Planting and waiting for rain...

The guys have been busy planting wheat this week, while we have been busy teaching (click on the birds for more on that). I think they have finished our fields tonight. Yesterday they were planting for a neighbor whose truck they were using to put the seed in (they purchased some treated wheat seed this year and this truck picked some of it up a few days ago. They are trying to get in in before the rain arrives. On Monday and Tuesday we are supposed to get a good soaking, but it is forecast to start raining tomorrow (Sunday.)

That is a good thing, it will get the wheat sprouted and growing, and the other fields soft enough  for fall plowing, right now the ground to too hard to plow. The fields they planted were disced up to prepare them for planting wheat. So I am hoping to take some good muddy photos for the blog next week!

They also bought some wheat seed from a different place, one that Maxim Rudei spent all day last Sunday getting to and back with the tractor and one of the precepts (wagons) that they had foamed (like the insulating puffy kind you use to seal around windows and doors) to seal the cracks so it wouldn't leak. He also had a one of the neighbors in a spotter car driving in front of him to avoid police checks (the wagon does not have a passport, mostly because it is so old that it has parts of more than one wagon, and all equipment in Ukraine needs to have a "passport" an official document that proves ownership especially on the roads, even wagons.) He had to go on the dirt roads through the fields for a while, but they got that load of wheat seed home.

bo- KC - C is our s, and Ks is the X sound in Russian
N is not a Russian number their N looks like our H,
so I assume someone put a little English there.

Garry only had to purchase the seed this month, since they still had bagged fertilizer in storage in the box (it's our locked storage compartment in a building the collective had in the center of the village- and it is called a box, like  бокс N8, as you can see in this photo.)

Friday night at 6 pm the seed drill (planter) broke down and Maxim phoned several farmers in the village to see if they had the bearing on hand, since all the dealers would be closed at that hour if they even had the part in stock. None of the three farmers had it, but the last guy he talked to thought maybe someone in a different village might have one. Maxim phoned him and he had half of the bearing, luckily the half Max did not, so the guys were able to repair it, and keep planting.

Garry carrying a bag of fertilizer out of "our box" to the van

The truck of seed in the field- they bucket the wheat out and into the seeder

The fertilizer is in bags however.

Andrey is driving a load of corn silage over to the other barn to feed
the cows in the foamed wagon that had wheat seed in earlier in the week-
you can see a line of yellow on the back of the precept