able to clean it right out in the barn. We needed to haul water out to the barn to clean it which was a pain. Our neighbor has a wood stove burning in the tack room of the barn where they keep the milker, we had frozen hoses several times which made us start taking all the hoses, bucket, and claw into the house after each milking.

The milking was a fairly long process. A couple buckets would be filled with hot soapy water. The milker bucket, hoses, and claw would be hauled out to the barn. The cow would be hooked up and milked. After milking, the milking bucket would be taken in the house and the milk would be filtered and put in containers. Then the milk bucket and bucket of soapy water would be taken back to the barn. The milker would be washed and the dirty water emptied. The bucket would be rinsed and filled with water again, hauled out to the barn. The milker then would be rinsed and rinse water would be emptied. The wash bucket, milk bucket, hoses and claw would then be hauled back into the house and the filter would be cleaned. The reason everything had to be taken out to the barn is that the vacuum pump is very heavy and would be impossible for one person to get in and out of the house.

Surge Bucket Milker

Surge Bucket Milker

We are very grateful to our neighbor for loaning us the milker. It let us have good clean milk. It also helped us make decisions as to what we wanted in a milker. We wanted a milker with no long hoses. We wanted a milker that could be cleaned in the house without the use of the vacuum pump. We wanted a milker that was easy to use and easy to carry in and out.

We decided to buy a surge bucket milker. There was a small problem though, production of surge bucket milkers ended in 1999. I started bidding on old, used surge milkers on ebay. By the time I was done bidding I had one mostly working milker (all that was needed was to replace the inflations) and another that needs a few parts worked on. I also bought a small, very portable vacuum pump which will stay in the barn on a shelf Sean and I built for it.

The new milker really sucks! It works really well and milks very quickly. It is easy to get back and forth from the barn. It is easy to clean. It has no long hoses. It keeps the milk clean. We are very pleased with the purchase and would recommend the setup for anyone that has only one or two cows to milk. The surge bucket milker is great.

Posted in Cows, Farm | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

My Bovine Birthday Present

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Mike

Calf

Calf

Yesterday was my birthday, and the day started out with a great surprise birthday present. It really was not a total surprise. We have been expecting a calf for several weeks now, and it arrived early in the morning on my birthday.

Being new to animal husbandry we waited longer than we should have before introducing Rose, our dairy shorthorn, to a bull last winter. Our neighbor was very generous and brought his black angus bull over to visit Rose in our field. We kept him here for a couple of months to make sure that there was plenty of time for Rose to become pregnant.

We probably were not as vigilant, or nosy as we should have been. We probably should have calculated the number of days in the pregnancy better than we did. We dried Rose up in the beginning of August to let her build up her strength and fatten up a bit. We were expecting Rose to calve around the last week of September. The September date came and went. We thought she looked plenty fat, but this was our first time doing this so what did we know?

We started getting worried around the middle of October. She was fat but still no calf. We started thinking she might not really be pregnant. We asked our neighbor who owns and runs a dairy to come take a look at Rose. He taught us how to “bump” Rose and Tani and I were able to actually feel the calf! It was pretty neat to learn how to test to see if she was pregnant, and it was a relief to be able to stop wondering if there was going to be a calf.

Here we are a few weeks later with a cute little heifer, and both mother and calf are nice and healthy. We are looking forward to milking again. Fresh milk, home made butter, yogurt and cheese! What a great birthday present.

Posted in Cows | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Green Tomato __Fill-in-the-Blank__

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Mike

I love the fall in our little valley. It is just beautiful with the fields gold and green, and the trees yellow and orange. We have been spending some time making sure that everything in the barn and garage is organized so that when things freeze to the floor they are where we want them. We also are cleaning up the yard and garden and since we have moved up here we have run into the same problem. There are tons of green tomatoes on the vine. I am going to pen lyrics to a garden shanty called “What Shall We Do with a Green Tomato?” that can be sung each fall at this time.

