village life

We are really glad to get out of town once a week and go to visit our friend in the village. It's about an hour and a half on the bus from here to get out there. Once we are there it feels like a lifetime away from the world we know. There's no store out there, no public square, no internet, (unless we connect with our cell phones, which I don't bother to do!)
When we arrive the first one to greet us is usually Bruce barking up a storm.

From it takes a village

Here is Bruce trying to defend his supper dish from a Chinese pig. This poor dog suffers all kinds of indignities, even the chickens are bold enough to try to rob his supper dish!

From it takes a village

With young people moving to town to find work and better possibilities there are lots of Ukrainian villages that are quite uninhabited, but that's not the case with this place.  However there are some homes left empty when the occupants go away for the winter.  Maybe I should say empty nests.

From it takes a village

Svitlana, our friend, has a strip of land in front of her house where she can plant potatoes and beets and whatever else she wants to grow. 

From it takes a village

This week we helped her mow the strip to the left in this picture.  I'd never used a scythe before, never thought I'd ever master that skill, but she and I mowed 10/100 of a hectare together. (1000 meters squared, about the whole length of the field, almost to the trees)  It took us about an hour.  When we started I had no hope of finishing, glad we were doing it together!  You can see the scythe in this picture:

From it takes a village

This picture from http://www.vtcommons.org/files/images/scythe.gif is easier to see.  The trick is she told me is to swing it and aim the "heel" to the earth, when I started doing it that way I couldn't believe how it cleared a huge swath in front of me.  In time it became quite normal to take a step and swing my arms, take another step and swing my arms and watch the greens tumble from their mowed down stalks.  That was 2 days ago, and yes, my arms are still sore!
What I found very interesting is that the field was sown with something she calls "oil radishes", people sow their fields with radishes, mow the field then plow the crop under.  This is done instead of fertilizing the ground.  It seems that farmers at home are doing something similar as well.  Click here for the story.
bye! thanks for listening!