Waking Up In Norway - L

It doesn't really get dark in Norway in the summer. At 11 pm when we went to bed yesterday it was still at least as light as though it were 7 pm in Minnesota, and though something resembling night time happens around 1 am, by 4 or 5 the sun is back up and the roosters are cock-a-doodling. Despite this, we started learning the ropes at 8 am this morning, preparing for the milking, and calling in the cows. (Though in actuality, it takes more work than that.) We were guided through this work by Jacinta, who I gather has been working on the farm with the Kolle's for a while.

This is the view out our bedroom window!

Besides Una and Oystein and their two boys (who are 4 and just about 2), there are six other people helping on their farm at the moment. Jacintha who is the Netherlands, Tinian from California and her brother Galan, and now of course there is Pauline from France, and Eric and I. The Kolle's have only been hosting people through WWOOF, or World Wide Opportunies of Organic Farming, for a few months. How it works is this: in exchange for an average of six hours of work a day, volunters (called woofers) are provided room and board and it supplies small scale famers with a lot of extra help with the endless lists of tasks to complete. Coincidentally, the first woofers the Kolle's hosted were two juniors from St. Olaf. ^.^

Anyway, we got to start off our first day milking the cows and though we'll definitely have to work to catch up to the speed Jacintha fills a bucket, I think we're getting the hang of it.

The first step for milking is cleaning the udders and unfortunately the cow I milked, Iselin, is very messy. Except that it was the back of her udder rather than her butt, it was kind of like wiping a baby's ass. Except that this baby is an adult cow who very obviously consumes a lot of grass.

Gross.

But definitely necessary. I wouldn't want that to accidentally get into my icecream! After milking we learned how to separate out the milk from the cream using a separating machine and then the next job of the day was to lay down wood chipings in the walkways between the new garden plots Una and Jacintha have been working on, it was a little less thrilling than milking a cow, but we definitely saw progress much more quickly than our milk pails did.

After lunch we finished up in the vegetable garden and helped speed along the installation of the first ever freezer room on an organic ice cream farm in Norway! ^.^

This post is getting a little to long so I'm stopping. Stay tuned for baby animals, ice cream making, vegetable planting, and more!