Done! Well some of it!

One bed of Amaranth found amongst
the weeds. Believe it or not there is
another on the right of this picture and
another four beds you cannot see.

It has been a week of a lot done and a lot not done, such is summer time. I managed to finish the paper I have been writing for ages. Hopefully this re-write satisfies everyone. We will see! I didn’t think I would be able to edit it down to the correct word count, but I amazingly managed it. I was very chuffed with myself for that.

Fortunately not all weeds are quite so
large. This was in our small greenhouse
that is more like a storage area and errrr
weed incubator.

Food mill and halters for the alpacas arrived from our good
friends in America. If only this package could talk, it would
be interesting to know why it was sent from Oregon to
Florida (diagonally opposite across the country) then up
north to New York? It took 12 days to leave the US and yet
we were give a delivery date of 6-10days. Oh the efficiency
of the US postal system, I guess. Fortunately after that it was
flown straight to Latvia and took a day to go through
customs before being delivered to our local post office.

Of course there has been much weeding and processing of berries, as usual for this time of the year. I got my new food mill that meant I could process a whole load of berries for the freezer. I decided not to do them all, but wait until later on in the year, when the weather is not so good and process the berries first by steaming to get juice and then through the food mill for jam or berry sauces and that means I can just sling them in the freezer with leaves, stems the lot. I think we have just about finished the strawberry harvest though now - so sad when that happens. We had been really enjoying the strawberries on our porridge for breakfast.

Blackcurrants ripe for picking

The barley is ripening

The season seems to have turned here and it has a definite feel of late summer now. The weeds are slowing down in growth (thank goodness) the leaves on the dandelions and strawberries are going red or mottled and the leaves on the trees are the dull green of the end of the season. Birds are also starting to congregate in preparation for migrating soon – it may still be a few weeks away yet, but the signs are there.

The first cabbage of the season. The cool weather has
favoured the brassicas this year and our cabbages are
looking quite good. We are not necessarily great
cabbage growers usually. Mind you, the snails were
out in force tonight and I had to pick quite a few off and
squish them underfoot.

We are not sure if we should be worried about the
appearance of these bugs on our redcurrants or not. Not
really sure what they are.

We are still getting summer visitors too, which is rather nice. This week the chap who wanted us to meet his German friend the other week and who Ian keeps meeting at the car technical place, came with his wife and young son. They stayed for quite a while chatting. Ian showed the wife around, since she had never been before and I got into a conversation with the chap about hunting. It is funny that I can explain the Latvian system to a Latvian, as I know more about the topic. Still not every Latvian is acquainted with the laws of their land on the topic – they don’t need to be in general and I did spend quite a while studying the ins and outs of hunting in Latvia. We are enjoying it when many visitors come, they bring chocolate - always welcome in our place and we had only just eaten up the last one from a previous group.

These bugs, however are a very welcome sight - ladybird
larvae

Oats all behind an electric fence.

Talking of hunting, our hunter told us he had shot a wild boar on our land the other day. We are pleased as we are starting to have more serious trouble with them and we had to put an electric fence around the oats to try and prevent more damage. Unfortunately the electric energiser we have available to use is not that powerful, but it might make them think twice – it made our kitten think twice when she came into contact with it. A learning experience for any farm cat!

Rather close to the barley field but an area the boars do
dig regularly next to the trees. Apparently boar are not
so fond of barley - probably due to the stiff hairs that
stick out of the head of the barley ears.

You won't see a sight like this very often. It has been nice
and warm but not too hot this week and so a chance to wear
a t-shirt and not a long, sleeved top to keep the sun off.

The reason we knew the hunter had shot an animal was because we had been to our local festival and they were having a grilling competition and he told us that on the menu was the wild boar that he shot at our place. We really wanted to organise taking our alpacas to the festival and show the fleece to people but yet again we didn’t get organised in time, not easy when we need translators for it. Maybe next year (that sounds like the gardeners’ refrain when something doesn’t work)

We have seen more bees this week, which is good news

Eyre, our kitten, obviously under-whelmed by Le Tour!