Last year we tried pulling up all the plants and bringing them inside. We hung them upside down in the storage room and waited for them to turn red. They did turn red after a while and we were able to use them. This did create some mess with dirt tracked in and tomatoes that fell to the floor and went splat.

This year we opted for going out and picking all the green tomatoes off the vine. There must be ways to use them. Only frying them came to mind, and only because I had heard of it as a title of a movie. After searching the web we have found some ideas that we have never tried and we decided to experiment and see if our family liked any of them.

Fried Green Tomatoes

I decided that we would try the first recipe that I found on the internet. I did a quick Google search and pulled up a recipe from Simply Recipes. The fried green tomatoes were pretty easy to make and we ate them with some spaghetti that we were making for dinner. They turned out to be really good, everybody in the family thought that they were pretty good. Jeremy Gardner was visiting and even he (a disliker of tomatoes) said that they were good.

Salsa and Piccalilli

Salsa and Piccalilli

Green Tomato Salsa

We made two different green tomato salsas. The first salsa we made was a fresh salsa following a recipe that sounded good at recipetips . It was darn good too. Once again Jeremy Gardner said that it was good and was surprised that, as a disliker of tomatoes, he was liking the green tomato experiments so much.

The other salsa we made for canning. We used a recipe that was posted on a garden forum. We bottled the salsa and we sampled the salsa that did not fit in the bottles. It was very mild but tasted pretty good. Sean said that we could blend it up and use it as enchilada sauce on chicken enchiladas, which I think would be really good.

Piccalilli

We also made Piccalilli, which is something that I had never heard of before I ran across a recipe when searching for things to do with green tomatoes. At suite101 there were several ideas of things to make with green tomatoes and one was piccalilli. It turned out to be very tasty. We ate the portion that did not fit in bottles along with some grilled chicken and it was really good. The family thought that it would be good on hot dogs so we will have to try that soon. I was very pleased with the piccalilli, it tasted good and is very nice looking in the bottles too.

Green Tomato Raspberry Jam and Strawberry Jam

This one sounded very interesting and was really easy to make so we just had to try it. This recipe I found at allrecipes and there were a lot of good reviews. I have not tried it yet, but Sean and Tani both said it was pretty good. I’ll have to add a comment when we break open a jar and try it.

Enchilada Sauce

Enchilada Sauce

Enchilada Sauce

We were given a recipe from a friend for green enchilada sauce using green tomatoes. This turned out really good and I think I almost single handedly finished off the stuff that did not fit in bottles. I got a plate of corn chips and melted cheddar on them and dipped them in this sauce for lunch one day. It was really tasty! I can’t wait to make enchiladas with this for dinner one night.

We had to give up on trying to make things out of green tomatoes because the tomatoes have now either turned red, or turned black. I did not know that so much could be made with green tomatoes and look forward to trying some new experiments with green tomatoes next fall when the cold cuts the life of our tomato plants short.

Posted in Food, Garden | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Johnny Appleseed

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Mike

Johnny Appleseed, for various reasons, has a holiday set aside for him on two different days. One of those days is in March and the other date is September 26th. Our family has made the decision to recognize September 26th as Johnny Appleseed day because it is his birthday, because September is a time to start picking and preserving apples in our little valley, because we like apples and because it seemed like a fun thing to celebrate.

Apples

Apples

Through the generosity of some friends we had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, to go and pick apples at an apple orchard. The apples were ripe and beautiful and we did not actually need to pick them off the tree, the apples were just itching to fall off the tree so we did a lot of picking them off the ground. We did try putting ground cloths down on the ground and shaking the trees to get the apples off, which worked really well and we cleared a tree in just a few minutes. Most of the apples came from the ground though and they were wonderful.

