Still milking, mowing and fencing

I haven't got many varied new things to blog about because at the moment mainly Doug is struggling to keep on top of the mowing strimming and twice daily milkings.
We have cut down to once a day from this weekend and get about 6l in a milking. It will not be long until Venus can keep up with this herself as she is growing fast. More out than up at the moment which is good because she was a bag of bones when she was born.
It is hard to find things to do with that much milk so we have been drinking it, skimming the cream for raspberries, having icecream, kefir, kefir cheese (made by straining kefir and leaving to sit for a day and adding salt before refrigerating), butter, soaking wheat in it for the chickens, the dog drinks a bit - but we are getting worried too much is not good for her, fattening and too much liquid and finally I have been putting some on plants in the garden (! it is meant to be good for them... mostly this has been the left overs from butter and kefir cheese, so not the best stuff!)

Doug has redone the sheep fence on the top field. I don't have photos but it was a big big job. The sheep mesh gets grown in to the brambles and it has been a while since it was last done. He has also rerouted it some so they have a bigger area which is great. We are going to join the two flocks together for now with just the Ouessant ram and eat the other one. This will mean a bit less work refencing and moving sheep.

Courgettes

We have planted some things this year, but not too many as we wanted to focus on keeping on top of what we have rather than planting loads of stuff and then the weeds taking over. It is quite hard to keep it going along with all the other stuff. Mostly the garden is my job except sometimes Doug has to mow it when it gets just toooo out of control.

The courgettes have just started coming through as baby courgettes. In a month or so they will probably get on top of us and we will start to feel burdened by the number we are failing to eat that are turning into marrows. Maybe it won't happen this year as I did have the sense to only keep two plants, also they are self seeded and as I think last years were F1 hybrids there is a good chance they won't be as prolific as normal.

There are some french beans that will come through soon and some tomatoes and we have been having quite a few raspberries.

We planted some new fruit bushes this year and so far I have been doing well at keeping them weed free-ish.

Toastmasters 4 - How to say it - Life in the Country

The purpose of the 4th Toastmasters speech is described here.

I took this photo half an hours drive from my house and you can see this mountain from my front door. (I had the photo printed on canvas - not for the speech just to have on the wall but was convenient to use)

Mr Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and most welcome guests
My husband and I bought an old farmhouse in France five years ago. I lived there two years full time and for the past three years I have been living there and working in London 4 days a week while my husband renovates the house.
When I said I was moving to the countryside having lived in cities my whole life, my mum said 'WHY!'. I think why is obvious. Look at the mountains, I can go skiing, horse riding, have a dog, live the dream. But generally things aren't all good and no bad, all up and no down, all high and no low. When people ask about our life in France, I generally tell them about the highs. Which results in them saying 'oh I wish I had your life'. So this is me setting the record straight and talking a bit about what I found hard making such a big move.
First the bugs. Spiders don't bother me, I am not a wimp. House flys are a bit annoying, we never got more than a few in London but the house in France has to be covered all over in fly mesh to keep them out. Much worse than this though are the horse flies - giant things that don't politely slip a straw through your skin like a mosquito, but rather have a huge pair of slashers capable of cutting through a horses skin with which they slice through your clothes with a short sharp shock of pain, it bleeds and the itchy lump can last for weeks. There are even worse things that infest the animals such as blow fly that lay eggs on sheep that hatch and eat the animal alive, various intestinal worms and ones called nose bot which lay eggs in the animals nose. You don't see these things in London.
Second the utilities. The phone and electricity aren't so bad, though we have more problems in storms with the connections failing than in London and we have at times spent nearly a week without internet - oh the horror! The worst thing is the water, we are not on mains so our, admittedly delicious, water comes out as a spring below our house and is pumped up in to the house. This means no water if there is a powercut, no water if the water from the spring fails to flow in to the tank and no water when the pump goes in to a sulk. Generally one of these things happens just before we have guests round and means one of us wading through a nettle and mosquito infested swamp to look at the spring/tank setup and then spending time in the dark barn praying to the pump gods. In London I just called the plumber.
The final thing I am going to moan about is the dirt. They say the city is dirty and the countryside is clean. Sorry, but the 'they' are wrong. In London the street cleaning fairies come out in the night and remove mud and dirt and all the flats I lived in had nice communal carpet in the hall that wiped any remaining grot of your feet before it entered the house. Before I moved to the countryside I obsessively read lifestyle blogs where people were skipping around wearing lovely flowery wellies and skirts to do their farmyard chores. I find this is not possible in real life, partially due to the afore mentioned flies and partially due to the mud which is everywhere and gets everywhere. In fact I wear a very fetching farming 'onsie' that I have several of allowing for frequent washing.
We don't have time to cover the language barrier, the effort of laying concrete or the snakes.
I can joke about these things now, but when we first moved I found it very stressful. I think I had culture shock from too many changes all at once. I used to lie awake at night and worry that my husband had stopped breathing because I worried he was going to die and leave me alone with this horror. I was very jumpy and loud noises scared me in to screaming, plus I lost weight - without even trying.
If you had asked me a year in whether I had made the right choice I might have struggled to categorically say yes. Now five years in the lows seems less low and the highs stand out more. Finally - part of the reason we moved, was for a more interesting life, so the moral of this story is not 'don't move to the countryside it is scary and rubbish', rather it is 'move to the countryside for a