Our kitten has also been learning other lessons this week. Firstly she has been getting quite good at catching insects, unfortunately she tends to bring them into the caravan to play with, which is not what we really want. Neither was Ian impressed with the dead stinky mouse she brought in and even less impressed with the live one. We are not sure if Sofie, our older cat, had caught the mouse earlier and was trying to train our little one, or whether our little one had actually caught it herself. Either way, Ian made sure she caught it again and then evicted her from the caravan with the mouse in her mouth. She caused us a bit of consternation, just before we are about to leave the land tonight as she went missing Ian looked all over for her. Just as we were about to give up, she turned up.

Venturing out. She often accompanies us on our walks now
but gets very panicky if she cannot see us and we have to
whistle or talk to her so she can find us when we are going
through the long grass.

There are lots of flowers blooming in our meadows at this
time of year in the areas we haven't already cut

Our other visitors this week were friends of our goat farming friend and she brought her friends around to see what we were doing. It was great to hear their ideas on the things we are doing and they asked lots of questions of the sort that you know they know a lot about the topic. They have also used a seed processor before and loved the fact we had one. They reckon that ours is over a hundred years old. We were also told that the old Russian tractors use belts like the processor one and so we should be able to replace it without a problem. They told us there was a screen missing and what it would do and explained that the movable sieves underneath could do with some repair, which we thought might be the case. Other than that it was fine. At least we feel a little more confident that we know what it does and how it should work. We thought we had worked it out, but it is nice to know that from someone who has really used them. It was also nice to get an email from the people who had donated it to us where they mentioned that they think the seed processor is in good hands.

The hemp is growing well

To let more light in when we are
checking over the animals in the
evening, Ian made the back door into
a half door. It helps, but we could still
do with more light in. 

We have been trying to do some planning this week. Sometimes we get so busy we don’t really take time to think ahead, which is not so good. Ian put all my planned trips away into his diary and so he should now know when I am likely not to be around. Basically every month I am away somewhere now until November. Our daughter also asked if Ian would go over to their place to help her husband work on their new house and so that means Ian will be away for part of the time too, leaving me home alone with the animals.

We didn't have much in the way of seed for the sweetcorn and
didn't want to risk it outside anyway - heavenly food for boar
- so we planted it in the greenhouse, which it seems to be enjoying

Cooking the chicken out on our land
means using our halogen oven in the
greenhouse. It was too warm to have it
cooking in the caravan. We call our
halogen oven "Robbie." can't remember
why.

Part of our plans included dispatching three cockerels, since they are not really needed. One was making itself a nuisance by pestering our other free-range cockerel. One was favouring one particular hen and her feathers were coming off on her back, so hopefully she will recover. The other cockerel didn’t have a nice temperament and so we had no wish to keep him any longer. We had the bad tempered one for our evening meal, he was chewy but tasty. The others will definitely be put in the slow cooker.

Are we worried? These are the chicks and not for dispatch-
well not yet anyway. Some will be when we are sure which
are cockerels and which are not.

The grapes are beginning to turn too

Other plans for the future included prioritising new fences for pastures and fields, digging for water, and sorting out a container for winter storage. We started to put a list together of what needed doing when and who we needed to talk to about the plan if needed - or in other words, I got out a paper and pen and wrote it down. It’s a start. We also chatted about all the requirements for a happy and long marriage. Since we have been married for over 30 years, we feel we have some experience in the matter. We decided that deliberate mis-communication, selective deafness, repeated story-telling repeated and of course all that has to be washed down with a liberal dose of humour, otherwise all of that will end in tears. Well it did help the planning to go down a little bit better, or there would have been many a cross word I think.

Brencis is growing up fast. His mum, who
is sat behind him, must be giving him some
good stuff.

Deliveries

Four baby swallows in the alpaca house

It has been a week of deliveries, but unfortunately one of our alpacas is still hanging on in there and probably waiting for the holiday period of Ligo/Jani to get fully underway. We have been spending some of our nights out in the caravan so we could take advantage of good weather to get things done. We have made slow progress on the weeds, but in some places we are getting there, or at least we were until it rained a lovely drenching rain for three hours yesterday. Weeds appeared overnight then. In one crazy moment this week we were dreaming up ideas for a drone to do the weeding in our field. Surely in this day and age something small enough, but powerful enough could be invented? It probably has, but more expensive than a good old fashioned hoe and no quicker.

