I worked in this area today planting iris from other parts of the garden and pulling weeds. The circular item is an old milk strainer. It is so rusted out and can't be restored so don't worry I am not recking an antique. My dad had one or two cows that he milked while I was growing up on the farm. There were four boys in the house to feed so it was cheap milk. Dad hated to milk when he had worked all day in the field or whatever and then had to stop and go milk the cows. Our neighbors had many cows so they had a mechanical separator that would separate the cream from the milk. As it would spin it would have different spouts that the different parts of the milk would pour out of into containers. On the top of the device was the strainer, that had a filter placed in it each time to take out any foreign items. Sometime the cows tail would switch flys into it or loose hay leaves or the farmer could get debris dropped into the pail. With the strainer, that was the initial cleaning stage before the rest of the processes happened.
My mom just had a separator like the one in the garden and after the milk was strained she would put the milk in large gallon jars and put it into the International Harvestor refrigerator. As the milk cooled the cream would separate itself and form at the top of the jars. We would do two different things before drinking it. We would pour off the cream as best that we could then stir the milk to redistribute the cream left over into the milk before drinking. If we wanted rich milk to drink we just automatically stirred all the cream back into the milk and poured glasses for us to drink. The cream was heavenly on pie or warm chocolate pudding. I took for granted that it was good on cereal as I guess I never noticed the rich creamy milk. Eventually my dad just quit milking. As the two oldest boys were out of the house, my mom just started to by milk at the store. Of course at that time there was only straight milk to buy and none of this one or two percent stuff.
Anyway back to the garden part, the weather has been too cool and too wet to allow the marigolds and snapdragons to take off and grow. The flower bed sits on top of an old stump area of a very old silver maple tree that had been cut down four or five years ago. Thanks for reading. . . .
3 comments:
I loved the milking story. That brought back memories....when I was a kid I worked on a dairy farm one summer. They had automatic milkers (I can't remember what they were called?) but my job was to bottle feed the calves and shovel feed into the feeders. Then I went to the house to fix lunch for the men who worked there. After lunch, I would crawl under the floor of the house (a two story 1800's red brick federal style home) with my brother and we would crawl on our stomachs and shovel the dirt out one bucket at a time. We were trying to create a crawl space deep enough for the homeowner to get down there to insulate the floor. That job lasted a whole summer and I believe we worked 8 hours a day. Today, somebody would be arrested for letting kids work like that....I think we were 12-13 yrs old.
I'm shocked that a couple of my snapdragons are blooming more.
I haven't had real "whole" milk since my grandma was around. I only had it on cereal at her house and for some reason, it made it taste better. Eggs were fluffier and the only apple pie I'd eat had some cream on it. Now I want some!
Oh I love the use of that old strainer, I remember them well! Also the cream seperator. I have an old seperator without parts sitting here in the woods..I should do something creative with it..maybe for the birds? Some day I will come up with a great idea! :)
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