Harvesting corn and spreading manure

Here are Garry's photos from Friday. Maxim and the neighbor Serosia are doing business loading up people's manure piles on their yards, and spreading it on their garden. The fall garden plowing is starting to take place, so the manure will be plowed under and ready to nourish next year's garden. They are charging 70 grivna each per hour (Max has to get enough to cover fuel for the tractor) and were busy most of the day in the village.

Some manure piles have sat next to sheds in the village for years. Last year the guy with the white horse would move it to the field for people with his wagon but the manure was shoveled on and off! One guy told Garry it was much better than last year when he did it with his pitchfork! Garry said he watched a couple work all day to move their manure pile into small piles in their garden with a wheelbarrow, and they will still have to spend another day spreading it around on the garden.





Today Maxim packed up some leftover pizza to take with him; they were off to another village to spread manure. Garry checked the lug bolts on the tires this morning, since the spreader had new tires put on before we bought it last week. Sure enough they were loose, he said a couple nuts were close to falling off, it was a good thing they hadn't spread any more loads yesterday. It will be interesting to see how many customers they have next week, after word gets around, we have one of the few spreaders around here. We will need to spread our own piles on the fields.



Garry was ready for the combine to come since Friday morning, but he was still waiting by the time we had borsht for lunch, he had taken the photos of Maxim, and was waiting to watch the combine and go with the truck to the mill.

At 2 pm Maxim phoned Garry to say they had called him the combine was on its way. It was the same one that the big dairy farmer had used for his grain corn (he also owns the mill.) Garry says the combine was brand new, they told him it cost 180,000 dollars, or 1.4 million grivna. Garry said it was pretty nice and cheaper than one in North America. Garry was wondering if it would be difficult to find some one to combine our corn, but it seems that there are a few around to do corn this year, there is a lot more corn being grown in the area than two or three years ago.


Garry was hoping to get 30- 40 ton of grain corn, which will be enough, with the wheat we got earlier this year to feed the cows for the year. It seems we have almost 36, not bad considering the way the cornfield looked this spring. Garry is not sure how many hectares were combined to get that amount, they are charging him for 16.5 but he chopped about a third of the field in August for silage and the whole piece is supposed to be just over 18. The corn will be stored at the mill, until we need it ground to feed the cows. So we have plenty of corn silage this year, enough grain, but no hay, there will be brewers' grain to buy (plus some in the tubes for when we can't buy it), but the price is going up. The brewers' grain will take the place of the hay in the ration, since it is high in protein.

Victor called to say that the brewery phoned him to say the price is going up double for people that did not buy in the summer to 200 (grivna per ton), we will only have to pay 150. However, we will have to raise the price we charge to 3 grivna per bucket from 2. Garry says we have sold less since the price went from 1.5 to 2.



They told Garry they had to finish his field last night, the sun was setting but they were still at it, Maxim wanted to check out the combine, so Garry came back to the house while I made pizza around 7:20 and Max went with the last truck load to the mill (only two trucks full- it was a big truck.) It had been dark for a while when he got back around nine. The village herd have come home by 5:30 the last couple days.

notes to self..this post is all about me...

Think of it as a pet peeves list... I am annoyed today with..


our internet service...did you notice that both of the posts I published on Wednesday were dated Tuesday? That's because I started them Tuesday and gave up when I couldn't get a single photo to upload. Not one. I had photos that went with them, so I took the computer along when I drove to Dnepro to pick up the semen tank (Garry was all out of frozen bull semen straws and a cow was in heat, Victor had gotten it refilled the day day before)I sat in the Dafi mall and had the photos uploaded in no time at all with the free wi-fi. No photos for this post because we can surf and check facebook and email but uploading is impossible because it cuts out while working.