This was taken at 10:23pm on Saturday night. It shows how
light it is until quite late. 

Thursday was one particular delivery day. We were sitting in our caravan awaiting a phone call for delivery of shears. We had ordered a new pair for two reasons. The first reason is that they are supposed to be better for the finer fleeces that we are expecting off our heavy fleece producer, Veronica, who will be sheared very soon and for next year when the babies are sheared for the first time. Our current pair managed with Agnese but it did struggle a little. Secondly it is also good to have a reserve pair for when we have more animals, or if Ian does any shearing for anyone else. Mid-morning there was a phone call and we realised that the instructions for delivering out on the land was not going to work, or at least that was what we deduced from the phone call, however it was not the shears, it was Ian's passport. At least I managed to understand that the guy was going to be at our house in twenty minutes and we agreed that Ian would be at home to collect the delivery. After that Ian then went onto deliver some poo to a laboratory in Madona, the big town nearby, for internal parasite tests for the alpacas. While he was in Madona he was also able to take in his passport to the immigration office to update their files, so good timing!

We have had our first strawberries for
breakfast this week, all two of them.
These are our greenhouse ones, the
ones outside are still green

The results came back clear for the parasite tests so no need to give them worming injections. We had been routinely giving them injections, but I was beginning to wonder if this was just as bad as giving routine antibiotics and so was not happy with that. It doesn't help that the injections are also getting expensive. Mind you, so is screening them, but we figured that one aggregated sample was enough to decide whether we had the presence of parasites or not on the property when we only have seven animals. If one was infected, they would all need injections anyway.

Comfrey, a wonderful healing herb

While Ian was away, a couple turned up. At first I thought it was our delivery, but it turned out not to be the case. It was a couple that had seen the sign and decided to come and see the alpacas. They didn't speak English and so tested my Latvian to the utmost again for the second time that day. I must learn some key words to describe alpacas, such as soft and try and learn some spinning terms. If I understood correctly they were just driving past and were willing to pay, but since we are not set up for that yet, I declined. Also without Ian it was a short tour, as I didn't really want to freak out our heavily pregnant ladies. I think I also understood that they knew that alpacas are sometimes used to protect sheep, although our particular male alpacas are rather soft for that particular job we think. Still they seemed happy enough to see our boys at a distance. For some reason they wouldn't feed them, I think they may have been afraid they might spit - but that was another reason for not visiting the girls as one of them does from time to time.

The onion, lettuce, poppy and hemp bed

Plantain (no not the banana type fruit but Plantago major)
I only wish I had discovered this plants amazing
anti-histamine properties earlier. Whenever I get a bite, I
chew one of these and then rub the leaf on the bite. Works
a treat and easy to find, we have a huge area "infested"
with them

A friend of ours turned up next to borrow our trailer again and still no delivery. We were just beginning to think they would not arrive when there was a phone call from our village to enquire the way. So the detailed instructions did not make any difference after all. I managed to communicate that I would phone a friend and she would phone him and tell him where to deliver the shears. At least that worked and the deliveries for that day were complete. Still no babies though.

One uncomfortable looking mother

Minutes old

Finally on the Saturday Veronica gave birth and I was actually there to see my first alpaca birth, due to a change of plan on the morning. She started first of all by moaning a lot and then rolling about, which fortunately we know to expect. It does look a little alarming seeing an animal who we suspected was in labour to be doing so much rolling around, but apparently it is to get the baby in position for birth. Not sure how thrilled she was with the attention, we even got chairs out to sit and watch her. At one point she went outside the alpaca house and we were worried she was going to deliver outside, but eventually she went in and  the babies legs appeared. There was a huge sigh of relief when the head appeared too and Ian broke the sac, since that was still in tact and it looked like the alpaca baby was trying to breathe. He then gently pulled on the body to help it out. We weren't taking any chances with this one, as she lost her baby last year. The chord ruptured close to the body again, but not as close as the baby she delivered last year.

A little help to start the feeding process. Normally Veronica
will not let any of us get this close if she can help it.

