Goatmilking and Haymaking

My brother and a friend of him visited me, the extra hands would be useful during haymaking. But before that I needed to go to Kittilä (Northern Finland) to get a canoe. I needed two since we were fishing in two lakes now, it was a bit difficult to swim out with the fish cage in Perch lake. My brother stayed at the farm and took care of the animals and helped me with covering the rest of the gardens. I had to be away for three days. I got a request from a friend when I was in Finland, he wanted me to take care of his goats during two weeks I accepted. When I returned to the farm the goats were already there, my friend had set up an electric fence that covering a large area around the shelter. We could milk one of the goats and got about 7 deciliter of milk each day. It was a bit difficult to milk the goat since she could not stand still and also because she attracted a swarm of mosquitos.

Now it was time for haymaking, the upper meadows had already been cut and the grass had been used as coverage for the gardens so now I wanted to to cut the grass at the lower meadows. We used the drying racks from last year and even built some new ones. There was a nice feeling to cut the grass at the lower meadows since they were so plain after all the work with taking away grass bumps an bushes. I cut grass with the scythe and my brother and his friend raked it and hanged it up on the drying racks. It was a rainy summer so this year we could not dry any hay at the ground.

Most crops in the gardens were still small, but we could now start to harvest winter kale and salads. The crops did not grow much in this rainy weather.

The old road were still covered with spruce branches from all the trees I had taken down in February. We cleared the road and burned the branches. The wet meadows looked so much better without all the shading spruces. Still it was more spruces that needed to be taken down and a lot of birches but not for this year.

Usually cloudberries and bilberries is ripe this time a year, but they were still not ready to pick, and it did not seem that it would be a good year for berries.

My brother and his friend returned home, but the next day a girl from England arrived.