life like the mountains in my view - with interesting highs and lows, ups and downs, peaks and valleys. 

Lots of milk

When the calf is just born the milk is not milk it is colostrum. It looks like custard! But doesn't taste like custard. It is really fatty and tastes a bit salty to me.

The milk slowly gets less yellow and more milky. It often has a bit of blood in it because the udder is so swollen straight after the calf. I am not sure if this is specific to dairy cows like Jerseys as they have been breed to have much more milk than the calf needs.

We got a lot of cream for a few days but normally the cow keeps back the cream for the calf and doesn't let it down for us. But as we have been getting 3 or 4 liters of milk twice a day there is still plenty.

I make butter by putting cream in the kitchen aid and whipping it with the whip attachment on a medium speed until it separates in to lumps of butter and liquid like this

I then add ice and wash and squeeze the butter until all the milk residue is gone. The butter keeps better if you can get rid of all the milk.

We have also had white russians

Made Kefir (drinking yogurt) and I am now making Kefir soft cheese by straining the Kefir

We have also have ice cream with our own raspberries.

Venus

We have called Buttercup's calf Venus. Janet named her after a 1951 film called Appointment with Venus where they have many laughs trying to get back a cow that was left behind when an island was occupied by the Germans.
This is Venus with her brother Bif. He is booked in to go to the abattoir on the 17th of July

Buttercup and Venus

Buttercup in the stanchion for milking

Venus feeding

Buttercup with Venus and Bif

More and more mowing

The fields have been getting more and more infested with brambles. The animals will eat them when they are new shoots, but if they manage to take hold they won't eat them and then they grow in to massive balls that the animals cannot force their way through.

Doug has spent some of the spring mowing them with the sickle bar on the walk behind tractor.

These brown patches are all that are left of the big big ball of brambles they used to be.

This is the bottom field

Owen's field (there are still some big patches here - the plan is to nibble away at them over the years)

The corner field

This is by the potager where the hops grow.

This is the lawn that I mowed with the hover mower. Doug normally does it but I felt he needed help with the amount of mowing that needs doing at the moment!

I mowed the potager too

The rabbits are busy trying to help out too

Buttercup has had her calf

It is a girl. Which is great as we would love to keep it.

We checked Buttercup early this afternoon and there was no calf. Then we heard some mooing and checked again early evening and there she was!

She is quite a bit smaller than Bif was when he was born (he gestated for nearly 2 weeks longer) and skinnier looking, but she seems quite energetic and is walking around already. The legs seem a bit bamby and out of control.

She is a bit confused and trying to drink from Lismore (who is her niece)

You can see here how shiny and giant and swollen Buttercups teats are. We don't know if the calf has drunk yet. She looks really skinny and empty in the middle so maybe not. Can she fit her mouth round these things??

If you look closely you can see Buttercup and calf in the distance. The calf has just been meeting the whole herd. They all ran around a bit and the bandy legs gave way, but she seemed fine.

