mud and rye

Tuesday and the high was supposed to be 13 C (sweater weather) the mud in the yard sticks all over your shoes, globs stuck to the bottom of your boots, in fact when I went out to took photos this afternoon, my boots were getting stuck and I had to pull them out- luckily I didn't lose any (lots of practice over the years in Manitoba sticky muck.) It was still plus 8 when I looked at 6 pm. The snow in the yard is gone- just a few pieces of hard ice remaining around the edges of buildings.

The fence is fixed- the heifers have not got out- they had gotten out near the haypile on the weekend, where the fence had gotten squashed down a little. Even the white heifer has stayed inside for two days, the one that jumped fences at her former home, so it must be good. They get locked in the barn at night, to prevent abductions (apparently spring is a good time for cattle rustling in Ukraine, when money is tight.) Garry and Maxim were working on the precept (wagon) as you can see it has four wheels now, now they just need to turn it over. Garry's not sure how yet.




Yesterday Garry and Maxim went to look at a cow and heifer for sale down the street, Garry says the cow is nice looking, but she calved a month ago and is rather thin as they only have straw to feed them now. The guy wants a good price for her, Garry thinks its a little high. He told him he'd buy them this afternoon, and at the end of the month he is supposed to buy 5 heifers from the herd we bought last fall (the lady wanted to keep some animals for the winter.) So he may be done buying for now.


While they were looking at the cows yesterday, Garry made an appointment for haircuts for him and the boys. The man's daughter Lena, recently completed her haircutting course in Zaporosia, and has been cutting Garry's hair since last year. Garry told the boys he could explain (in Russian) how they wanted their haircut. They weren't sure they would get what they wanted, so we looked on the internet for celebrity teen photos and picked haircuts they liked, and printed them out. Maxim said he heard that Lena really liked cutting their hair and here is the results.







On Saturday morning while the ground was still frozen at eight am "the big dairy farmer" showed up at the end of the driveway with a tractor, fertilizer spreader and a truck with ammonia nitrate in (leftover from last year) Garry had hired him to spread fetilizer on the rye field Garry planted last fall- they put on a little less than a ton (opps Garry makes a correction after checking the blog- over the 12 acre piece- shouldn't blog before bed) acre, because the other farmer needed to save enough to spread on his alfalfa field (yes all you farmers out there- on the one crop that makes its own nitrogen- thanks to bacteria that lives on its roots.) We didn't actually pay him, since he owed us for the partial load of brewers' grain we paid for a couple weeks ago, that he fed his cows. Unfortunately he has not gotten any more brewers' grain for his herd (we think he is low on funds) and has not implemented any of Garry's other suggestions for improving his herd.

Anyway, it is supposed to rain this week, stay above freezing, and the rye field will green up, and start growing so Garry can chop it for feed this spring. I don't think I told the story of how they planted this field. In September I think, they spent a very hot dirty day- Garry, Maxim, Victor and Serosija (who we are renting the field from) used Serosija's old seed drill to plant rye seed, that Garry and Maxim had bought from a farmer a few villages over. Garry had seen the field growing during one of his drives. The two of them had shoveled the rye seed into bags from the guys shed, some of it had spoiled from a water leak in the roof, so they tried to avoid the bad stuff. When they went to plant it, it wouldn't run through the seed drill, because of all the dirt and plant trash plugging up the holes. At the time, Garry did not know that there was a place to clean seed in the village. So Victor went back to the house and found some screens, and he and Garry shook the seed through to clean it while Serosija dorve the tractor, and Maxim rode on the drill to watch for (and fix) plugging problems. They were all hot and dirty by the time it was palnted that day. It grew nicely in the fall, and is all ready to get growing, Garry says there is a lot of volunteer barley (that's what you call what was planted previously in a field when it comes up- when you don't just call it weeds) but no problem- it will make good green feed too.