Big build day

 

Here's some photos from Wednesday when the crane was here to put up the pieces of the new quonset type shed. Garry has been telling everyone walking past who asks what it is going to be that its a sportshall, so we actually went and purchased a portable basketball hoop for it last night. 

It's main purpose will be grain storage, however, it's pretty big. It's not an optical illustion, it is wider than the other one is long. The guy seaming the sections together actually went over the barn with the machine, too. When the first one was built (maybe eight years ago) the machine went up and over on it's own. Garry took a video yesterday.

I had a busy morning, I walked down to get Bear, walked him to the barn, where he got his nose scratched by one of the cats while getting his morning milk snack, then home for his nap, while I cooked lunch for the crew.

Around ten Garry and Max came for something and said only five guys for lunch, so I planned on eight, plus some for the girls here. At that point, I had baked a chocolate cake and made a large coleslaw, a big pot of soup, and was peeling potatoes for scalloped potatoes. Good thing I made extra, as Garry came back at noon to pick it up and asked if I had ten. He wasn't joking, so I quick moved some more food into the to go containers, leaving only one culetta (really it's a hamburger) for the girls. 

Turned out Leila and one of the Sashas were the only ones on clean up over at the barn that morning, so Garry invited them for lunch. Oleg has been on a clean up around the buildings campaign. So one of the girls got everything to eat anyway. I got to set up on the table saw in the shop.

Now the building guys just have to finish the end walls. Andrey Rudei was welding the angle iron on the short sides for them yesterday. Soon we'll have the sportshall of Garry's dreams, or the grain storage of Max's.

They came!

 After many days of waiting, apparently the barn building guys have solved their labor problems, finished the barn they were building and arrived here Saturday afternoon. When we got back from Garry's English classes, there was a crane unloading their machine.

They have been working on making 19 loops that will be seamed together tomorrow. We have hired a crane to lift the pieces up. We had to feed and house the crew while they're working, so they are at Vova's (the boys house) since there aren't any guys there currently. He's feeding them too.However tomorrow I'm making a big lunch so they can keep working all day since I'll bring it there. 

I just have to hurry down in the morning and bring Bear home, he's been moved there in the evenings to guard the machine. Hopefully I'll have lots of photos of the Quonset to post tomorrow.

Other stuff

 Some other highlights of the last week: Monday we didn't have students in for dinner because Victor had car trouble. Tuesday became pizza night after a late afternoon staff meeting, and we had cake a day late for Oksana's birthday. In a first I had leftover pizza for the next day, but I did make a lot of coleslaw they filled up on. There's going to be a few schedule changes for students and a few other changes suggested by the new people we're going to try. 

 

Monday morning I rode along as Garry went to breed cows in two different villages, one he'd never been to before. It was a wonder we found the village and then the right street, as there were no signs or house numbers on it. At one point he turned at a red fence according to the directions she'd given over the phone. Garry saw an older lady outside and decided to ask where we were, and amazingly it turned out she was the caller. She'd gotten his phone number from a place in another village he'd bred a cow in recently. She told him she used to milk cows at a collective in the old days.

Then we drove back through the village to put more money on Garry's phone as he'd run out so he couldn't call the last lady back when we were trying to find the right street. We met a guy who'd phoned that morning from Dnepropetrovsk Sharokey at the store in that town and followed him to his house to breed a cow there. New customer, but Garry is often breeding cows in that village, apparently they don't have a bull in town anymore. It's sometimes luck or good guesses, when he finds the right place, often he tells them to slow down because his Russian is not good on the phone, with so many new people calling this year, but if Garry doesn't understand the directions over the phone, he asks to meet them somewhere. After his cow was bred the guy said "watch this" and fed her some pumpkins.

We did get some rain Friday, but not as much as Garry would like. The students and I made "sweet pizza" with apples that morning. Bear and I did a three mile walk before I made a quick stir-fry for lunch. My wash was rescued off the clothesline by Garry when the rain started around two instead of seven PM.

