More to do

Now that the corn silage is chopped and the pile covered- the  plastic arrived at Nova Posta in Zaporosha the afternoon afterward they finished- Garry is busy checking more things off his to do list. Last year they bought discarded used tires from a shinomontage to weigh down the plastic, and when they went to put them on this year, they discovered about a quarter of them missing. It seems the people in the village have been taking them for spare tires. Max is trying to figure out how to make something to split them in half, so there's twice as many and no one will want to take them home with them. 

The guys mowed our new seeding, and a hayfield someone wanted to sell third cut off of (we went to see it, I took a photo of Garry checking if he wanted to buy it) on the weekend and it was ready to bale Monday, they did the second field Tuesday. It was in a nearby village. They had a wagon break in the field and had to go weld it in the field. It took Max a couple days to fix the ones we broke doing corn silage. I think the students are happy to not be baling and stacking bales for a while. Garry's hoping to get another cut of hay if we get more rain. They get paid for doing extra work like baling, but this summer has been really busy.

Garry was happy to be able to increase hay in the ration from twenty to twenty-five bales. The hayshed by the barn is full of hay this year. Other years it's been a combination of bales or even just straw. This year the straw is all in the mow here in the tent barn or in a big pile over at the farm. On Saturday they finally got the last of the straw bales baled, so they can finish working up the wheat fields that will be planted with sunflowers next spring.

They hope to start combining sunflowers this week as the first fields they planted have dried down fast. The new Quonset shed is yet to be built, but one side of the old one is empty now, so it can go there. They were able to get back to work on finishing the concrete for the new Quonset on Monday. The last wall was poured and they started pouring the floor. They got two more loads of cement Tuesday and one more comes today. The company has not called to say when they will be here to start building. The metal for the shed arrived and was paid for before it was unloaded from the truck a week or two ago.

On Monday we went with Victor in his old blue van (which he brought out of retirement for a Mennonite tour he's doing in September) to pick up the headlocks for the heifer shed. The new heifer shed will have automatic headlocks in one of the two pens so Garry will be able to breed heifers artificially. Using a bull for heifers means that you don't know how big the newborn calves will be, which means they might have difficulty giving birth for the first time. Artificial insemination means you can select a bull with a proven record for calving ease, or use a Jersey bull (a smaller breed than Holstein). Garry tells me that they did some work on the heifer barn yesterday afternoon, installing the headlocks and cementing in three posts. They hope to finish it very soon so they can move heifers in. 

it's been dry, it hasn't rained in more than a week! It's the first time all summer it's been so dusty, not a puddle anywhere. The gardens looking dry, especially the pepper plants, but I have frozen lots already. I canned pickled peppers on Saturday and plum jam Monday.  There's rain in the forecast for Thursday and Friday, so we'll see what happens.