Next came the step of preserving the apples. Apples are awesome, there are tons of ways to preserve them. Our first thought was to dry some and to make applesauce. We dried some apples and we made a bunch of applesauce which we like a lot. We especially like eating applesauce with our home grown pork chops. I had never had pork chops and applesauce until, as a kid, I saw Peter Brady imitating Bogart saying “pork chaawpsh, and apple shaush”. I remember asking my mom if we could have that for dinner, and ever since it is hard to eat them separately.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We had a lot more apples and decided that we would make apple butter. I thought that sounded great, I like apples and I like butter so apple butter would be awesome. It is awesome, but let me pass on something I learned. Apple butter has no butter in it. I was shocked! Honey butter has honey in it, but not apple butter. Apparently the term “butter” refers to the thick, soft consistency. Now that I think about it this also explains peanut butter. Besides, I can always butter the bread before putting on the apple butter.

With still more apples left I thought apple jelly would be good. On the rare occasions that I have had breakfast in restaurants I like to put apple jelly on the buttered toast that is brought out with the breakfast. We found a recipe on the internet for apple jelly and decided to give it a try.

With some hot bread, butter, apple butter, apple jelly and applesauce and a little help from Disney’s American Legends our Johnny Appleseed celebration is complete. We can enjoy a show loosely based on the man who was an American legend in his own time, and enjoy the products of the fruit he championed. The family thinks that next year for Johnny Appleseed day we should have apple pie, and apple cake and that we should plant an apple tree. I think Johnny Appleseed would approve of that.

Posted in Family, Farm, Food | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Mike

Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam

Spam, Bacon, Sausage and Spam

We bought four weaner pigs today, and according to long-standing tradition (long-standing being three years) we named them Spam, Bacon, Sausage, and Spam.  Since we moved here we have raised some pigs each year. We raise a couple pigs for our family and for friends that would like a pig that is raised on a local farm, fed good food and that is treated humanely. This year in addition to the pigs for our family we are raising one for my friend Mike and one for my friend Steve.

When I was young I helped raise rabbits for food. I would raise the rabbits and my dad would do the rest. I don’t remember it being a big deal to me but I suspect that it was hard for my sister and brother. When we started raising animals, here at our little farm, that would eventually be harvested for food we were a little worried about how the kids would handle it and if it would bother them. From that worry we gave the animals names that would make it clear what our intention was and help them not become attached and make it a pet. That worry and a little Monty Python and the pigs got their names, the same names they get each year.

Our first spring here we bought some chickens. We bought some for laying and we bought some that would be good for meat. By the end of the summer it was time to harvest the meat birds and so I got twine, the axe and the log stump and went out behind the barn with the birds and told the girls to stay away. Their curiosity was to much for them though and I finally had to give in and let them see. A week or so later we were eating chicken for dinner and the girls asked if this was our chicken, and we told them that is was not one of ours and they responded with an “Awwwwwwww” of disappointment. We have not been as worried about them becoming too attached to the non pets since then.

As I have mentioned in other posts, our garden has a large amount of clay soil in it. In an attempt to help our garden soil Sean and I built a pen out of pallets in our garden area. We are hoping that as the pigs root it the garden area that we are experimenting with they will till the area really well, eat all the grass and weed roots, spread compost about and also fertilize the area. If the experiment works well we will be able to move the pen to expand the garden next year. I am excited to see if this idea works.

Posted in Pigs | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Preserving the Harvest

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Mike

Zucchini is an amazing fruit. We planted one zucchini plant in our garden this year and it tried to feed our family of eight single-handedly. We had our first freeze in our little valley yesterday and sadly it looks like our friend and provider is on its last leg. That death is but a short separation though for next week we will have zucchini bread and maybe in January we will have that great chocolate zucchini cake that Tani makes. That is right, through the wonder of preserving we will be able to eat Britain’s 10th favorite culinary vegetable all winter and maybe even past the time for planting the next zucchini.

We have had a great summer. We have been blessed, and our neighbors have been blessed, with a bountiful harvest. We have green beans, tomatoes, peppers, corn, beets, chard, garlic and zucchini of course. We have purchased peaches, and tomatoes from local farmers and excellent potatoes from farmers in nearby Grace Idaho. We have also been able to pick apricots, apples and cherries from generous friends and neighbors. Of course you have to eat it fresh when you can, but canning and freezing allow you to enjoy the food and the low prices throughout the winter.

