Baby, baby!

The hat is behind the eggs and Paska bread 

Monday morning it was not raining as we left the village to go to the gym in Zaporosia. Maxim Rudei came to work just we were leaving and said that his wife Yulia had gone to hospital at 1 am, and the baby should come around 8 or 9 am. Garry asked him why he was here if the baby was coming, but he said he would go later, her mother was there with her.







 We got a call from Max around noon, when we were back in the village. The baby girl had just arrived and weighed in around 3 kilos  (or about 6 1/2 lbs). I heard that her name is Victoria, Vika for short and that she has lots of black hair, too. Luckily that morning I finished crocheting the pink hat to match the booties had I made for her, so I gave Max the bag full of presents for her. I think they are coming home on Thursday.

Garry went to breed a cow in the village yesterday (Monday) and he got a present with his payment from one of Yulia's relatives, Paska bread and Easter eggs. You can see two of them were dyed with onion skins after applied leaves with wax. The others are the plastic shrink wraps that are sold in all the stores here and have cartoon-like characters on, the yellow one has a cow on it.

At one time there was an air force base near Zap

As we got closer to the city, it started to rain pretty hard, as you can see in the photo I took along the highway. Since it was raining most of the weekend, there were no tractors in the field on Monday. However, this afternoon they were able to get back to work in the fields, since the drainage is so good here. Garry is excited about how much moisture is in the ground, the corn should have lots of moisture, enough for the first month, anyway, even if it does not rain. The wheat will be growing like crazy now, with warm and wet weather.

 They hope to get some more corn planted on Wednesday. They only got about 10 acres planted on Friday, because even after they got the planter working better, the cheap fertilizer they bought turned out to be a mistake, it would not go through the planter.  They spread it with the spinner spreader on the field - which is bigger than I thought, 260 acres- on Saturday and today, which was sunny.   They had so much trouble with getting it on even with the spreader, they actually screened it through an old bed frame spring to break it up first. Garry says it has some kind of clay in it.

  In the morning they will harrow the field and start planting with some new fertilizer that they are buying in the morning, since they could not buy any sooner because of the Easter holiday, so the planter may be working by lunchtime.  Turns out that the extra fertilizer is needed as the soil samples Garry sent away show the soil is lacking potassium and potash in the extreme, the only good rating was for organic matter in the soil.  They did some more work over at the trade school barn (check for a new post- click on the bird photo), and spread some more of the bad fertilizer on another field that will be planted in corn,

Still wet and getting up soon after birth

This afternoon there was a different kind of baby girl born with the arrival of a heifer calf. The girls were excited about the heart marking on her face. Garry was more excited that she is 75% Holstein, and her first calf mother looks ready to give lots of milk. The 50% Holstein heifers are milking much better than the native Russian Red ones.


 The cows are milking pretty well we are making about 600 liters a day. Last week the buyers were trying to get all the milk they could to sell with the before Easter week rush. They can sell all they can get in the markets then, since you need milk to make Paska bread. Unfortunately, this week the price we sell it for drops with demand as the supply goes up and everyone's cows are eating green grass, so there is more for sale through spring and summer.

Maria watching Yana trying to get the calf back in front of her mother

Everyone is looking good

Some new baby ducks up the street out in the sunshine