Still here and there

Our grandson likes to follow daddy on the bench at church softball

I am still in Manitoba for a few more days, been busy with a number of things, getting ready to teach English  a week after I get back, hanging out with the kids and grandkids, rearranging the house.  Three Four (I forgot Max is home from university for the summer) twenty-something guys have strange ideas on ideal living- the kitchen couch is back in front of the stove "where you (they) can sit and watch your (their) food cook."

This week was the annual French farm tour days, on the first day it started pouring as the picnic lunch was about to be served, so it moved inside the new gym. I helped stuff take home bags on day one- full of promotional items from ag groups. Yesterday the sun shone, so they ate and played outside after learning about dairy farming. Highlights for the kids? Trying to hand milk a cow and feeding calves with bottles.

The help eats too, I am wearing a purple shirt

There they are (Garry sent it but I haven't been on the ball)

Meanwhile Garry is busy in Ukraine with his hay (really straw, that's what's going under it) shed building project. There were photos of them making posts in the last blog post. The students were digging  post holes on Wednesday. I heard that they had half the posts up on Thursday and were putting the rest in today. I don't know when Monday they were getting a crane in to lift the rafters in place, but Garry has promised me photos, so I will update this post when I get them. They got four up before Garry left with Victor to pick up the new (to us) van in Germany.

Garry in a better field

The difference between a field that was plowed vs. disced last fall
The better (taller, greener) side was plowed

I got photos of the fertilizer too! one...

Two... yes that's Max Rudei... If you are wondering
this part of the field has not been worked in several years
the main part is the green in the distance

Meanwhile he is still wanting rain. I was talking to him earlier in the week while a thunderstorm rolled in, but he thought it was going to miss them again, Lightning, thunder and a few big rain drops. He told me that they were going to do something new- fertilize the irrigated corn field by adding it with the water this week.

Three...Looks very high tech in the photos

Apparently there was a good rain last week, but that only fell on half the fields. We have had no significant rain since March he tells me, so the corn fields that did not get rain are looking really bad and the ones that did look good in the morning before the hot sun beats down and curls the leaves. He says the corn is shoulder high in those fields.  Sunflowers look a little better, they are more drought tolerant.

Here and there

Me with the youngest two granddaughters, 5 and 10 months old

While I have been hanging out with the kids and grandkids, doing the Winnipeg  ALS walk in memory of my mother (5 km with a broken toe- I ran into a coffee table two days before), going to Havilah's ninth birthday party and watching the boys play church softball, Garry has been busy in Ukraine.

Sunday he was helping with testing for the Summer English Institute, he is still buying that used 9 passenger van (I saw an email with a red one, but I haven't heard if that is the one yet) and picking and freezing the peas while I am gone.

Apparently now that first cut hay is done, they are working on building the hay straw shed. The rafters were built when the building team was here in April, but he had been too busy with planting, spraying and school to get the poles up for the shelter. It looks like the students are nailing boards together to make the posts in these photos, and painting the bottoms that go in the ground.

 This year there will be no straw pyramid over at the new barn, the bales won't get rained (if it does rain) or snowed on, and will be better quality. We actually feed a good deal of straw in some of the rations, so its good to not get spoiled by moisture.

Hay

I am guessing that the rain did not amount to much, since it looks like they finished baling the last three loads of alfalfa from this photo Garry put on facebook. That's (from Left) Anton, who joined us in March to learn about dairy farming- he was with another Christian organization that had cows, but didn't know how to care for them. At center- Max Rudei and his youngest brother Artom, who is the main tractor driver and in red Nikolai, one of our grads, who has become the skid steer operator, and normally cleans the freestall barn with it every afternoon. There were a large number of current students and grads loading wagons and unloading hay into the mow of the old barn this past week, including Karina, Leila and Vika, along with many of the guys.

He told me that there were three more to do Tuesday morning when it was raining before I flew out of Kiev, and there are three in the photo. I have not talked to him since I left Ukraine. The internet is not great here at the farm and I have not gotten through when I tried to phone.

Rain and refreshment

We found a canola field full of poppies on the drive

We seem to be suffering through one of the driest springs since we started farming in Ukraine. Normally it is July before I start writing about the lack of rain. Garry keeps telling me I don't need photos because the fields look so bad. Although a really good rain would really help the crops recover and get growing...  without one soon we could be looking at one of those total crop failure years, with the exception of the irrigated corn field, which would become silage to feed the cows over the winter. He says the first sunflower field they planted looks pretty good, but really shows the need for some water in the lower leaves now. The last field is not bad, it came up better than some of the others because Garry reset the planter to plant deeper- where the moisture still was -to sprout more of the seed.
The wheat is ripening, the fields are looking more yellow than green now; and the barley field will become hay sometime soon too. The corn and sunflower fields are sprayed for weeds, so we have spent a pile of money, and are hoping, wishing and praying for rain, so it's not all for naught.


Yesterday it was raining in the morning when I talked to Garry but he described it as little more than a sprinkle with a couple hours of light rain. What he needs it the gully washer thunderstorm we saw in Berdansk over the weekend when we were at the sea for our English Bible study retreat. We had a lovely time of retreat and getting into God's word with a lot of food and a little sunburn mixed in.

