The farm in Manitoba

Victor called yesterday morning- late afternoon Ukrainian time (it's 7 hours ahead of us in the central time zone) to say hello from Maxim and himself and ask about buying a heifer for sale in Nikolipolia- I think they are getting her- she is about 2 months pregnant (cows- like people- have a a 9 month gestation period) The fresh cow that calved last week is milking 15 liters a day already, they said.

To prove that exciting things happen on larger farms in North America, while we are here in Manitoba, I'll post if there is some interesting news (with photos.) At 6 am yesterday morning I woke up and heard a strange sound- at first I thought it was the cats- there are three in the house- but then I decided to get up and check it out. I went down to the basement and found that Wiggles was having puppies in one of Micah's blue reclining theater-style reclining chairs. To give you some context when we got home last we we commented on the fact that she looked huge. The boys replied that she had done it in the summer and there were no puppies then so she must be doing the same thing again. We got Wiggles about 4 years ago, she was about a year old and she has never had puppies, so everyone assumed she was sterile. So she had 7 puppies by the time I found a box and we got her settled in an empty bedroom. After I washed the the chair up (it was very wet- luckily not bloody) later in the day we realized she'd had 8 live pups, mostly black but a few with white under the chin or belly and a couple brindled ones with brown striping.

I took some photos outside as Matthew was engaged in an interesting project. He is a part-time pastor for a small area church and they are going to do a nativity Christmas program Sunday afternoon, with live animals and Sunday school children, outdoors in Matt's barn- he lives across the road from the church- I'll try to post some photos afterwards- it should be interesting. Anyway, for the program they wanted some small square bales for the audience to sit on. They had not baled any on the farm here this summer, and there were none left. He had searched for some for sale and was now desperate enough to try opening a big round bale and using the square baler in the snow to make some- he got 11 bales finished in during several hours of struggling with mouse-chewed strings and broken shear bolts. I was teasing him that there were no bales- large or small) in Bethlehem anyway- maybe a haystack.

You can see that the snow is here to stay for the winter- it has been rather balmy -10 to -18 this week, after the deep freeze on the weekend, but that doesn't melt snow. Micah and Noah were moving weaned calves from the barn where the babies are into the next barn. Noah had made a stack of bales to block the wind in front of the opening to this barn and they were trying to figure out how to get the first calf inside when I went by. The other photo is of the big cow barns on the other side of the road- the smaller calves live on the same side as the house.

The other excitement of the day was Josh decided to dump (throw away) 5000 liters of milk from one of the tanks, The night before while the guys were playing basketball in Winnipeg an employee decided to run the tank washer on the empty milk tank. Unfortunately, it was not empty- no one is quite sure how he managed to do it- but there was a lots of water some soap in the milk (which you could not taste or smell) and so the guys saved some for calf feeding and Garry made cheese curds to eat. The rest went down the drain. Poutine anyone?