Hotmail annoys me for some reason it wants to start at a message from a month ago- with three attachments to load before it will do anything when you click to go to the inbox (don't tell me I should delete that message, I've tried several times, and it refuses to work then).

my hip hurts from bowling yesterday...not much just enough to remind me that when I finally bowled a 151, Garry did 202. It was nice to get back bowling, since Garry hurt his knee ten days again, the night before our bowling date...er, competition. We got in our usual four games plus four frames in the hour, no injuries and Garry was only ahead 44 to 42 on the four frames when time ran out.

name the cat? one of the spring male kittens has been making a favorable impression on Garry when he sneaks in the house, and I can't remember the name the boys had for him. He is either curled up sleeping or playful, but made less of an impression on me when he grabbed my toes with his claws. Garry decided to call him Tom today, I just call him Fat Cat.

Box wants to sleep with us We have never had a cat or dog in bed with us (only crying children) but Box drove me crazy on Wednesday night during the Phillies game (it started a 1 am here) she meowed and stratched under the door, around 12:30. I thought she was hunting mice so I let her in, and she happily got up on the bed to curl up and sleep. Eventually I put her out, but she repeated the performance. In the fourth inning I was annoyed and opened the door, planning to throw her into the porch, but she darted under the bed. I caught her as she settled on top of Garry, who was sleeping. I guess Box prefered the night before when I watched the game on the couch with her at midnight.
Last night, no game and no Box (she had made an escape outdoors in the afternoon.) We'll see what happens tonight- the Phils are on here at 3:30 in the morning, I won't care as long as they win. If you don't know this I grew up in New Jersey, and if you are from the southern half of the state you don't root for the Yankees, you are a Philly fan forever

No blog pics Garry is snapping photos like crazy today, here's to uploading them on Sunday afternoon if the internet continues to suck like it has all week. Back to Dafi after church, that's where I used to do all my posts when I did one a week, every Sunday.
Blame our son Josh for my use of the word suck, it was his favorite word in high school, an eventually I got used to it. I usually take the photos but he is excited because the combine is coming to do the grain corn field today- ever since like 9 am, I think it started at 2 this afternoon. He also took photos of Maxim and Serosia spreading people's manure piles on their gardens.

Road repairs

We found out from someone at church that road repairs are now being funded by a new gas tax this year. Two of the main roads in Dnepro have undergone big renovation this
summer Heroes of Stalingrad has been torn up since spring, and they seem to be putting the final coat of asphalt on this week. The main road on the left bank also got completely redone. It can be a bother to drive on them while they are fixing them, but what a change from the rough shape they were in last year to when they are finished!


Remember this spring when I mentioned the overpass they are building that is off our highway to connect the highway to the other highway toward Kiev, without driving to and through Dnepropetroesk. They made the detour around the construction site on our highway and paved it, and put up some signs.

You have to realize that signage here is maybe half a km before the right turn you need to take. If they are painting lines or something, it is more like 10-20 feet! It's one of the reasons you have to be constantly aware of your surroundings while driving here.

As the summer progressed so did the project, and the amount of signage warning drivers to turn. Remember how people with expensive cars speed based on how good the car is? We think that a number of cars have run off the road with resulting injuries or worse. If the missed the turn, they would hit a big pile of dirt. In the dark, you didn't see the pile, and not everyone drives the highway several days a week like us. They painted a short (like 400 feet) get into one-lane merge lines, they even put a little line of dim rope lights they turn on at night under the big arrow sign. Some car drove off the curve of the U detour they made on night, so curve signs were added at those two curves.












Any way they dug this impressive hole to put the new road under the highway (really would be bad for the cars missing the turn and going straight) recently they started putting up the posts for the overpass. We really hope that it will be finished by winter.

I uploaded these pics on Wednesday when I drove to the city, successfully navigating past the slow truck full of bricks, the fast Mercedes limo on the highway, the stopped in the road parked to buy produce from a roadside stand, the auftobus changing lanes the buses attached overhead to the powerlines, the two lanes making a left-hand turn, and the car that thought I would magically let him in the lane I was in as he eased over into it (I solved that by stepping on the gas so he had room) and returned to the village, where I just had to weve through the herd of cows coming home.

