Garry's been busy

While I have been busy in Manitoba with camping and other family activities while Garry's parents were here, Garry was very busy on the farm in Ukraine. Thursday he cut some of the headlands on the cornfield where the sunflowers grew last year, and on Friday he and Andrei did more loads from that field before Maxim returned from his holiday at the Azov Sea. On Saturday they worked on chopping the field across the highway, and had 65 loads done when a chain broke on the machine.

Sunday morning they finished the last load of silage before church and now there is a very large pile of corn silage covered with plastic and ready to feed to the cows. He says it is twice as big as the one last year, and there will be the late corn field to turn into silage this fall yet. He tells me the plants in that field have not tasseled yet (that's when the fertilization takes place before the cobs grow.)

Last week he said it needed rain, but he said on Monday evening that it was a good thing that they had finished the corn silage harvest and got the machine ready for someone else to use because it was really wet and muddy outside. The forecast for the rest of the week is for more rain.

In other news- the first calf was born from the frozen Canadian semen on the farm. The calf was large (hopefully this does not mean all the cows that he bred for people in the villages will have trouble calving) but both cow and calf are doing well. The machine milking is still going well (no problems with the vacuum pump) and
he and Max followed through on letting Luba, the older milker lady go (she was not popular as she yelled a lot and sometimes hit the cows with her milking stool) She was very upset, but they found her another job milking with a place to live at the farm with 100 cows milking, so was happy afterward, he thought.

I am sure Garry will find other things to do for the next ten days until I return with the boys.