It's in my blood, I'm sure about that. This desire to live on land unmarked by cement & construction. The endless sky overhead & the waving grass at my feet. They all seem to call to me, to beckon me. It sang it's enchanting song even when I was young, skipping around our backyard, dreaming about a cow named Bessy & endless fields. Thankfully I married a man equally smitten with the idea of broad horizons & fresh, pure air. Even when we dwelt in our little house in the suburbs we would use any excuse to pack up our growing family & drive to the country. We'd explore dirt tracks & walk along deserted creek beds & always, always there was this dream, this hope, this desire.
Growing up I had tastes of country life. My uncle had a farm ~ the bug had bit him too, even as a young man & he'd purchased 40 acres of paradise in a land quite the opposite of here - where they are flooded with rain - too much rain if you ask them! I loved visiting as a child. I noticed the beautiful vistas, the broad paddocks to run around in & the cows ~ oh the cows! My grandparents lived there too & my grandmother who had grown up on a farm had a milking cow named Cherry. Even though I didn't really like the taste of raw milk I always, always wanted a cow of my own. Why I wanted to call her Bessy, who knows? Something in my little girl heart thought Bessy was the perfect name for a cow!
After we were blessed to be able to move down here & purchase this little plot of land we call Sunnyside, one of the first animals we bought for our farmyard was a little jersey calf and of course we dubbed her Bessy (after a little bit of negotiating back & forth)! Milking seemed far off as we fed her the bottle she needed to grow. Eventually she was old enough to send to the bull & before we knew it she had returned & we were all upon the brink of a series of brand new adventures!
Labour/ Birth/Stillbirth/ Milking/ Calf adoption.....
My total milking experience was practically non-existent. Just once at a show I was the child chosen to squeeze a teat & even that made me realise how very difficult it is to actually make milk come out of those knobbly, hanging things! I'd briefly watched a cow being hand milked sometime by my grandparents, but never had I been given the opportunity in life to actually take a turn at actually milking a cow. No matter that I had absolutely no experience in the milking department, I was determined to make this work. I'd read a little, but life had already taught me that book-learning doesn't really compare to experience. ( I have twins ~ LOL) The fact that we had little knowledge, no experience & no people to call on if we needed help didn't concern us in the least. We were confident that we could learn this new skill that had been used for generations before us. We were more than happy to push ahead!
We had our bucket, we had our pregnant cow & we had the Internet.....
Confidently I declared:
'How hard can it be?'
Sorry to keep this hanging, but if I did it all in one post it would be far too long for even the most determined reader.... Part two coming sooner or later :)
Have a lovely day friends
Blessings
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