Potatoes

Potatoes

We have a small room that is about ten feet square that has walls all made of cement with a sand floor and only a small hole in one of the walls for access. Last year we started using it for a cold room and storing our potatoes in it. We made it about five months before the potatoes started sprouting and a month after that the few that we had left had shriveled up. This year we bought a few more than last year and will be able to use them more liberally during the winter. We also hope to prolong the storage by not storing the onions with the potatoes which I have been told is not a good thing.

The garlic has dried and some has been set aside to plant and the rest ready to store in the basement. I have thought about pickling some garlic and maybe trying to make some garlic powder. I have also read an article about freezing the garlic shortly after crushing it which sounded interesting so I may try that also.

The cherries, peaches, and beans have been bottled. The apricots have been made into yummy apricot syrup. Tani has also bottled pinto beans, black beans, and kidney beans which is great because you can go to the storage room and grab a bottle or two of beans to make chili or soup and not worry about soaking the beans the night before.

We have frozen chicken and bottles of chicken that we canned when we were able to buy it for a great deal. We have bottles of deer meat that Tani bottled when we were able to get deer meat from a friend. We bought more than 80 pounds of bananas a month or so ago when local stores had an awesome deal on them. They are now frozen, or dried and stored.

Why go through the work to can this food when you can go to the store and pick a can of beans off the shelf?  Why make all the effort to plan and freeze when you can get a “fresh” tomato at the store all year round? It saves us money by freeing us from trips to the store. It makes us more self reliant and less fearful in strange economic times. I think that it is environmentally friendly, reusable containers, no jet fuel used, less car fuel used in shipping. Preserving the harvest lets our family enjoy our bountiful harvest all winter.

Posted in Food, Garden | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sweeeeeeet!

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Mike

Frame of Honey

Frame of Honey

It is time to start harvesting honey from my bee hives. This year is the first time that I have had honey to harvest. Last year I started one hive, but for some reason they would not get started making honey for me. This year that hive has filled two honey supers although one of them is not fully capped yet. In the spring of this year I started two new hives and one of those hives has produced a full honey super and another that is nearly full, while the other has one super that is about half full but will probably not be able to get it capped before I need to close the hives for the winter.

My plan has been to harvest both the honey and the wax. I decided to figure out a way to harvest the honey and wax simply and without the use of the usual honey extraction methods that require a machine for spinning the honey out of the wax comb. I did a lot of searching on the internet and reading experiences from other beekeepers and using the information I found I came up with a method that I thought would work, and so far it has.

I bought the following items for my honey extraction system:

Extracting Honey

Extracting Honey

I built a frame out of a 1×2 that would sit on the edges of a five gallon bucket. I then covered one side of it with the wire mesh. I also drilled a hole in the side of a five gallon bucket near the bottom and inserted the plastic gate. With those two things done I felt I was ready to get started.

I put the coarse filter in the top of one of the five gallon buckets and placed my frame with wire mesh on top of that. Then I got Tani and Sean to help and we cut the comb out and let it drop in the wire mesh frame. Tani and I pushed the comb through the wire mesh where it fell into the filter. Sean would take the empty honey frames out and set them near our swarm hive to let them clean up all the left over honey. When we were done the spoon and wire frame were also taken out and set near the beehive to let the bees clean up the sticky honey. We put the lid on the bucket and set it out in the warm sun for a couple days to let the honey run out through the filter into the bucket.

For the next step in the process I took the bucket with the installed gate and placed the fine filter on top. Tani and I poured the honey into the top of the filter and used a rubber spatula to get the majority of the honey out of the bucket. We left the honey bucket inverted over the other bucket and filter and left it in the sun to warm the honey and make it flow more easily from the inverted bucket.

