Finally Finished!

This morning Garry and Maxim after a good night's sleep, finished fixing the chopper. Then they drove all the equipment out to the field again. Unfortunately they were back with the chopper right away. They had chopped for about 2 feet before it broke again. They came in for breakfast before taking it apart again- I cooked up some leftover potatoes and sausage with some onions and eggs for them.

They took the chopper apart and found that a welded piece on the "spider" had broken so they had to take everything apart and reset the 6 remaining knives, so there would be less stress on the welded piece. It was a bigger job than the first time, they finished before one- with slight delay for another repair, which they needed after trying it in the yard. We ate dinner after they finished fixing it and selling milk to Oxana, the lady milk buyer.


After we ate they headed out the field and it was a relief to hear Maxim driving past the house regularly to dump loads of silage. By four pm, the chopper and everything else was back in the yard and Serosia showed Maxim how to pack the pile with his payloader. You have to squash the air out of the silage so it will ferment into silage- otherwise the air will cause it to rot instead.






Garry went off to breed a heifer in Frederika - a nearby village-at four o'clock. He said it was on a thirty foot rope- he grabbed it and clipped its neck collar to the stake it was tied to since the man who had come to drive him there was not much help catching the animal so he assumed he didn't have much to with it(mostly women take care of cows here in Ukraine.)





At five pm the neighbor boy Andrei was busy with customers for brewer's grain- Garry has hired him to sell from 5-7 pm three days a week, for 5% of the sales price. We were surprised to find out that Andrei is 15 years old- the same age as Jonah (Jonah is alot bigger) Garry had thought he was 12 or 13. He has his back to the camera in the green shirt (that used to be Jonah's) Maxim is loading a wheelbarrow for the barn with one of the guys that were helping him this afternoon, and a couple ladies are there to buy some for their cows.




















After the heifers came home, we had some battered and fried summer squash for dinner and then Garry, Maxim and some of Max's friends (with the help of Stacy) covered the pile with plastic (after 8 pm) and the guys piled dirt around the edges to hold it down. Garry then bred a cow in our barn while the ladies were doing the evening milking. Afterwards they tried out the latest strawberry cobbler I made- Stacy keeps picking fruit so we have a new dessert everyday! Stacy seems to be enjoying her time in a Ukrainian village before spending nest month in the city teaching English.










For some reason Papa duck thought me and the camera were more of a threat than Mint!