We are still here- internet went down for a couple days, so I was unable to blog- and did catch up on my sleep after staying up all night to watch the Flyers game seven victory (sadly 7:30 pm EST is 2:30 am here.)
Tuesday the milk tank was emptied and washed – I think Garry hopes to get it empty again today- Friday. As Garry says, all the milk in the tank is as old as the oldest milk in the tank. The lady milk buyer hoped to be back today with the repaired van. One of the buyers has already complained that the milk is too cold for him to make sour cream/cottage cheeses out of.
Thursday Garry’s dental work was finished, and the dentist office only wanted 12 liters of milk to buy- seems like Garry can forget about taking some in after this. Victor says milk drinking season is almost over- people stop drinking milk when the strawberries are ripe. Maybe cold milk will help change Ukrainian habit. One of the ladies from the village who come in to buy a few liters of milk was very excited to see the new milk tank. She told Garry that the cooler was wonderful- now there would always be good tasty milk.
Wednesday Garry and Maxim took some time to work on the concrete walls for the third brewers’ grain pit. There was a problem after the last load of brewers’ grain came- the wall of the original pit fell down (it was not as strong because the original pit was going to be a single instead of the row of cells we now have- with all the weight of the grain pushing again the empty space it collapsed.) Luckily no one was in there when it happened- now that that pit is empty, they cleaned out the rubble and put the forms in and mixed up cement. As you can see they had to use the wheelbarrows to move the cement around to fill the walls, instead of the easy tractor way. Max is using a piece of rebar to make sure the walls are completely full- no airpockets that become holes in the wall!
Garry is selling more brewers’ grain to people in the village to feed their cows, pigs, and they come by tractor, motorcycle with cart behind, cars with trailers, or even young Andrei comes on his three wheel bicycle with a big pail to get some for his parents’ animals- he makes a couple trips- they live across the street and three houses down. He charges a little more than we pay- but less than the truck that comes through the village now (Garry says we were selling it first- so we aren't putting anyone out of business) The cows have not gone out to the community pasture yet here in the village, so sales may slow down in May.
The trees are coming out in leaf (not quite all of them- but more everyday) Garry says you can see the difference from morning to evening when he was cultivating. They have been discing and cultivating fields to get some corn planted today. Yesterday Max was cultivating while Garry was gone to the dentist and had more tire problems so they were fixing it when we got back (I was grocery shopping) Garry did finish cultivating the field across the highway in the evening (the one he planted last August in the hope of getting something to feed the cows- but there was no rain so it didn’t grow.) It is a strip between the road through the field and a winter wheat field- the winter wheat fields are emerald green carpets now. He finished cultivating and got back around 9:30 – I was teasing him he’s normally asleep then!
No comments:
Post a Comment