When I arrived in Manitoba last night for my two weeks at home, it was in the middle of a thunderstorm, and it poured for the entire two hours Seth drove me home, with huge puddles in the roads. Wish I could send it your way Garry. Of course I woke up about three hours after getting to sleep after not getting much sleep on the 17 hours in planes plus the overnight train the night before to get to Kiev, so I have borrowed Jonah's computer, which seems to have moved into my living room, to finally update the blog.

I had planned to write one in the couple hours I was in the village before leaving, but we drove to Dnepro about two hours after getting back so Garry could pick up the rest of the car money at the bank. Someone is looking for the used van in Denmark, I think, that Garry wants to buy and he should be driving it by the time I am back in Ukraine. It will be a nine seater, to drive students places.


Meanwhile, Garry Victor and Max were busy with a different harvest yesterday, the first honey harvest of the year. They were working in Victor's new honey room.

Irrigation, hay and other farming news

Bales that went up into the mow around noontime

As you can see, this week we are in the midst of haying season. Today more loads of alfalfa went up into the barn.

Last week they were baling the wheat (I was wrong they did not make it into silage). It was a bit tricky to bale up, it was slippery and broke a number of bales the first day as the strings were being tied.

Garry will be up and out on the tractor in the morning, raking hay so they they can bale tomorrow.

Garden getting a good soaking

 We have had the sprinkler going on the garden again the last two days, I picked a few Chinese peas pods we ate on Monday, and I should have more to pick and turn into stir fry tomorrow (Wednesday). If you are wondering Maria planted the onion rows in the center of the garden.You can see her six potato plants the regrew after the frost.  We had several rows that finally sprouted beets and carrots after we watered it a week ago.

The water was turned on for the corn field last week. It was not on when we stopped on Sunday but I got a couple photos.

The black things are filters, they are cleaned out everyday. They keep dirt out of the system that could plug them up.

Garry says some of the other corn fields are looking a little wilted since we still have not gotten more than a sprinkle in the last month. It could very well mean that this could be the only corn we harvest this year if it doesn't rain soon.

 Garry wanted to see if the field had gotten wet enough to got more corn to grow in the field and was very pleased to see some more corn has popped up in some of the bare spots in the field. The ground was just too dry to sprout the corn.

Look baby corn up!

The green is the top honey maker now

 Today Victor and Garry tended bees for a while. First they prepared more frames to put in the boxes since they were running low. They have to put new wires in the wooden frames to hold the sheets of beeswax.
I brought their soup outside to eat under the trees, as they were finishing the frames, and we reminisced about how we ate outside all the time the first summer were were here in 2009.

Bee water station

After we ate, I carried stuff inside and they tended the hives. Garry got a bee sting for the second time this spring, a bee got in the glove he was wearing!

They tried to start a new hive today with some not yet hatched frames of workers and a queen from the busy green gang. They also checked the other hives and were happy to report that the bees that Garry and Max caught have settled in and the queen is laying now.

When Victor checked the yellow box that they left, he reported that the new queen is not fertilized and laying eggs yet. He says they will check on them again next week to see how they are progressing.

Garry's own hive and the dark green one they captured

Bee days

 As you have seen in the blog, we have been expanding the honey business this year, Peter built new bee boxes when he was here with the cheese building team.

A few weeks ago the new bees arrived that Victor had ordered and were put into the new boxes.

Victor is out here several times a week tending the bees, and recently he got a book to wrote down details about each hive, so he could remember what they do. He says that is what his father did. His father was the beekeeper on the collective that Victor grew up in. One of the things he does when he checks on each box is hunt for the queen and look for extra queens and remove them. It is always interesting to see him and Garry trying to spot the queen in the piles of bees crawling around as they pull out frames from the boxes and then slide them back in.

A few days ago Garry and Max caught the swarm, as seen in the most recent post. Victor thinks they did come out of the first box in the line, the yellow one, but not the group that took off earlier. He says we have to wait two weeks to see if the queen of the new group starts laying eggs.

 The yellow box has no queen at the moment, Victor says there is a new one getting ready to hatch out, so the hive that had been making lots of honey is stopped and waiting for their new queen to emerge and start laying eggs.

Since they are hoping to prevent more swarms escaping, on Wednesday morning Garry helped Victor move the busy green group from their old box into one of the new ones with a second story on top. They had stored lots of honey like the yellow group had before they swarmed. The way it works, the queen stays in the bottom box laying eggs in the frames and is prevented from going to the top, the top box is where the workers make honey, and the beekeeper moves the frames as needed to keep things in balance.

Garry has found a bigger shirt to wear for beekeeping

Garry has been learning all about beekeeping  from Victor and has even got his own hive to take care of. He gave his a second story, even though though he says they are not quite ready for it yet.

Wednesday morning before Victor came he was getting frames ready to go into boxes, putting new wires into the old cleaned wooden ones, so they can put new wax sheets in them.

Garry was watering the fruit trees while he was working, because we are still really dry. Tuesday we had a few drops of rain as there were thunderstorms around us, but we missed getting enough rain to do any good.

After they finished with the bees they saw this hedgehog coming to get a drink where the water drips from the connection pipe in the yard.