It's late and Garry is sleeping. I am waiting to get in the bathroom as the girls were all doing night milking and are going through bathroom to shower, one after the other. He had English classes today, and bred cows for people before and after our trip to Dnepro. I got groceries and did some cross-stitch and people watching. 

I rode along on his Saturday afternoon cow breeding trip that featured a couple kilometres of bad field road. The van really was that tilted as it looks in the photo. The road had a gully washed out of it that he was trying to straddle. At least he knew where we were going. They have eight cows, so he's been there before. The road was better before all the rain this summer.

To be continued...

 

Just realized I never finished that last sentence in the last post! They did do some concrete work last week and this week, with another truck yet to come sometime. They are increasing the manure storage pad behind the barn, knocking down the little wall and making a bigger area with a taller wall. Since we are milking a hundred or more cows, there's a lot more manure!

The forecasted rain did not amount to much last weekend. It rained more Saturday afternoon than any other time, but not enough to get that wheat growing. Thursday morning, Bear and I walked in a cold drizzle, but I'm told the forecast for later today is for real rain. We will see. About half the winter wheat is planted, the last sunflower field combined had to wait for the stalks to dry some so they would break up when they disc it. 

The most exciting thing last weekend was Garry got his first Pfizer shot!  He'd about given up on getting vaccinated against covid before flying back to Canada, since it seemed foreigners were never going to be eligible in Ukraine. We all know how hard it is for him to wait to see the farm for two weeks of quarantine, but it was looking like what we'd have to do. However, we spoke at Lena's English school on Saturday, afterwards she went with Garry to the Jewish center and he got the forms. We went to Victor's house, he helped fill them out (he said it was the same form he helped fill out the last time they tried to get Garry vaccinated).  Sunday morning we went back first thing with a pile of ID and documents and it worked! He only had a sore arm the next day, too. 

He can get the second one in three weeks. Unfortunately that's when we booked the trip to Sharm el sheikh (Red sea, Egypt) with Max and his wife and daughter, and Yana, so it will be four weeks before he gets it, plus two weeks wait before he can get his certificate, so we won't be flying back until November. Our kids are figuring that Manitoba will be in a lockdown of some kind, like the last times when we flew home.

The second most exciting thing was when we went to Victor's we picked up the repaied washing machine. The girls and I are still trying to catch up on washing dirty clothes after two weeks without a working one. Looks a little iffy, it's banged up, but still working almost a week later. Hopefully the two loads out on the line dry some before the rain starts.

This week

 It's been a different week. At the beginning of the week, Garry thought it wouldn't be very busy, but it managed to be as busy as we've been all summer.

You could say it had highlights, and lowlights. They harvested almost all the sunflowers now, they sold three truckloads right out of the field when the combined on Thursday. The field was so good, there were more than that, so they sqeezed them in somewhere, since there's still wheat on one side of the Quonset. The old one, because no one has shown up to build the new one, even though Max had a phone call that they'd be here last weekend. There's just that little field planted after they cut that wheat for silage.

More than half the winter wheat is planted, and three days of rain is predicted, starting Sunday, which it really needs to get growing, as it is still dry. 

The cows are making more milk, and the price has risen a bit too, as fall is here. 

This week Victor did a Mennonite tour. A few months ago, an American couple contacted us, looking for Victor Penner's contact informantion, as they couldn't reach him. They had stopped here with him three years ago. Unfortunately we had to tell him that he had died last year. However, our friend Victor also does Mennonite tours, so we gave them his contact info. They had eight relatives coming to visit Ukraine and wanted to show them them where their ancestors lived. That was why Victor had gotten the old blue van on the road. Two weeks ago, the van broke down, so Victor was going to use ours instead. However, ten guests wouldn't fit, so Garry drove our van and Victor his brown car with four people. Since there was room, I tagged along for the first day, down to the Moloshka colony area. We went to the Mennonite Center, the old windmill and some villages where their relatives lived.

We dropped them off before six and took Victor out for a steak dinner. There was a huge traffic jam leaving Zaporosia (because of a fender bender on the dam bridge) and we didn't get home until eight thirty!

