I'm back!

After all the fun helping out with the new baby and going to our granddaughter's third birthday party and open farm day in Manitoba, I'm back. Back in Ukraine, back online, although on Garry's Russian laptop, since he changed the wifi for the umpteenth time in the last two years, and I have not hunted down the password yet to connect mine.

All of the grandkids together for the first time

However, I will attempt to update you with some photos, now that I have had some sleep. I arrived in Dnepro Tuesday evening about 24 hours after flying out of Winnipeg.

The new storage shed, with Milka the new house's heifer in front 

Garry has been very busy, with a number of foreign (Canadian, Dutch) tour groups stopping in in the last couple weeks, the beginning of harvest. They have combined sunflowers, a little corn to grind to feed the cows, they sold some sunflowers right from the field to pay for seed to plant winter wheat, and maybe the fuel for the fall plowing (unfortunately they still haven't gotten the money yet, so...)

The sunflower seed in one side of the new storage shed

 the rest of the sunflowers were cleaned and stored in the new shed. It seemed that the combination of one type of seed not running through the planter well, and the attack of the fungus (some varieties were unaffected by it but the one we planted was highly susceptible to it) meant that our fields were thinly populated, the fertilizer we applied grew a great crop of weeds in the fields. Ironically, tractorist Sasha planted sunflowers in his own field, used no fertilizer and got two tonnes to our one! One of the neighbors did even better with no fertilizer, so I guess we should have saved our money.

 Garry is quite busy trying to get stuff finished for two things, one, they are building a system of pipes for floor ventilation for the other side of the shed floor to store the corn which will be combined soon.
The other project? The cows will be moving into the free stall barn finally on Friday, and there are lots of last minute details, like hanging lights for the parlor. The milk tank will be moved Friday morning to the other farm, and reinstalled by professionals so watch for photos on the weekend! The ones of the cows going through the village to the barn should be even more interesting.

Garry had to drive to the Nova Lenya ( a home depot kind of store) twice yesterday to buy supplies for his projects, and hunt down missing drills- the three grad guys were drilling holes in the sewer pipes for the ventilation system for the corn-  and he had to go in to sign some papers with Victor for Hope for Each (there are new government rules for charitable organizations, basically if you go out of business they get the assets)  and  then we drove to one of our follow up English programs in the evening!

Classes started last week for the students, so far there are only boys in the first year of the course, seven of them, with one of the ones that was here most of the summer having taken off with one of the other kids cell phone and jewelry. I was even greeted with Hello Teresa by a student I have not yet met yet this morning. Garry tells me we have one guy with epilepsy, one with a physical handicap, and twins who are the younger brothers of our recent grad Kolya. Our grads Kolya, Nikolai, and Sasha have moved into their apartment, and Julia in with Karina in the other, hopefully the electricity will be connected next week.
 All the second year students (except Kristina, who has her grade 9 diploma already and is getting tutoring from teachers in the village to take exams for getting into a vet tech course next year)  and three of the grads are going to Dnepro three afternoons a week to get proper grade nine certificates so they will be eligible for better trade schools if they want to apply to them next year. After all they can't all stay here forever.
                                     

                                         What's that?

Remember the alfalfa that was left blooming for the bees? The bees are back in the yard. They cut it with the mower last week and this week they combined it and now it's in a little pile in the shed. Garry thinks there is enough to plant 6 hectares in the spring. Now to figure out how to get the seeds from the hulls....