On Sunday I saw my first body on the road here. Garry has seen three bodies of pedestrians since we moved here. This time we were in Zaporosia, and there was shiny green motercycle on it's side going in the the other direction, no sign of a driver, police car behind it, traffic backed up, and on the median strip, a body under a white piece of plastic, withred and black basketball shoes sticking out from under the tarp. Motorcyclists here have a habit of weaving in and out of traffic, and don't all wear helmets.

odds and ends

Here's one for Seth and Jonah, if you look carefully you will see two striped cats in the photo, the spring kittens like to slip in the door for a snack of catfood and to play with Box, they race around the house chasing each other until someone gets tired of it and puts them out.


The quail were happy in the cage sitting in the window of the summer kitchen when I saw them last week. The baby ducks have disappeared, there were four left at last count. One froze when it escaped from the coop one night last week. I told Garry that Momma Duck did better this spring when they ran around the barn. It seems the attempt to keep them safe didn't work that well. I saw Momma Duck in the barn yesterday but no sign of the babies.




Garry is looking for more nice old Mennonite bricks to clad the porch. It turned out the pile under the tarp that has been there since Victor's original renovation did not have the good whole bricks we thought. Now we have maybe 400 bricks stacked and clean and we need 1000 according to the bricklayers. The neighbor that was renovating his house this summer may have some, but they used some of his in the water irrigation pipeline project. He took apart one wall of his really old Mennonite house this spring, propped it up with posts and then had the walls rebuilt. It was falling down, it was built with posts and bricks, as some of the oldest houses here were. He even put new windows in with the money he made raising two bull calves he bought from us last winter. Good thing the project is about done, since the first frost was Monday, and the cold wet weather will start any day.


Monday morning we had frost and Garry brought in a few handfuls of small peppers from the garden, it wasn't quite a killing frost, so they were OK, I made some fresh salsa and put the rest in the fridge. Last night he said something about how they would be driving over the garden anyway, so this morning I took a bucket and tried getting the rest of the beet and carrot crop out of the ground. The ground is really hard and dry so I had a number of broken carrots in my bucket even with digging around them with the hoe. Box the cat thought they looked interesting when I came back inside. I cooked a bunch of carrots for dinner, the rest go in the fridge for another day.

It was a disappointing crop, early dry weather made both the beets and carrots germinate poorly. Me and the rest of the neighborhood members are looking forward to a garden with irrigation next summer, since we are finally able to connect the water lines to the main irrigation line since they are shutting it down for the winter.



Turns out the dry cow that didn't want to go to the field on Sunday, didn't get out Tuesday (not for lack of trying), but today Maxim chased her all the way out of the village with the herd. Since the corn is all chopped and there is a fair amount on the ground because of the plants between the rows from the re-planting of the field; Garry told the guys with the herd to let the cows out there today. There is very little grass for them to graze, it has been too dry this fall.





Many of our other cows are giving very little milk as they are going to go dry soon (that's when they have a rest and we don't milk them before they have a new calf) and calve in December and January. We are now making only 450 liters a day. The yellow milk truck no longer comes the other buyers (Like Oxana- her van is in front of the milkhouse in the photo) are buying all the milk, even with the new price increase to 3.7 grivna. Last October Garry thinks we were selling at 3.5, with the November price going up to four.




Monday was brewers' grain sale day. Andrei was wearing a sweatshirt and hat while he was selling. The horse and wagon was in again today, he seems to trot in every Monday and Friday. Here's the sign that means Andrei is open for business - the price has gone up- it says Kasha for sale- two grivna per veedro (bucket) Garry decided we were selling for less than we were paying at 1.5.

We have so much corn silage that Garry is going to offer it for sale to people in the village along with the Kasha so that they can feed their cows better in the winter. He is trying to decide on the best price- right now it could be 3-4 grivna. Garry says it would be even better if he could offer a TMR for sale balanced for a cow milking 15 liters a day. Maybe next year.

Snapshots outside - Monday and Tuesday

Monday morning bright and early, when I was hoping for a late inning comeback by the Phillies (I can watch live on satellite TV, I woke up just as the game started at 3 am) Garry went outside just after the agreed upon 6 am to talk to the guys buying the baler. Garry says after they walked around it and hemmed and hawed for a while before they handed over the cash. They finally had it loaded it on the truck about 7:10. Garry cheered after it left, he can't wait to use a bigger, better baler next summer.

