The good and the bad and the ugly

While walking through the garden I caught this butterfly with my camera. Butterfly - both good and pretty.

Then I checked my rose bushes only to find these little monsters munching away. YUCK!  Time to get out the Neem-Py and spray at sunset.

Butter day

One day a week I clear the milk refrigerator. First I skim off all the cream, then I re-bottle about two gallons of milk into one quart milk bottles. The smaller bottles fit in our inside fridge better and they are easier to handle for my mother who has arthritis. After all the cream is skimmed, I start making butter.
No I don't sit in my rocker and churn like granny on the "Beverly Hillbillies". I use the blender. While the butter's in the blender I empty the excess milk into a "Pig Pale" to be carried out to the hogs. Then I wash all the empty one gallon jars and put them back on the shelf for next week.
You can hear the change in the blender sound when the butter starts to rise. Then I run it through the strainer to remove the buttermilk. I save a little for cooking and send the rest to the piggies. Then it's rinsed with clean cold water and put into a bowl. When all of the cream is butter, I "work" the butter to get as much liquid out of it as possible. Then I add salt, shape it into butter balls and drop the butter into ice water to firm it up.
One butter ball goes in the butter dish and the rest in the freezer.

I'm hoping to have enough butter put by in the freezer to keep us through the time when Hazel is dry this winter. 
Here are some of my buttery creations swimming in their ice bath.

There is nothing like real butter!

Today I made butter from the cream I've been skimming off of Hazel's milk. It is yummy!

I was in a hurry so I used the food processor to "churn". It worked pretty well, though the butter didn't clump like I expected it to. I had to strain the butter out of the butter milk. Then I put it in a bowl of cold water and gathered it together into a ball. After I had all of the cream churned, I worked the butter to remove any water or butter milk. I ended up with about a pound of beautiful yellow butter.
Now I need to make some fresh bread to go under it!

And there she was...

a beautiful butterfly.

It's been horribley cold and depressingly wet for the last few days, but this morning when we woke the sun was streaming through the windows. There in a puddle of sunshine was a butterfly warming herself and drying her wings.
I took several pictures and waited for it to warm up outside. Then I coaxed her to climb up on my fingers and carried her outside where she caught a whisp of a warm breeze and was gone.