Growing

As you can see our garden really grew while we were gone, there was rain for about 10days in a row, until the last couple days. When it’s this hot the rain really gets things growing! We have been picking spinach, sugar snap peas (Garry is alarming the neighbourhood kids by eating pea pods- they are not familiar with this type of peas, one girl keeps pantomiming shelling peas to him) and strawberries and cherries. I made some tasty cherry pies Saturday.
The field crops are looking better with the rain- the sunflowers and corn are getting growing. The grain fields are starting to ripen already. In the garden Garry’s sweet corn is getting tall (he has been planting some every two-three weeks so we can eat it for a while) as you can see in the photo. He wishes he had field corn as tall- he has paid a local farmer to grow some, since the land we have been leasing/buying is all planted for the year already, and we won’t be able to use it until the crops are off. Most of it is in winter wheat.
The villagers are making hay. Garry plans to buy a small (7 foot) mower when our alfalfa is ready to cut- one farmer in the village has one. Everyone else cuts the hay with a scythe or some people have a gas-powered weedwacker, and bring it home and spread over the front yard to dry. The guy with the horse and wagon is moving some of it. When it’s dry they fork it into haystacks near their cow shed. The rain was not helping this process, some of it was wet for a week, and so some hay didn’t look too good, but now they are making nicer stuff.
Garry and Maxim have been busy digging the hole for the septic system for the milkhouse – it is 2 metres by 2 metres by 4 metres deep- they finished Saturday morning. Maxim was in the hole most of the time with Garry dumping the buckets of dirt, but Garry was down there digging a bit too. Next week they need to get it bricked and plan to get the steel on the outside of the milkhouse- it was delivered yesterday.
The boys are working hard to finish off their biology, math and computer lessons (Jonah has finished the Bible section, with English and Physical science to go.) In the photo Seth is checking out some plant slides we made this week. They are on schedule to be done by the end of the month, when Seth is going to home Canada for two months with Victor’s son Dennis. He plans to enjoy hanging out with his brothers and their toys and even do a little work. Jonah is hoping to get more books to read.