Summer’s Arrival

So perhaps I should not have complained about the rainy weather we had in June and July. At present it is scorching hot and I am dripping sweat just sitting here. The last few days (since Friday at least) have been sunny and usually around 30 degrees Celsius. It makes working less enjoyable and adds chores such as bringing the pigs water halfway through the day but on the other hand it also means that we went to the creek twice this past weekend, which was heavenly.

The weekend of Aug. 8th and 9th was a very exciting weekend. First, Kenton Lobe (a professor at CMU and a good friend of my family) came on Thursday to visit us here. Kenton is good friends with Terry from their CMBC days and it was Kenton who suggested that I come out here this summer. It was fun to have him here and to see his excitement about everything on the farm. We even learned how to eviscerate a chicken together! Then, late on Saturday night, my parents flew into Moncton to visit me. We met them at church on Sunday and then they came out to the farm to see what I am all doing out here. After Sunday afternoon and Monday morning on the farm, they stole me away and the three of us went to PEI for a couple nights. It was a wonderful trip. We stayed at a cute little bed and breakfast, ate lots of ice cream and drove around the North Cape part of PEI. Some of my highlights were visiting a wool mill and walking along a beach one evening. My parents also took a couple days to visit Fundy National Park on their own and then Friday before they left they came with me to the Sussex Farmers’ Market for a little while.

Life has not just been relaxation here on the farm. Chores continue, and the farm always has some new surprise for me. After coming back from my little excursion to PEI, I discovered that Terry had a new job for me: feeding the new calf. He got a calf from a dairy farmer friend of his for nothing because the farmer was just planning on shooting the calf. The calf is male and therefore is no use to a dairy farmer (who would keep a female because eventually she could be milked) but is of use for Terry and Monique who will let him live longer than 5 days and will eventually use him as food. So, since the calf is still very young (only a couple weeks old now) he needs to be bottle fed several times a day. He is very cute and the first time I saw him, I thought that he looked very much like a deer.

The hot weather here also means haying weather and so David Bunnet, who we get hay from has been haying. Fortunately, I have not had to stand behind the baler and stack bales yet but we did load a whole bunch of bales into the mow of the barn. We picked up the first wagon of bales Sunday night and then Terry, Monique and I put them up once it had cooled off that evening. We started around 10 pm and finished by probably 11:30 pm. It was a late night but kind of fun at the same time. Monique and I were up in the mow and Terry was loading the bales from the wagon to the bale elevator. It was very sweaty being up in the mow especially because we didn’t get any breeze at all. The next morning, David brought over two more wagons of hay and Terry and I stacked it in the mow while David loaded them onto the elevator. That was even hotter because we were doing in the heat of the day (Monday morning was not very cool at all) and we were working much faster because David loads them fast and he also wanted to get home to get more hay off the fields. Here is what the mow looks like with all the bales we stacked in it.

Another exciting farm activity that I got to do was help Terry combine the winter wheat. We got the combine up and running around noon on Tuesday and, after lunch, out we went. Terry has an old combine with a big wheel on it to knock down the wheat into the machine and it was beautiful to watch it work. Combining was a very relaxed activity and I think part of that comes from using an old machine (another part comes from the fact that we didn’t have too much to combine so we could take our time). My job was to sit on the combine while Terry pulled it with the tractor and watch the bags that were attached and catching the grain so that when they were full, I could replace them with new ones. Here is a bit of what it looked like:

(Sorry this one is sideways. I couldn't figure out how to rotate.)

Tomorrow (Thursday) I am coming home for a short period of time. I fly into Winnipeg on Thursday morning and will be driving to Regina for a friend’s wedding. I’m not too excited about trying to adjust to the time difference again and I am very excited to see family and friends again!