Cheese Whiz

Keeping up  with nearly 4 gallons of milk a day from our generous cow LaFonda is a challenge. But Cadence is always up for a challenge, and has tackled this one by teaching herself to make cheese, using the book "Home Cheesemaking" by Ricki Carroll.
So far, Cadence has made the following cheeses:  Ricotta, Mozzarella, Cheddar, Cream Cheese, Paneer, Queso Fresco, Manchego, Parmesan, Romano.  Making cheese takes the better part of a day, and I haven't followed her through the entire process with my camera, but I have taken  photos of most of the stages - these shots are from different days, different cheeses.

Basically, a culture is added to the milk and it is heated up to a specified temperature, depending on what type of cheese is being made.  All of the types of cheese Cadence has made so far have been from  just two cultures, thermophilic or mesophilic. The temperatures and cycles of heating and cooling, and size of curds determine the type of cheese.

The milk forms a semi-solid mass which is then  cut up into curds (the size again depends upon what type of cheese is being made.)

The whey separates from the curds --at this stage it looks sort of like very large-curd cottage cheese. The whey is drained off (and  usually fed to our very happy chickens.) The cheese curds are formed into a disc shape and placed into the press to squeeze out the remaining whey.

Cadence and her dad devised a simple cheese press using a cylindrical plastic container with drainage holes drilled in the bottom, a length of plastic pipe that just fits inside the container, a metal plate screwed onto a dowel, a small ceramic plate, and some heavy weights. The metal plate pushes down on the cheese, the weights slide on the dowel to  press onto the cheese, and the plastic pipe serves as a spacer for the weights.

The first version of cheese press was too tall and top-heavy and was susceptible to catastrophic crashes.

Cheese Press 2.0 works great.  The entire press  is placed inside a large metal mixing bowl to collect the whey that is pressed out.

After being pressed, the wheel of cheese is then either  brushed with cheese wax or wrapped in cheesecloth, depending upon the  cheese. Some wheels, such as manchego, can be eaten fresh (the manchego has been delicious!)  Cheese that aren't waxed are allowed to dry  enough to form a natural crust.  They are all stored in a  cool, dark place to age. Our current "cheese cave" is an unused bathroom in our cool basement.  If it gets too warm we will move the cheeses to a refrigerator.
At this moment, we have  six large wheels of cheese curing in our "cheese cave." When you open the door you are hit by a wonderful aroma of parmesan!

Tame Turkeys

This morning Cadence let her turkeys out loose  in the yard for the first time.  There are 9 of the little darlings  (a little runty one did not make it) and they are a month old.
As soon as they see a person they all come running and follow.
They joined us on the patio this morning while we drank our coffee--something we won't encourage when they get a bit bigger. (Soon they won't be able to squeeze under the fence.)
Then they assisted Cadence while she weeded her garden, snapping up insects and spiders.  Occasionally one gets separated d from the group and  peeps frantically. Keeping track of the  turkeys reminds Cadence of her babysitting days.

Wild Turkeys

The past week we have been watching a wild turkey hen and her babies foraging at the edge of our yard each morning and evening when we go out to milk the cow.
Last night I had moved the cows to the   west pasture next to the woods, and when I filled their water tub I accidentally startled the turkeys. The  hen flew up into the top of a tall tree.  She was so big, it was  hard to believe she could fly through the dense branches and  make it up so high.
I was wondering  what the four  poults would do.  The mother called to them encouragingly, and they peeped back at her. After a few moments, they  all took off and erratically flew up to her. I am pretty sure I was witnessing their maiden flight.
The hen flew from tree to tree, each time calling the chicks to follow her, which they did. I haven't seen them since their flying lesson - I hope they return.

Bee Story

 I checked on my bees over Memorial Day weekend, the first time since the swarm a couple weeks earlier.  There were so many bees and I was delighted to see that every frame in the  top deep was  getting filled with honey, much of it capped with wax--must be time to add a super so the bees could  gather honey for US!

But then I started checking the frames in the bottom deep, the brood chamber.  There were some bees, and a little bit of honey and pollen stored, but no brood! No eggs, no larvae, and no sign of a queen. Every frame was desolate, with empty brood cells.  The hive must not have successfully raised a queen after the swarm.