That's when Garry realized that they had missed sending the heifers and dry cows out with the village herd, so they didn't put any one out on Monday. On Sunday they put the two cows that went dry out with the herd for the first time, and one returned shortly after, Garry figured that the guys herding must have lost her around the curve, and she knew where she had come from because she came up the driveway on her own! So they just tied her back up in the barn. Tuesday morning I heard them chase them out just before 7 am as usual, I have not heard if they all stayed with the group this time.

After hurrying through the rest of chores (feeding the cows, cleaning the barn) Garry and Maxim came inside and quickly left again in the car. They were on their way to deliver a good deal of the cash received for the baler for the manure spreader they were buying. Garry and Maxim had gone to look at this used manure spreader last Thursday (back when Garry's knee was still sore) and had worked out a deal to buy it over the phone on Friday. When they got there to look at it the price was higher than the one quoted to Victor when he found it. There was a lot of back and forth about tires and delivery. Since they wanted cash before delivery, Garry insisted the price needed to be reduced for his gas driving there again. He got 300 grivna off and so he and Maxim went to deliver the cash (remember almost everything in Ukraine is paid in cash or at the bank.)

Garry phoned at noon to say he was lost in Zaporosia but would return as soon as he figured out where he was (he had come in from a different direction than normal) I told him Oxana's truck was outside, but he said Yana's father was supposed to take care of selling milk to them. Yana has gone on vacation and her father came to milk cows in her place. Garry said he had left after the manure spreader was loaded on the truck. Maxim was riding back with the truck driver. Suddenly he said he had to go, apparently he had found a street he knew - Lenina (main street).


Garry had lunch when he got back and then went and started unloading the precepts (wagons which had been loaded with old corn silage went Maxim cleaned up the yard for the new pile they are making now.) Then Max came in asked where Garry was, he was back with the manure spreader on the truck. I was cooking chocolate pudding but ran out for a quick photo.





Garry and Maxim started chopping the field of late corn Monday afternoon, Garry said that he went around the field and had three wagons full in four rounds, so it looks like a great crop. They have been at it today since 8 am, after finishing chores. Maxim has been going past with the wagons like clockwork, I gave him plates full of dinner for him and Garry about 12:30 as he drove past the kitchen door. The silage pile is really growing.



I am sure they will stop chopping around 4 pm, just like yesterday, so they can do the afternoon chores in the barn....



Turns out I was wrong, Maxim got someone to feed the cows, and he is still driving past the house with the wagons at six pm. Garry said that they had 3 hours or so to go at 3:30 when he phoned to ask about whether I could send a snack out to the field. The sky is overcast, and it looks more like rain now. The neighbor Serosia took the day off from work to pack the pile with his old payloader.

Garry told me that for the last two weeks Max has been worried that they would not get the field chopped before the rainy weather gets here, and then it would be too muddy. However, Garry thought the corn was still too green to make good silage, but now it's all in a pile.

Garry came in the house at 7:30. Maxim was about 2 hours later, he and the neighbour packed the pile across and not just end-to-end like the first one (it was between the tubes of brewers' grain) so it's well-packed. You want to avoid having any airpockets in the silage so that it ferments, air means mold and throwing away rotten silage from the pile.

Maxim's baptism...down to the river

Here in Ukraine baptisms are held outdoors and the most popular place in both Dnepro and Zaporosia is the Dniper (nee-per) River. Maxim has been working for us since a year ago in May. When he came he didn't know any English, and we invited him to come to church with the Steinbach building team the Sunday he returned to the village (he had been working as a welder for the company building the barn before). After that he attended church with us in Dnepropetroesk until he visited John Wien's church in Zaporosia one Saturday night in February. He liked it so much he started going there regularly.






Last winter Pastor Andrey from Morningstar told us that Max had prayed the prayer to accept Christ, and his faith has been nurtured in the New Hope Church in Zaporosia. A few weeks ago he told Garry he had decided to be baptised and it would be Sunday October 2nd. Garry told him we would definitely want to be there. It is exciting to know that this young man started on his Christian life because we came to Ukraine and met him. Victor wanted to go for Maxim also, but he came and picked up the milk for the churches in Dnepro this morning so we could attend.