All a bit much for him after a wee run around. At least
Mum is feeding well

A bit wobbly on his pins

That grass is tantalisingly close but he's more likely to land
on his face

A little uncoordinated there

Legs akimbo 

Meet Eyre. She has an eye infection unfortunately but we
were given the cream for it when we picked her up. She is
three months old

We did have a bit of a conundrum on the Saturday. We suspected that Veronica was in labour, but we had also organised to pick up a kitten from one of the neighbours. We had put out a request through our vet for another cat, since it is better to have two out on our land to keep the small furry population in check and although our cat is a good mouser it is a large area for one cat to cover. I don't really like loosing lots of vegetables to furry critters and one seems to have taken up residence under my orchard plot at the moment. Not good! The only problem was it was someone who can be difficult to get away from, lovely though she is. Lack of language is not always enough to plan a good escape. I did get away lightly and with a few extra tomato plants too. Our little kitten already had a name Eyre, as in Jane Eyre, but pronounced Air-er, which sound a lot like Euro in Latvian. She has three colours grey, yellow and white and so is considered lucky in Latvia especially in terms of money. Maybe with a golden alpaca and a lucky cat we are in for a windfall or the house sale of Ian's late mother will all come through anyway, since I am not of the particularly superstitious kind.

She is a feisty little madam, but has learnt that we don't like
her crawling across the table already and knows the sound
of cat biscuits in the bowl. Unfortunately she also gave a scare
to Sofie our older cat, when she hissed at her We will have to
work on that relationship I think. 

That head is a bit heavy on such a long neck

To our surprise the baby was a deep golden colour. A quick look on the internet and as we suspected, the baby must have passed some meconium sometime in the delivery process, which is not good. However, the baby, a boy, appears to be fine and up on his wobbly legs and feeding from Mum, with help at first. He was a good 8kg in weight. I half wanted to call him Dzintars - amber in Latvian, but that would have messed with our naming system where we are working through the alphabet, so it had to begin with B, so we finally settled on Brencis. If I am correct it sounds like Bran-ts-is, but Ian has already nicknamed him Big Bren. This is our first alpaca that was conceived on our land and the second to be born here, so his official name will be Griezītes Brencis.

Food is in there somewhere

Close

A little nudge from mother in the right direction

Getting whiter now and a little less
wobbly, but his legs look like they
maybe knock-kneed like his Mum

We were thrilled this week to have another group of visitors, someone who has translated for us for official documents and also who invited us into school to teach his English class. He brought a little sum of money for travelling expenses, which was very welcome and he brought his family with him to see us. We had a great time. Since he was an English teacher I made scones but we drank green tea using herbs from my garden and not typical English tea. Fresh marjoram makes a really nice refreshing drink. He had seen our presentation in the classroom and got a glimpse of some of the things we have been doing out on our land, but he obviously hadn't really got the full flavour of it and was amazed and inspired by the things we have done. It has now encouraged him to make more use of his own land and see what he can do there, which I find really exciting. If more people can be encouraged to make better use of the land they already own, I will feel that our work has been worthwhile. Making the land work for them more helps to bring satisfaction and a reason to stay in rural Latvia. It is just a part of the jigsaw puzzle of making life in the rural regions more worthwhile. I know it is not as simple as do this and do that and you will have a successful enterprise, if it was, we would be better off ourselves. But by making the land work for us, has meant our money has gone a long way.

Holding his head up now when he's resting

Curiosity

Not everyone is pleased to see him. Snowdrop is not
impressed and pushes him away. Hopefully she will have
her own to sort out soon.

Getting the hang of this feeding lark now. We weren't so
impressed with Veronica's mothering skills on Sunday
though. We fell asleep as the rain started and after a rather
longer sleep than we anticipated, we realised all the alpacas
were still outside and drenched. Ian put them all away early
and dried Brencis off with a towel. Fortunately we think he
 is none the worse for wear, as you can see.

Who's been eating my poridge?

What! Who Me? Yes you!

