Maxim finished cutting down the alfalfa and the prusso millet on Saturday while Garry and I drove Yana to her village for a visit. Normally she takes a marshutka (small bus) but she wanted to take her bull calves home - she bought two in the last couple months. I took a number of pictures in her village, and some along the way, including some in the small city of Tokmak, which I will be putting on the blog as soon as I find the photo card reader!
Sunday was a great drying day, and Monday also , when Garry got the chopper back together and it worked when they tried it out on a load of alfalfa to feed the cows, even with the problems with the blower from when it was away-- and "fixed". Hopefully it hangs together long enough to chop all the silage.
Yesterday I dug up everything in the garden that was left- the light frosts we have been having didn't hurt the peppers, the last one did hit the tomato plants. However, everything must go now, because the silage pile is going to be on the garden!
They were going to stop chopping Tuesday, but Monday the farmer who grew corn for us the first year offered them some free feed. He has a barley field that grew back from seed after harvest, (like many did with the rains since August) and said they can have it for free, they can even use his swather to cut it. Maxim was trying to get it up and running all day yesterday, so they can get the barley cut and make a really big pile of silage now! The swather had to be put into transport mode to go out to the field, then it broke, but the guy had a replacement part, so Garry (who was finished teaching class) and Max put it on, but it broke again and so they took it back (where they will have to fix it again.) Today Maxim is mowing with the disc cutting hay bine, a smaller swath , less than half what the swather would have cut in one pass, but it just wasn't going to work, the barley is just too green (wet) to cut with a machine that normally is used to cut a ripe crop.
Garry helped all afternoon, rushing in at 5:30 to get a quick shower and run out the door to go to our "Bible study" we are reading and discussing CS Lewis' book Mere Christianity in English. We made it in time, although without our normal stop at Mc Donalds for hamburgers on the way into the city. We decided to stop on the way out, but had a slight delay as we realized had a flat tire just before we crossed Heroes of Stanlingrad street. Garry couldn't pull over until after we crossed it-- it is a big wide boulevard with tram tracks in the center---- so the tire was toast. He changed it in the parking lot of a store on the corner, he had a bunch of tools in the car from trying to fix the swather, and I held his cellphone with it's handy tiny flashlight pointed at the tire. We did get our hamburgers and made it safely home on the spare, which he had to reinflate with his little plug-in the cigarette lighter air pump before putting it on the car!
Garry plans to start with the chopper today on the alfalfa that was
mowed on Saturday, but there was a heavy dew- it clouded over last night
so we escaped the killing frost which is bound to happen soon.
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