Here's one for Seth and Jonah, if you look carefully you will see two striped cats in the photo, the spring kittens like to slip in the door for a snack of catfood and to play with Box, they race around the house chasing each other until someone gets tired of it and puts them out.
The quail were happy in the cage sitting in the window of the summer kitchen when I saw them last week. The baby ducks have disappeared, there were four left at last count. One froze when it escaped from the coop one night last week. I told Garry that Momma Duck did better this spring when they ran around the barn. It seems the attempt to keep them safe didn't work that well. I saw Momma Duck in the barn yesterday but no sign of the babies.
Garry is looking for more nice old Mennonite bricks to clad the porch. It turned out the pile under the tarp that has been there since Victor's original renovation did not have the good whole bricks we thought. Now we have maybe 400 bricks stacked and clean and we need 1000 according to the bricklayers. The neighbor that was renovating his house this summer may have some, but they used some of his in the water irrigation pipeline project. He took apart one wall of his really old Mennonite house this spring, propped it up with posts and then had the walls rebuilt. It was falling down, it was built with posts and bricks, as some of the oldest houses here were. He even put new windows in with the money he made raising two bull calves he bought from us last winter. Good thing the project is about done, since the first frost was Monday, and the cold wet weather will start any day.
Monday morning we had frost and Garry brought in a few handfuls of small peppers from the garden, it wasn't quite a killing frost, so they were OK, I made some fresh salsa and put the rest in the fridge. Last night he said something about how they would be driving over the garden anyway, so this morning I took a bucket and tried getting the rest of the beet and carrot crop out of the ground. The ground is really hard and dry so I had a number of broken carrots in my bucket even with digging around them with the hoe. Box the cat thought they looked interesting when I came back inside. I cooked a bunch of carrots for dinner, the rest go in the fridge for another day.
It was a disappointing crop, early dry weather made both the beets and carrots germinate poorly. Me and the rest of the neighborhood members are looking forward to a garden with irrigation next summer, since we are finally able to connect the water lines to the main irrigation line since they are shutting it down for the winter.
Turns out the dry cow that didn't want to go to the field on Sunday, didn't get out Tuesday (not for lack of trying), but today Maxim chased her all the way out of the village with the herd. Since the corn is all chopped and there is a fair amount on the ground because of the plants between the rows from the re-planting of the field; Garry told the guys with the herd to let the cows out there today. There is very little grass for them to graze, it has been too dry this fall.
Many of our other cows are giving very little milk as they are going to go dry soon (that's when they have a rest and we don't milk them before they have a new calf) and calve in December and January. We are now making only 450 liters a day. The yellow milk truck no longer comes the other buyers (Like Oxana- her van is in front of the milkhouse in the photo) are buying all the milk, even with the new price increase to 3.7 grivna. Last October Garry thinks we were selling at 3.5, with the November price going up to four.
Monday was brewers' grain sale day. Andrei was wearing a sweatshirt and hat while he was selling. The horse and wagon was in again today, he seems to trot in every Monday and Friday. Here's the sign that means Andrei is open for business - the price has gone up- it says Kasha for sale- two grivna per veedro (bucket) Garry decided we were selling for less than we were paying at 1.5.
We have so much corn silage that Garry is going to offer it for sale to people in the village along with the Kasha so that they can feed their cows better in the winter. He is trying to decide on the best price- right now it could be 3-4 grivna. Garry says it would be even better if he could offer a TMR for sale balanced for a cow milking 15 liters a day. Maybe next year.
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