The cat, that's who! Our youngest one, Bella, to be more precise. I had just read about how to get creamier porridge by first soaking the oats before cooking and that is what I had been doing. No one explained that leaving it out on the kitchen table whilst soaking was not a good idea did they? Oh no! Ian found Bella busily tucking into the milk and she drank quite a bit of it before she was found. As good feline owners we never give our moggies milk, not good for them so they say. Well our Bella proved them wrong on two accounts, one is she thought it was very good and it didn't have any dire consequences on her digestive system either, thank goodness. She is still not getting milk though.

Tasty looking?

Talking of food, have you seen the BBC article on eating grubs? Well it set me thinking, what about the cockchafer bugs we were pulling out of our composted straw pile earlier on this year? Were they edible? And the answer is ......... yes! I think I was rather hoping they weren't. I mean the thought of throwing away good protein is not what I like to think we do, but we were. Does it make me want to try them? No! Not at the moment anyway, but just in case you do, here is a link, to some tasty recipes. Enjoy! And if you fancy a try and can't find any, I'm sure we could oblige with some specimens for you.

This was taken on 28th November

This was taken today 5th December. It is a pond that never
filled up for most of the year. Whenever it rained it quickly
drained away. Here Ian has added a couple of barrel loads
of clay and silt well mixed with water to try and silt up the
holes. Hopefully that will help us to keep our pond next year

The dreich weather continued this week and our land is getting wetter and wetter, it is also getting more and more damaged by wild boar and worryingly some of the damage was close to our electric fence around the orchard and vegetable garden and also close to our young blueberry bushes. Not good news at all! Our neighbours, however are seeing less damage this year, which is good for them, just wish they weren't migrating over to us. I wonder what will happen when we have alpacas though? Will the presence of the strange animals keep the boar away? Will the electric fence keep them off? Or will the presence of the lynx finally sort the boar out, since that seems to have possibly made a reappearance? Having said that, will the lynx try and catch our alpacas? I wonder if the answer will be in the humongous book we got this week called "The Complete Alpaca Book." It certainly looks very complete and is rather thick, covering everything from the history and predator problems to health and nutrition and more. It is going to take us all winter to read it I think, at least it is something to do whilst we have this rather dreich weather.

It looks quite bright on this picture, but it wasn't really.
It was 10:30am in the morning and I still needed the
lights on.

As for other snippets of information, I won a book and I am now awaiting the delivery of it all the way from Estonia - not too far then! Hopefully I shall be able to discover some Estonian recipes that will expand the range of things to do with vegetables that can be grown locally. I also finally got the results from my presentation for my course. For some reason the email system had swallowed my post, as the tutor did send it in my direction much earlier. At least when I got the results, I was very encouraged with the comments, now I just have to write up my thesis to a good enough standard - the hard part. At least the basis for the proposal was sound anyway. Another snippet actually should have been in last week's blog. I had one of those, "you're not from round here" type moments. At the beginning of the month I got a bill for our water at the other apartment, we are not there that much to really use a whole load of water, and so we only get a bill every now and again. This time the bill seemed to have doubled, when I thought it should have gone down to nil. I took the bill and complained, "not right" I said in Latvian, only to be told that actually the bill meant I had overpaid and I didn't actually owe anything at all. Whoops! Embarrassing really! Should have checked all the words before I went.

Recycled welly (rubber boot). This will keep the water out
of the locks and hopefully stop them from freezing.

Ian has been tootling along this week despite the weather, he has braved the elements on many a day, but he also took some time off to do some "real" work, i.e. work that he got paid for. He went back into Riga to play his consultancy role, at one of the hospitals. (No he's not a doctor! A well qualified lab technician for those new to the blog). Tired him out poor dear, came home and went to sleep! Strange isn't it! He can spend all day out in the fields, or logging trees and he's fine, maybe a little sleep in the evening, a few hours consulting and he's fast asleep by the afternoon. It is not as if the commute is particularly difficult either, compared to what he used to do. It is an hour and a half on mainly empty roads, until he gets close to the hospital, whereas he used to spend an hour commuting into Sheffield with extremely clogged roads at the end of it, requiring an early start to ensure getting a space to park. By the way the "real" is inverted commas, not because I class it as his real job, just in many people's eyes that would be considered his real job, and the rest of the time is not - no money in it. Well not yet anyway but there is a great deal of satisfaction.