When I called my beekeeping supplier to order a queen they said my bees would probably not accept her -they would kill her. What I should do instead is obtain one frame of brood from another beekeeper and put it in my hive. Then my bees would raise a new emergency queen, which they do by feeding the bee larva royal jelly.  My friend Joe kindly offered me a brood frame, so on Sunday I  drove to Lanesboro, about  an hour away, to get it.

Joe has six hives, but two weren't doing very well.  Last year he lost a couple of  hives to colony collapse disorder - the hives seemed to be thriving but suddenly all the bees disappeared. Bees everywhere in the world are having trouble - Joe  believes spraying of alfalfa crops by a nearby dairy farm may have been a factor in his bee problem, so he moved his hives to a new location this year. 

It was fun to help Joe work his hives.  He started beekeeping with his grandfather when he was just a boy, so it is in his bones. (In contrast, I have been learning mostly from a book- "The Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping.")  Joe knows exactly what he is looking for and he checked all of his hives in less time than it would have taken me to go through my one hive. Joe told me  it takes 11 day for a queen cell to hatch out a queen, so he check his hives every 10 days to prevent swarming. Queen cells are elongated and larger, and we just flicked them off to destroy them.  

Joe let me choose a frame with lots of egg and larval cells and he nested it into one of his deeps to protect it on its journey to my house. We stuffed the hive entrance openings with grass so the bees couldn't get out and put the box in the back of my car. 

I couldn't help but frequently check  the hive in the rear-view mirror as I drove, and  soon I began to notice a few bees had found their way out.  As I drove on, more and more bees emerged until there were over a hundred bees on the back car window (putting a vibe in my Vibe!)  I am not afraid of bees, but I did worry that if one stung me I might swerve dangerously, so I blasted the air conditioner on cold in the front seat and it seemed to persuade the bees to stay in the back on the warm window.  I managed to get home with no stings.

 I hopped into my bee suit, took the bee box out of my car and replaced a frame in the center of my brood box with the new brood.  As I was checking all my brood frames, I noticed one frame had a few eggs and larvae-- maybe I do have a queen after all! I didn't find a queen, though, and  Joe has since told me that sometimes a queenless hive  can have "infertile" workers who produce a very limited supply of eggs from which a new queen can be raised.  Bees are so amazing! 

As for all the bees in my car, I left the doors and windows open all day and  that evening when I went out close it up before the rain, all but one or two bees were gone.  Poor homeless, doomed bees. Or maybe not, maybe they are enjoying their first freedom, liberated from the drudgery of the hive. 

Udder Relief

LaFonda is giving us about 4 gallons of milk a day.  Cadence milks her in the morning in about half an hour and gets  2 1/2 gallons. When I milk her in the evening, it takes me over an hour and I only get a gallon and a half. 


Cadence can milk with both hands simultaneously. My old-lady hands cramp up when I milk, so I have to alternate, giving each hand frequent stretches and rests. 


I  have been watching Craigslist and Ebay for a bucket milking machine. Although I have found reasonably priced used bucket milkers, I still would need a vacuum pump and that gets too expensive. 


A couple weeks ago I saw an ad in a magazine (Mary Jane's Farm, kind of a cross between of Mother Earth News and Martha Stewart Living) for the Udderly- EZ Milker,  a simple hand-operated pump that sounded like the perfect solution. It turned out that the  inventor/entrepreneur lives not far away, so I called him up.  He was very friendly and helpful and even offered to come over to help if I had any problems.  He originally invented this device for collecting colostrum for horses, but now  he sells many EZ Milkers to people who hand-milk  cows, goats and sheep, often with arthritic hands. He had just sent some to Dubai  for milking camels!


I have been using the Udderly EZ Milker for a week now. The first few times LaFonda tried to nudge it off with her  hind  foot, but now she is used to it and  ignores it entirely.  It isn't really much faster for me than hand-milking, but my hands are now painfree- what an improvement. I also like that the milk goes into a closed bottle rather than an open bucket, so there is no chance of anything falling into it.  The only  downside is that I miss the musical ringing of the milk hitting the stainless steel pail. 

Dew Drops In

As the sun burned off the fog this morning, dew bejeweled the plants, flowers and weeds alike.

Wordless Wednesday