Becky and I are drinking raw milk from our own cows!
Now the fine print:
I don’t know how much milk a first time cow milker should expect to get. My guess is that it probably depends on the cow. Well, the first cow I ever tried to milk was Esmerelda.
She was a little bit stroppy with me, so I only managed to get a few hundred mills of milk out of her before I decided to let her out of the bale.
I carried my sad, little haul of fresh milk back to the house. I chuckled a bit, thinking about all of the effort that went into getting those few sips worth of milk.
The first few ounces of Farmlet milk
“Well,” I told Becky, “It’s not much, but it’s a lot more than we had yesterday,” which was none.
I still felt glad to have it. I used almost all of it with my coffee the next morning, and it was delicious. A small victory.
When Linda and Donald, Becky’s aunt and uncle, came over, we told them how we just got a few squirts out of Esmerelda so far. Linda chuckled and asked, “Do you want a bucket of milk?”
With that, we headed down to the shed and put Esmerelda in the bale (meaning, we coaxed her into the bale with a bucket containing kiwi fruit skins, grapefruit skins with a dribble of molasses on top). Linda went to work and began milking aggressively. The milk came gushing out. Linda was pulling with both hands and the stainless steel bucket rang out as the streams of milk went in. Donald had a go. More milk came out.
Esmerelda didn’t seem to mind. Was it because she knew she was being handled by experts!? Was she just extra distracted by her treat bucket? I didn’t know, but, man, the milk was shooting out of her.
Key Point: The cow actually wants to be milked. It gives the cow a good feeling to release the milk.
My problem was that Esmerelda got sick of me messing around with my too slow and gentle milking manner. Esmerelda wants to be MILKED!
So, how much milk did we get with Auntie Linda and Uncle Donald on the job?
There are five, one litre glass jars of Esmerelda’s milk in the fridge right now!
Some of it is in the tea that I’m drinking as I write this post. Yummm.