While in Riga, Ian also picked up a UPS - uninterruptible power supply unit. The idea is that if our power supply fails then we can keep the pump running on our wood fired oven for 24 hours, hopefully enough time to keep it going until the electric comes back on and not explode our oven in the process due to over heating. What happens if the electric goes off for longer is a problem we will have to think about later. At least we have an emergency back up system for now.

Nine people were sat around this table earlier.
You can just see the Alpaca book on the end
of the table - I said it was thick.

This week we were invited out to eat, but first we had to listen to 2 six minute sermons, which were recorded for a visiting pastor's course. His deadline was due before he got back to the US and so as some of the few native English speakers in the area we were dragged in to help. Dragged in very willingly I may add, after all, it was a fair exchange - 12 minutes of sermons for a roast dinner. Sounded like a fair deal to me. We also invited some other friends over for a meal at our place later on in the week. A group of us have gelled together quite nicely and have similar interests in farming, so we can learn a lot from them and we can throw in some discoveries that we have made along the way usually from the internet. We have a bit of an advantage, as lot of information on the internet on current methods and not so current methods is in English, so we can forward our research results to them to see what they think. We also just enjoy each others company, and each others cooking it is fair to say. As it was our turn to cook, we decided to eat up at our other apartment as we had a table and room enough for nine people there, unfortunately not all the equipment and place settings for nine people were, and so there was a bit of toing and froing in the process of putting the meal together. Still it worked in the end and it was very tasty, especially the cake that one of our guests brought with them. We decided not to eat the turkey that night as that was still fresh, it is now sitting in our freezer waiting for a more convenient time to cook it, or a few more friends to invite around.

So much fun and just an old camera

There have been a few interesting articles on the internet this week. The first was a TED talk done by a guy, Chuck Collins, who admitted to being from the 1%, or at least his family are. If you haven't discovered TED talks yet then check them out, there are some amusing ones, some mundane ones and some very informative ones. This guy who is from the 1% was explaining why those who earn a lot, and even those who don't make so much but make their money from companies that they may have worked very hard to build up, should still pay their taxes and not baulk at it. He explains that all those companies have benefitted from either their own education or the education of their workers through the state system. He believes that we should be building a society that funds education that fosters the entrepreneurial spirit, that nurtures the dreams and beauty. He also believes in funding libraries that support that learning, along with other services that enable rather hold back businesses and that all requires money and usually from the state. He certainly builds a convincing case.

Old hat and oh yes there's that camera
again. Cool tourist

As someone who has studied the development field for the last three years I was very interested in the comment of a leading figure in the field Erik Solheim, Norway's development minister

"The lender should bear responsibility as well as the debtor when a loan goes bad........ – something that may be applicable to countries closer to home in the current eurozone crisis."

Does this mean there are plans to sort out the debts of Latvia and Greece to see what is illegitimate debt? That would send the markets into a panic and yet in many ways is only right. Some debt was taken on and shouldn't be, but some debt was taken on and should never have been lent in the first place - so who has the moral responsibility in these situations? Who will sort out the mess? And who will lead the way?

An old box, a bit of time, a bit of paint and an old cot toy.
Voila! A car for a little boy and hours of fun in the making
and in the playing

My final trawl through the internet found a report that has been published in the UK that suggests that parents think their children will be worse off than they are. Isn't it about time that we started selling the idea that just because our children may have to live their lives with less resources means they will be worse off? They will be so much better off if they discover the delights of growing their own food, even if it is a few herbs on a balcony than be force-fed dreadful food that currently passes for the norm these days. They will be much better off if they discover that community is important, especially when it works together - we need to rediscover the delights of the equivalent of barn raising in today's communities, the coming together of the community to help someone out with a basic need, knowing that come the time they need help that others will rally around them. They will be much better off when they rediscover the delights of playing outside rather than sitting on their playstations for hours on end. Food, friends and family are far more important in this world than having the latest gadgets or the coolest clothes. Someone you can turn to when times are tough are far more important than having hundreds of friends on facebook because it makes you look popular. Our children could be far richer in their lives than we have been in ours if they discover what is really important in life. So if you are now stuck what to give your child that will show them how rich they can be on so little, have a peek at these suggestions from this link from a geek dad no less.