Whether the weather is good

Normally Garry would say that you can never got too much rain in Ukraine. However we have never seen the fields so wet! They have not been able to get a tractor or even a car out in the fields for more than a week. The winter wheat is green and growing, even though it could be warmer for April. Garry is quite pleased with how the wheat is stooling out and even the alfalfa fields are beginning to look green now.

He is glad that the new seeding of alfalfa went in just before the team arrived, about three weeks ago now, because it has been very rainy. The Sunday the team arrived was the day tractorist Sasha (so we can tell him from barn Sasha, who guards at the new barn, or the two students named Sasha) went to the hospital with appendicitis. He was in hospital for at least a week, but has been back at work for a week now. While he was laid up there were some repairs made to the tractor. I believe it was something that did not get quite right when they split it apart last fall. There is still harrowing to do, to break up the manure that was spread on the alfalfa fields earlier, and more to do on the fields that will be planted in corn, but that will have to wait on drier weather.

Today is more intermittent showers, like the last days when the Alberta team was here; but yesterday the rain was coming down in buckets, with water standing in the furrows in the fields and the ground is thoroughly saturated. I guess the crops will have lots of moisture to draw out of the ground when the dry weather comes this year.

 The wind was blowing hard all day with the rain.  It was about 4 C or 39 F, so it was a cold rain. It blew even harder last night, I thought I could hear tin flapping, but there doesn't seem to be much damage this morning. We saw one little girl walking home from school yesterday afternoon on the main street in the village, wearing her winter coat, hanging onto her see-thru umbrella, which was half broken, bent over and trying to fly away. The only ones who looked happy were the village ducks and geese!

 There were puddles all the way across the highway in places when we drove home from Dnepropetrovsk around 5 pm. We went to buy supplies for next week's building teams, Garry shopped building supplies while I bought groceries. Garry hopes the rain stops (see this is why I said he normally says there can never be too much rain) and it dries up enough that he can get the concrete poured for the pad that the shop will sit on so it will be ready before the team arrives from BC early next week, so they can get it finished in the time they are here as planned. He hopes that he can get the site behind the new group home leveled and some loads of slag in to make a driveway to it and be ready to pour on Saturday (and that he can get a truck of concrete then, because it is Easter weekend. )

                                    I'll let you know how it goes!

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