Two women in Ukraine revisited

This is another "Reaction and analysis" post on a video that shows the everyday lives of two women in rural Ukraine.

My interest in this is that if I want to learn how to live a smaller, post-whatever life-style, I can avoid a lot of (expensive) mistakes by studying people who already made that transition.

This video was uploaded two days ago, so it is pretty close to real-time. 

Starting at the 2:20 mark, the first task of the day is to muck-out the sheep pen. They fork the manure and bedding directly into the wagon and then drive the wagon to the (hay?) field where they unload the wagon into several small piles.

What is notable is that the sides of the wagon are easily removable. The reason that the sides aren't vertical is because the ends have grooved features that rest on posts. Not "slide down" posts...they are held there by gravity and the "pressure" from the load. The wagon sides have the grooved feature on both sides so they are reversible. I assume that is to minimize their taking a permanent "bow".

The picture shown above shows the side in the foreground and the women forking bedding onto the ground with minimum lifting of their loaded forks.

At 5:30 we get to watch one of the women meticulously clean out the inside of the wagon. Being able to lift the side makes it easy to push stray bedding off the floor without having to chase it down the entire length of the wagon. Nearly everything on this farm appears to be very well taken care of. They don't have new. They don't have a lot. But they take top-notch care of what they do have.

This image at about the 6:40 mark took me by surprise. It looks like leaves of a North American tree species, Quercus rubra, the Northern Red Oak in the foreground.

Non-native species are relatively common in Eastern Europe. I already mentioned the Siberian Elm.  Some other North American species that have "naturalized" include Prunus serotina (Wild Black Cherry), Celtis occidentalis (Common Hackberry) and Robinia pseudoacacia (Black Locust)

7"40 mark. This look like a yard full of bee-hives. They don't have any supers on them, so they already harvested the honey. The peaked roofs over them suggest heavy snow-falls or lots of rain.

The older woman is taking a load off of her feet while the cream-separator runs. I want to call your attention to the curtains across the opening. They are effective for heat-management. It makes it easy to keep one room toasty-warm with a realtively small fire.

10:40 mark. They use a branch that they sunk into the ground as a rack to store buckets and kettles. It keeps the inside of the bucket clean. No rain-water accumulates. No mosquitoes breed. UV light tears up poly buckets in a year (unless they are black), so they must have a supply of replacement buckets.

 

Incidentally, it is snowing when they took video at the 10:35 mark.

They have a rosemary plant hanging from one of the lintel-beams holding up the roof of their outside kitchen. The form of the plant suggests that the growing tips are pinched back frequently. The color suggests that it is nitrogen or iron starved.

12:25 mark. I want to call your attention to the mysterious pile covered with black plastic in the center of the frame. The squat structure on the extreme right, the one with the sagging door, is the entrance to the root cellar.

I think the door was mounted with the sag to make it self-closing.

At the 17:40 mark, the younger woman sorts through the vegetables in the clamp while the older woman starts dinner. The clamp is mixed vegetables and they were dumped, tops and all, in one pile.

My Uncle Steve fought in WWII in Europe. He spent one extremely miserable night in December of 1944 hiding behind a clamp in the middle of a field while the Germans kept sweeping the field with an MG 42. He recounted the pile quivering like it was made of jello when the stream of bullets hit it. He spent the rest of the war as a POW.

The vegetables cleaned up and sorted, ready to go into the root cellar.

After hosing the debris from the vegetable tops off of her rubber boots, the younger woman hangs them on the bucket-rack

 

13:50 mark. The firewood appears to be a mix of aspen and birch. By North American standards, it is very small diameter.

For the record, Europeans think we are daft to cut down big trees and then have to split it. Those are for timber. In their minds, rapid rotation, small diameter wood means it can all be easily down with hand-tools. It also can be done by women and older people.

 

21:10 mark. A lot starts happening here, so bear with me.

 

On the extreme left you can see that the post that anchors one end of their clothes line (which is ALWAYS in use, regardless of weather) is a dead pine tree with some of the bark still attached. They work with what they have.

The stack of hay on the right is covered with a plastic sheet but it doesn't look like it is weighted or tied down. Either they don't get much rain or it was just dropped off. My guess is that it was just dropped off and the stack of boards next to the pile will be used to weight down the sheet.

Keep your eye on the sheep...

21:15 mark. Observe that there are sheep on both sides of the fence.

Sheep are jumping between and over the bars of the fence.

No more fence! The person taking the video tried to pan-away from the little drama. The older woman kept cooking and the video person kept recording.

A couple of minutes later the video captures the bee-yard beneath the young orchard and the damaged fence.

As somebody who has raised both sheep and cattle, I got a great deal of joy learning that EVERYBODY has issues with fences. If you can only spare ten seconds, scroll ahead to the 21:15 mark and watch to the 21:25 mark.

Bringing the calf back from a pasture. Some kind of lagoon on left background. Row of hazelnut bushes on the right.

The evening chores start at the 24:20 mark.

If you like old gas motors, you will find the older woman starting the hit-and-miss gas-powered grinder starting at 24:50

To the horror of the Keto crowd, dinner is a big plate of white rice with herbal infused vegetable oil and salt for flavor, bread, home-canned pickles and tomato juice and some thin slices of fried pork loin.

I think that diet is very typical daily-fare for people living on a shoe-string. Carbs, carbs, oil, a few vegetables and a bit  of meat, cheese or eggs for flavor if they are fortunate.

It is my impression that the food(s) that these two, active, healthy women are eating would be unsalable in most rich, Western countries. Not just due to consumer acceptance issues (look at the buckets of vegetables) but because it is illegal to market "nonconforming vegetables" in the EU. For example, there are rigid specifications about what a cucumber must look like in terms of length and straightness. Of course those regulations reward the hybrid seed companies and pesticide producers who have offices filled with people lobbying in Brussels.

As an aside, I overheard a conversation between a woman who worked at a food-bank and a would-be donor. The food-bank discouraged the donor from donating cans of food that did not have pull-tab tops "Because a lot of families don't own a can opener." The contrast between "...don't own a can opener" and the amount of effort and the number of tools these women expend/use to turn raw products into the food that ultimately sits on their fork is striking.