Rain, rain

Tuesday morning Garry was telling me that it had rained overnight and there were puddles so they might not be able to work in the field.

After Monday's work, there is about one day of dripline connection work left to do so they can get the water running on the big cornfield.  Monday morning he spent an hour and a half reconnecting lines that had popped open the first night the water was on in the small corn field. He says there seems to be more pressure in the line than last year.

When I talked to him at the end of his Tuesday, he told me they had had three tenths of an inch of rain, and couldn't even drive on the dirt roads to the fields in the morning. Instead they dug a trench over to the Crawfords so they could run irrigation water to their place. Scott and Shannon have been carrying buckets over from our house for their garden.

Photo from a friend's Facebook page

I just talked to him (around 9 PM Tuesday evening in Manitoba) It's Wednesday morning and there's no power in the village.  He said that around 1:30 in the morning he woke up to a thunderstorm and put on a coat and ran out to rescue some very wet young  geese and turkeys.  He said he didn't think anyone in the village could have slept through the storm. The electricity went out and it poured.  He checked the rain gauge at the Crawford's this morning and discovered that they had another 3/4 of an inch of rain, so an inch over two nights.

He says that if they ran the irrigation system full out it would take 5 days to get that much water on the fields. This is definitely the wettest spring we've had in Ukraine.  Next week the second cut alfalfa will be ready to cut and bale, and the oats, peas will be ready to harvest as silage. If it stops raining that is.

Garry told me he thought it was sunny out this morning, but when he went outside, it was only sunny over the village and to the east. There are more storm clouds building to the west, and heading toward the village.

Garry was happy that he hadn't left his rubber boots outside Tuesday and he had dry feet to go make feed for the cows. Max had already taken the tractor over to start the generator running so they could milk the cows.

Garry said the metal was delivered yesterday to finish the back and end walls of the heifer shed, so maybe they'd be able to put that up today, since it will definitely be too wet to work on the irrigation lines. They can charge the batteries for the drills at the barn with the generator, so it's possible.

Hopefully the utility company gets the power back on before afternoon milking.