Maxim's girlfriend, Yulia, also came with us, we picked her up on the way out of the village, she lives with her parents on the street on the other side of the pond. We got there early, Maxim didn't want to be late.






We got there long before the appointed hour of ten, and everyone stood around under the trees on the bank of the river. The temperature was about 8 C at 8 am in the village, and it wasn't much warmer standing there in the brisk breeze...or really it was windy with choppy waves on the river (it was on the high water side of the dam.)






Max changed into his swimsuit and t-shirt and then sat in the car with Yulia to stay warm. The Pastor decided to wait until 10:30, and when two cars drove in then, we waited an little longer. Then we all headed to the riverbank.















Pastor Wiens, who is Canadian, spoke about the meaning of baptism, standing between our Maxim and Maxim the translator. Max was the only one being baptised since one lady had planned to but had pulled out the night before because she had a bad cold.



















Maxim went down the steps first and then helped the pastor down into the water, he slipped on the slick steps and they nearly both went under, but they kept their heads above water.

















When they got in position the pastor asked Maxim the questions, and then he listened to the translation from the bank and answered. Afterwards they were all smiles as they worked their way back up the stairs.






Afterwards Vonya (he did music at Garry's VBS in the village) grabbed a guitar and we sang a praise song. In spite of the sun shining you could see Max was shivering in the brisk breeze...er.. wind) Then we were invited back to the church for food, singing and communion. Maxim recieved many hugs and handshakes before he changed by the car, back into his dry clothes.






After we filled up with plates of potatoes with a little meat, and stew-like gravy on it, with a side of coleslaw and bread, we had tea and cookies and candies. One of the ladies who helped teach at VBS was in the kitchen and was excited to see Garry. Then the pastor asked the church members to speak and share Bible verses to encourage Maxim. After wards we had communion, in a way I never had done it before you dipped your piece of bread in the bowl of grape juice. We sang some praise songs and then the program was over.



Then some of the tables were put away so some of the guys could play ping-pong (table tennis.) I am pretty sure that Garry lost this game to Maxim, but it was after two and we had to return to the farm so the guys could feed the cows.

Nuts!

We don't have a chestnut tree, but there are some in the village, one next to the second store, the lady was sweeping them in a pile and off the pavement yesterday. Today they were all over again, when Garry and I walked to the post office. Still haven't got our letter in the mail, it was closed at eleven am (the sign says 2:30). The kids in the village pick them up, I don't know if they are used for anything, maybe for throwing.


For the last month or so we have seen some people gathering walnuts in the trees lining the highway. Most of the trees are chestnuts, but there are some wlanut trees. Since no one owns them they are fair game for gleaners. They were easy to spot as we drove by, someone would have a long pole to hit the nuts out of the trees and they would have buckets or bags to fill up. I don't know if they were keeping them to eat or selling them. Uncracked walnuts are selling for a dollar a kilo. At the market they sell whole and half cracked nuts and even sell the little divider piece in the center of the nut- apparently for use as a dye.

Lately it has been more fall-like, sometimes you need a sweatshirt on, and Garry has been picking up orecki (walnuts). Today he had Maxim up in the trees shaking them down, so he brought buckets and buckets inside. He had put them in a container outside but it turns out that the dogs Polo and Mint will chew them open and eat the nuts!



One problem with picking up walnuts is it turns your hands black and it doesn't wash off! Check out Garry's hands, and this was after he washed the milk jugs out with some super soap. Maxim's girlfriend teaches at the school, she has the youngest students and the boys' hands are all black from nut picking. Apparently someone complained that she should make them wash their hands when they went somewhere.




Tonight Garry started cracking walnuts, with a hammer like last year, and drying them in the oven. It's rather noisy, maybe we should invest in a nutcracker. The milker ladies can't figure what Garry is going to do with all the walnuts. Maxim told them he just really likes nuts. I'll have to find the sugared and spicy nuts in the crockpot recipes now.