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.