Thursday morning they were off around seven, not as early as Wednesday,  to pick them up for day two of the the tour. I went for the morning walk I skipped the day before, and then made some breakfast pizza, since they were coming here for a tour of the farm and the village first. I went with them to Khotithsa before we had to take them to meet their train. We saw some old Mennonite buildings, the old oak tree, and got a look inside the former Kroger clock factory, which is now a church. The ladies there took photos of it in the pages about in Victor's book.

It was a fun tour, with hugs at the end, as they went off on the train at 3:30 to explore other parts of Ukraine.

We raced off to breed a cow in the village and Garry had two English classes in Dnepro starting at five. I took the van and bought some tools for cleaning yards for Oleg to use with some of the boys, and some groceries. We got home after nine. Once again, Garry was asleep soon after.

Friday Garry caught up on farm stuff, breeding seven cows, including some of the new heifers in the headlock pen. I used some of the groceries for my student cooking class, we made oatmeal cooked with garlic and chicken broth, topped with fried mushrooms and onions and an egg. Topped by their choice of ketchup or mayo.

We had to go into Dnepro to meet someone at five, we left home aroud 3:30, Garry stopped at the New Holland dealer to talk about buying a tractor, after the meeting at the cafe (where I drank a pot of green tea) we had to go somewhere close to Victor's house. Garry mentioned buying gas on the way home as we left.  It was after six  and traffic was heavy, stop and go downtown,  and we ran out of fuel on Kiriva Street (it has a new name but we never remember). Sitting in the middle of the three lanes, shortly before a light. Flashers on. It gets dark around seven pm now. 

Called Victor. No answer, try again, and again. Called the guy we'd met. He brought us diesel and we got it going again. The place we had to go we closed by the time we arrived, but we used the bathroom and got dinner at the mall around eight pm. Garry drove home after buying diesel before leaving the city. Home after nine, and right to bed for him!

Yesterday evening  they did a load of cement 

A few photos from this week

 Last Saturday we had visitors, Sasha from SEI and her family came out to see the farm, we had a great time. Her son was less than impressed with how the barn smells though.

Saturday was the start of combining sunflowers. As predicted, a great crop. The pile of seeds in the shed was bigger from 55 (I'm going to say hectares, because when I say acres, I'm usually wrong in these posts) than from 100 last year. Today they combined 15 more acres and had the auger going and boys shoveling to fit more in. There's 25 more to do sometime that are close to dry, plus the five that were double-cropped that are still pretty green.

Here's the heifers and calves in their new homes. The big ones moved from the first heifer barn to the new one this week and after a little cleaning and renovation the calves moved from the baby pens (the two to three month old ones no longer drinking milk) and the bigger calves came from the tent barn (no more animals at the "old barn"anymore) in the wagon behind the tractor. They are settling in nicely. Garry plans to start breeding the oldest heifers artificially to Jersey semen now.

In other news, Oleg and Elena cooked plouf over the fire for Monday's student supper. I made salads.

The students pulled up the driplines in the big cornfield. Garry made Nikolai in charge and paid him and he paid everyone who helped him do it. Some days it was him and two people, sometimes five or six. It needed ,to be cleaned up before the field can be worked up.

They hoped to start planting winter wheat today. They got the seed cleaned on Thursday but decided that the ground is more dry than they thought so they need to disc it a second time before planting. I heard a tractor come in late so it may have happened. Hopefully we get some rain after its planted, so it will start growing.

Friday morning Bear and I took a shorter walk (only two miles) so I was home in time for the first cooking class of the fall. Monday night I told the students if they brought a kilo of sugar to class they'd get  four jars of jam to take home. Turned out it was only three, but three people brought sugar and they all peeled and chopped apples.

The guys to build the barn are supposed to arrive this weekend to start. Maybe tomorrow. Andrei has been welding angle iron on top of the concrete walls so everything should be ready. We have to house and feed them for about  so the plan is to put them in Vova's, since there's plenty of room there.

If you are wondering, yes, those are sunflower seeds on the cement, no, not ours, someone's trying to dry theirs out because the combined theirs a bit early and they are 11% moisture. Ours are good to sell, they want them around 7-8 %%.The price is higher than last year, I've been told.