back to basics- straw, hay and silage making

Try again, yesterday I had some time to post but the internet was not working well... after we had finally got the cable fixed last week! It had gotten corroded at one of the connection points.

 We are back in the village, after the final days of teaching English, we had company for a week, drove down to Crimea with them for 5 days and 4 nights, and a few more here before dropping them at the airport in Dnepro on Saturday afternoon. .

Andrei, Garry and tall Max

 Thursday Garry helped unload the last wagons of straw unto the big pile outside, the mow is so full, they made this pile outside, that they will use first...
We had just a little rain on Sunday, but really could use more to get the alfalfa growing so we get another cutting. After two good cuttings, there wasn't much third cutting last month with it being so dry.

How dry is it? So dry the ground is cracking...

Garry is in Zaporosia today for meetings about the trade school, while he is gone, the guys are starting the corn silage. The machine (chopper) is sort of fixed, they have been unable to fix one worn out part, so the spout cannot turn- the piece the chopped corn comes out of shooting the bits into the wagon. However, after three trips to the metal market, three worn bearings they found have been replaced.

On Saturday Victor went with Garry to the metal market and they bought three bearings. Saturday evening Maxim noticed one was the wrong size when he tried to put them in, so Garry went back with Olya, who has come to experience farm life for a week (one of our SEI students, a university student in Moscow, her mother is one of our English teacher friends from Dnepro, and Mooska- the white cat's original owner).

Olya with tall Max and Helen another SEI visitor

Olya has been helping feed the cows twice a day and
 helping tall Max with his English grammar too!

 Anyway they got a new bearing with the correct dimensions and got the money back on the first one (new one was more expensive of course), but that evening, they discovered that inside the one box they didn't check, since both the other bearings were supposed to be the same size, was a bearing that was not the same as the other, so Garry had to run back into the city first thing in the morning. By lunchtime they had it all together, and Maxim went to chop some corn silage for  a small farmer, but it turned out that his corn was too wet to cut yet...

the first load

which is why they are cutting ours today. It has dried a lot in the last couple weeks. Garry is pleased with the amount of grain in it, there are lots of cobs, the best corn we have grown in Ukraine.

 Today I decided to peel apples and pears) outside to cut down on fruit flies in the house.... so I did them out on the plastic table like I used to the first summer we were here. Very pleasant out there around nine am under the trees, except for some unwelcome insects that kept landing on my peelings...most of the time. I made a dessert for lunchtime and froze a couple bags, too. I was tossing the good stuff in a pot full of salted and vinegared water so they didn't turn brown, only had to remove one insect, without getting stung!

I made some meat pies for lunch and a meatless one for Olya, along with the dessert and a nice fresh cucumber, tomato and onion salad. Now for some hot pepper chopping and freezing hopefully without getting my fingers near my eyes!