Next up will be bottling the honey and doing something with the wax. Some of the honey we have set aside already for gifts and the rest will be stored. The gate in the bottom of the bucket will make the bottling really easy and should not be too messy. We are still deciding what bottles we want to use. We will also let the bees clean up the little honey remaining in the wax and then we will melt the wax and pour it into molds for later use. I plan on trying to make beeswax candles with some of it and Tani will use some in her soap making.

We have finished the honey extraction for our first super and it was pretty easy to do using this method. There was not a lot of mess, and the bees were more than happy to clean up the little mess there was. Hopefully the other supers will go just as smoothly. Bees are amazing and it was cool to see all of the beautiful honey that they had produced and the interesting ways they decided to build the comb. Of course everyone in the family got to sample lots of fresh honey from the comb and let me tell you that it was sweeeeeeet!

Posted in Beekeeping | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Building Perfect Peach Pancakes

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Mike

Peach Pancakes

Peach Pancakes

Peaches are coming on here in our little valley and to our family that means peach pancakes. Here is how we build our perfect peach pancakes. First of course you need peaches, you also need pancakes, you will also need sugar, walnuts, and whipped cream.

Peaches

Buy some nice ripe peaches from a local source. They have got to be fresh and ripe. The peaches will be divided into two groups, one group for the real nice peaches and another group for the ones that have bruises or blemishes. The not quite perfect peaches then are peeled and made into a purée. The great peaches are peeled and sliced.

Buttermilk Pancakes

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 egg (beaten)
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 2 tbsp oil

Instructions:

Mix dry ingredients. Combine egg, milk and oil. Pour liquids into dry ingredients. Stir mixture just till blended but still slightly lumpy.

Whipped Cream

Whip up some real whipped cream. Do not think that you can get away with just buying Cool Whip because it is just not right to ruin a meal like this by being lazy.

Walnuts

Chop some walnuts.

Building Peach Pancakes

Now it is time to put it all together.

  1. Get a stack of pancakes on your plate, don’t even be thinking short stack here because a short stack will just not hold enough good stuff on it.
  2. Pour peach purée over the stack of pancakes.
  3. Spoon sliced peaches onto the stack.
  4. Put a little sugar over the whole thing. Some people say that this is optional, I am not one of those people.
  5. Put dollop of whipped cream on. When I say dollop I am using the definition of dollop that means a large lump or portion, not the smaller definition.
  6. Sprinkle chopped walnuts all over and – voilà! – perfect peach pancakes.
Posted in Recipes | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Feta

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Mike

The latest attempt at feta has been more successful than my last attempt! I did some reading and found a feta cheese troubleshooting section at the Fias Co Farm website that says:

Sometimes you may have problems with the cheese softening in the brine.

This is most probably caused by the fact that you did not hang the curd long enough. The hanging of the curd is developing the acidity of the cheese. This acidity is what helps the curd “stand up” to the brine and not get soft.

In my previous attempt at feta the recipe called for hanging the curd for 4 hours and the recipe on the Fias Co Farm website calls for upwards of 24 hours. So I went with the 24 hour figure and it appears that it made all the difference, after two days in the brine solution it is still nice and solid.

Feta

Feta

In a lapse of attention while making the feta I let the temperature get a little high at the end of the process. I think that it may have affected the texture a little so next time I will be on guard for that mistake. Also I need to pay more attention to the shape of the cheese while it is hanging, turning it over part way through the hanging to get a rounder cheese.

I think it really tastes good, but is not perfect yet. I took a quick poll of those in the family that are around to try it. Sean says its good but has a strong flavor and is a bit sour. Tianna says that it is good, but she thought feta was supposed to be more like ricotta. Lelia says it is good, and is really buttery (none of us can figure out why she says that except that butter is a little salty maybe). Tani says it is good, but that it has that goaty after taste that all goat products have. So there you have it my feta is a good albeit an imperfect, sour, buttery, non-ricotta feta with a goaty after taste.

Posted in Cheese | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment