An epic milking day, storm, chased by beez.

Today (Wednesday) was an epic day here on the farm. I'm exhausted, my arms hurt, I'm covered in mud, we were chased by beez, and some small creatures have decided that I'm an udder.  And that's not even the half of it.

And the daffodils bloomed - what could be better?

What a day!

So much has happened my head is spinning and so I'll just have to summarize:

* We pulled the Milk Stealers from Debbie last nite - and this morning (Wednesday) Debbie was so full she could barely walk. So I ran for the bucket and she milked 12 cups!!! That's as much as Sunny!
* Sunny milked a total of 22 cups today - she didn't even break a sweat.
* Nibbles' babies - the Niblets (thanks Freemotion for their new fun nickname!) did just fine on their first day with the bottle. Little Guinness did the best and he's excited about going to his new home. During the last feeding Stout decided that the bottle was the business and she filled her belly. And decided that I'm an udder. She even bonked me trying to get more out. How cute is that?

Little Stout - thinks I'm an udder.

* We started the day with weirdly warm weather so I ran outside and started another tray of seeds - asparagus and more greens. I've never done asparagus seeds.....of course I skipped the "soak for a day" first figuring the rain we'll be getting the next few days will be plenty of soaking for them. They are currently outside with the flats I started the other day. Some of the sunflowers are starting to pop. I need to be careful to cover them when we get a frost. But so far so good.
* Daffodils are starting to open and its wonderful to see a little life out in the yard.
* I tried an experiment with some potato trimmings. I had some that had formed little sprouts so I trimmed them generously and planted them in a tub. We'll see if this works.

* Our weirdly warm weather resulted in a a tremendous storm - the news kept cutting in with watches and warnings. I even abandonded my post at cutting the cheese because it got so ferocious.
* Of course with all the milk we got today, I started a gouda. It was gouda...I mean.. good to get back to cutting the cheese...curds. And I finished up the fresh chevre I started yesterday. I had some of the fresh cheese in an egg-bacon-goat cheese scramble with some fresh chives that popped up. It was fabulous.
* I also had an epic baking day - did you see the Mennonite girls making pop tarts? So did I! So I did too. And then we had to have at least one tiny pie, two loaves of bread, and biscuits. I'm very carby and I like it.

But then disaster. As we were finishing up our evening chores we found that our front hive had been blown over! It was in pieces and all tumbled down! So The Big Man sprang to action to save our beez. Part of the action included some running and some stinging. But we regrouped and saved the hive. Tonite we'll have temperatures below freezing so thank heavens we got the hive put back together and saved the beez!

Of course, when I say "we" I mostly mean The Big Man... but I did a lot of long distance directing and hopping about. And I yelled helpful encouragement like, "DON'T RUN THIS WAY! YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!" But I got to work the bee smoker thing so that was fun.

The good news is that the hive is full and vigorous. The bad news was - they were really ticked off.

As I was mentioning to Ginny in the comments the other day - this is just the start of our busy season! We'll be ramping up soon. I have a feeling we'll have one more round of cold weather  - then we'll be home free.

Happy Thursday everyone! And remember...if you see a beekeeper running, try to keep up.