It is so exciting that Buttercup has had a calf when we thought the AI had not taken and we only realised she was pregnant a couple of weeks ago. Lovely it is a girl too.
We don't have a name yet. We are hoping Janet will name her as she presided over the AI while we took the highlands to the bull. This was all on Doug's birthday.

Buttercup's pins have dropped

We are spending some time every day staring at the rear end of a cow. This is quite normal when your cow is 9 months pregnant I believe. This is Buttercups udder. Pretty full, but not as crazy full as it will look when the calf has just been born

She has some slime coming out of her vagina

Her pins have dropped which makes her tail lift up a bit

Buttercup and Bif (her calf from 2015 that we hope to take to the abattoir really soon)

This is my finger on her pin ligament. Normally it is hard and feels like bone but a day or a few days before the calf is born they relax and appear to disappear. When I push my finger here it feels all squishy

If I do the same on Bluebell it feels hard like bone.

General Election

I voted. I am traumatised.

Sourdough bread recipe

100% hydration starter

67.5% hydration bread

Total 400g strong white flour 270g water

300g flour (plus 50 in the morning if doing overnight)

200g starter (100 for overnight)

170ml water (plus 50 if doing overnight)

Sourdough naan bread

280 flour 170g liquid 60%

100g starter

230 strong flour

40g butter

70g kefir

60 water

Sourdough pizza recipe

Pizza 100% hydration starter

66% hydration bread

180g flour total 120g water

135g flour (35g semolina rest plain flour or all strong white)

90g starter

75g water

Sourdough English muffin recipe

Total flour 400 liquid 270

67.5 % hydration

180 g 100% hydration sourdough starter

310g strong flour

180g milk

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1.5 tsp sugar

For overnight

100g starter

270g flour (plus 80 more in morning)

220g milk

plus salt, baking powder, sugar

roll to 2cm thick

Rabbit in white wine recipe

1 medium rabbit

1 onion

A big huge slug of olive oil. 50ml maybe?

Mushrooms

Salt/pepper

200 ml white wine

100 ml stock

Put the oil in the pan and fry the onion gently. Add the rabbit and continue to cook gently. You don't want anything browning.

Add the white wine and cook for an hour. You can make the stock from offcuts from the rabbit and add later, or if you have it already add now.

10 minutes before you serve add the mushrooms. These are chanterelles. 

Server with lovely fresh bread

These are new chicken shears for cutting up the rabbit. They were very good.

Bread, bread and more bread and sourdough bread

I make bread quite often, but it never comes out quite right. It is fine, but not amazing. I have come to the conclusion that this is because the bread flour they sell in the supermarket here just isn't great. Possibly because it is a small supermarket, but I think more because France has such great bakeries there isn't much interest in homemade bread so they don't have the variety we have in the UK.

I had a sourdough starter a few years ago, but did not keep it up. I have brought some bread flour from the uk and started a new starter. On holiday last week I made quite a few bread products to get in to practice.

Here is the starter. It is going better than the previous one because I have realised I was starving the other one which was indicated by it forming a brown liquid on top. Outside the fridge they need approx a third of their weigh removing every day and replacing with 50% water 50% flour. If you keep it in the fridge you need to do this about one a week instead of every day. I am keeping this one in the fridge.

You can use other proportions of flour and water, but this 50:50 flour and water is called a 100% hydration starter which is what I have gone for as it makes calculations in recipes simple.

 These are sourdough English muffins. I think the dough was a little bit too wet.

But they came out pretty well. There are now plenty in the freezer for Doug to take out and toast for weekday lunches

Sourdough pizza

A really really dud loaf that spread out way too much when rising. Actually it tasted fine, but the shape was no good.

Crumb not too bad

So I got a proofing basket

The first loaf from this came out as the best loaf of bread EVER!
I used the no-knead and baking in a casserole dish method
The dough is 67% hydration

450g flour (strong white)
50g flour (strong white for the morning)
100g 100% hydration starter
320g water
5g salt (1 tsp)

Mix together the flour, liquid and starter (but not the final 50g of flour for the morning or the salt)
Leave to rise overnight
Add the final bit of flour and the salt and mix well
Put in the proofing basket as per any instructions you find on the internet - it goes with the smooth side at the bottom.

Tip out of the basket into the casserole dish, or on to whatever you are going to cook the loaf on and bake as normal.

Beautiful!