Cows and Cranberries

  Bella, the newest member of our homestead. We have milked cows and goats, both for our own use and commercially, over the years. For the last ten years or so we have just had goats. They are so much easier to handle and we think more economical for the homestead. The price of butter made us reevaluate that. While the goats we have been milking certainly produced enough butterfat to make butter making possible, separating cream from milk with goats is a difficult process. We have a separator, a 1940's Montgomery Ward Chief that holds 5 gallons at a time, it is just not worth the work it takes to clean up after running the milk through. If you were doing ten gallons or so it would be alright but when you are only milking a couple of goats it just isn't worth the effort. Which is why we now have a beautiful purebred Jersey cow. We simply let the cream rise in gallon jars and skim it off. Now we have to keep up with the butter making. We churn almost ever day with each churning producing about 1 1/2 pounds of butter. We don't pasteurize so care is needed to prevent our butter from going sour. The pigs certainly like the extra buttermilk they get in their food. Not sure yet that we will do with the extra milk after the pigs are in the freezer.

Two buckets of wild cranberries we picked yesterday.

On the foraging front wild cranberries have been a goal for several years. As the pic shows we were successful this year even if we were a bit late to get a lot of them. Wisconsin has two kinds of wild cranberries, large and small, that were both in the bogs we picked in. They both taste the same as cranberries you get in the store. Those are just a strain of the wild large cranberry that are cultivated. The pic below shows one of the bogs we picked in. This is a typical wild  cranberry bog.