Autumn has arrived

 No frost in the forecast, which is good for Garry's millet crop, but autumn is sneaking up on us with the arrival of October... the signs are clear. In spite of the greenst grass we have seen since spring, the trees are turning gold and brown - you see very few shades of orange or red leaves, much like Manitoba, they seem to all turn yellow.

the maples in front of the house

We looked at the millet on Sunday afternoon, it is growing like crazy with the rain and warm weather, as is the alfalfa, the part of the field that did not get cut a couple weeks ago is almost to Garry's knees. In a couple weeks it should make nice pile of mixed silage with the millet.

The students standing around the chopper yesterday

Garry and Maxim have been working on the chopper. It came back a couple weeks ago, and looked OK, but closer inspection almost had me flying back to Canada for parts. However,  they had to try really hard to fix it, as it had been welded back together wrong, but they think (hope?) it will hang together for the silage making, I looks like we may lose the chopper as the end of the Canadian aid program is coming next year and they told Garry they plan to give them to the cooperatives they worked with in Ukraine. I guess maybe we can buy a broken one in a year or so, but Garry tells me that we can hire someone with a self-propelled forage harvester for about four times what this one costs to rent and then you don't have use your own tractor.

 Fall field plowing is taking place, although there are still some fields of sunflowers to be harvested. The pumpkin seed farmers had a terrible crop- last year they had a bad crop, it took 3 days to wash the seeds to prepare them for drying to sell, this year it took one day... the winter wheat crop is up and growing, there are green fields everywhere. Garry thinks that very few crops of corn will be planted next spring, this year we had seen much more corn planted than in previous years, but with the drought, no one harvested anything but silage, except the big crop farmer in the village... remember the field with as many volunteer sunflowers as corn plants?

Here it is early in the summer before it turned brown- it stayed four feet tall

He combined it, over three days and got a truck load of mostly sunflower seed with some corn in...Garry peeked in the truck to see. He believes the guy is planning to use it as his sunflower seed payment to the landowners of shares he rents. Remember how he only gave them half a ton of wheat instead of the two they were supposed to get this summer? They are supposed to get as part as the traditional payment some sunflower seed- or an equal of oil that seed would yield. However they can't get it crushed in the village anymore, the owner sold the equipment and then the building this spring, I think he was retiring to the city.




Yesterday I went in one of the spare bedrooms for something, one of the cats was inside, I stepped on a rag rug, heard a crunching sound, and thought "what's under here? It feels big..." Flipped up the carpet, and found a mouse lying there. I called Garry to look, he picked it up by the tail, and decided it was still twitching, I had killed it when I stepped on it! He carried it outside and gave Mooshka a treat....the mouse picked the wrong place to hide from a cat!

Mice moving in for the winter, that's defintely a sign of autumn!