Cooling down

At least here they are just chasing each other
around. It will do some of them some good and
a good work out to warm themselves up.

We had a heavy frost this morning and several, large flocks of geese were making a determined headway southwards. Yes! Winter is creeping up. Not quite here yet, but you can hear its whisper in the cold northerly breeze, or the crunch of the ice underfoot on a frosty morning. Today was one of those glorious late autumn days, crisp in the morning and bright sunshine all day. The boys came out fighting, only Turbjørn didn't join in at all. Something was in the air as they are not normally like that. The younger boys usually get a bit argumentative in the evenings, but never in the mornings. The nip in the air didn't leave all day, but at least it was better than the damp, wet days, which we've had a few too many of just lately.

The physio came out to see Turbjørn this last week.
He had a painful spot on his neck, not just the 
stiffness he normally has these days. She gave him
some laser heat treatment on it and Ian is giving
him regular treatments with the heat pad again. Mind
you, he's not that bad as he's still sitting outside when
it rains. He was so wet one morning that Ian couldn't
use the heat pad - he would have sizzled.

Oh oh! This is looking serious

Sunday morning I cut down the shrivelled remains of the Jerusalem artichokes and started the process of digging up the tubers - at least enough to clear some ground for Ian to dump the alpaca manure and expand the bed widthways. The rain set in for the afternoon, but fortunately I had some proofreading to occupy my time. I also dug up the dahlias that I raised from seed this year. The tubers are drying off in the little greenhouse ready to be taken back to the apartment. I also cleared and mulched another bed and so now nearly all the beds are settled down for their winter sleep. 

Not just the odd flock of geese this time. Lots
of flocks have been flying over. Winter won't 
be long now, so they say!

Wish vegetable gardening was this easy. Just
put the animals out on the grass and let them
eat it down. Not much mowing goes on these
days.

I need to work on the garden for next year, as it has started to get out of hand and take too long to deal with. I'm thinking of a very low maintenance to no veg gardening next year to give me time to get the flower and herb garden sorted and make the veg beds more manageable. It doesn't mean we will have nothing to eat from the garden, there are plenty of herbs. 

There are some gardeners on our land who we 
do not appreciate. The moles have been
working overtime. They are all round the
greenhouse and have even been digging up in our
new greenhouse now. They are in various places
in the fields. They also dug up the ditch and
blocked it so Ian has taken up the small bridges
and has re-dug it. So far they haven't been back-
close but not back yet! 

Such a glorious golden autumn

There are also plenty of wild edible weeds that we eat a lot of in spring and I can sort of cultivate them too. Nettles are really nutritious and if we cut them back they can be harvested later too. I've already put some potatoes in to see if they will be okay over winter. I know I've tried it before and it didn't work but then again the winter was hard that year. We seem to have lots of potatoes that grow up anyway where I haven't planted them and they are cheap to replace, so no big worries. 

...panning round a bit more

Such a profusion of colours, all bathed in a 
golden light

I might also buy some plants instead of trying to raise them myself and put some seeds in that can overwinter. I tried it before with parsnips and that worked really well. Those sorts of veg don't seem to need a lot of work and so can just sort themselves out with a bit of mulching later on. . Once I have the garden under control I could then think about late summer and autumn vegetables as they seem to be doing okay. The garlic is already in too. It is easy to put that kind of thing in after the potatoes have been removed (I say removed rather than dug up as I don't use a spade - no need and a lot fewer losses from spade or fork damage). After the potatoes the bed is clear and just needs a quick raking over and then mulching. 

Then we had the damp squib of a day which
drained the colour and makes the photos look
like a slightly faded one from the 70s. Karla 
and Lolly were wet through this week, but
none the worse for it.

Generally they get on, but sometimes little Lolly
pushes Karla to her limit. Karla is smaller in
height but much stronger than Lolly. But 
Lolly can outrun all the girls I think with her
long legs and boundless energy.

Another aspect I really need to sort out is compost. We have plenty of manure and that, but not a convenient place to compost it all. I need the compost for starting seeds and it seems daft to buy it in when we have so much stuff that could be composted. I could do with doing some hot composting to get rid of weed seeds and then bagging it up, but I just don't seem to get organised enough for the beginning of the year. April and May is just such a busy time, both for the academic and agricultural year, that trying to fit in finding compost, raising seeds, finding sticks for beans and so on, all gets too much. Starting earlier isn't an option either in our short season, as the ground can still be frozen in March and we still risk hard frosts and snow. 

Like miniature stained glass windows.

Looking gorgeous there Mr. P

Ian will have to get cracking with wood chopping, as now we have finally got the wood to the apartment and down in the cellar there, ready for our return in winter. I say we. We both stacked the horse box and Ian did one run to the apartment on his own. I had work to do and there was rain forecast which makes getting the horse box on and off the land tricky, so he made a start. We both went another morning to finish it off. We made it before it rained anyway. It would have been done earlier but we had a problem with a delivery of flour. I get my organic flour online and it was too heavy to use the post box and it had to be sent by courier. Well there are problems with our address since the administrative changes as there are now two places in our larger municipality with the same name and the courier got the wrong one. I always wince when people swear in my language. I'm not the swearing sort and so this just kind of compounds it. I did feel sorry for him though as I know they are on a tight schedule. 

A soggy Brencis

Mr. Tellus with a few glistening jewels

I heard last week that the paper that seems to have gone on for ever has finally been accepted. I sighed a huge sigh of relief but then got a message that they would like a summary of the paper for policymakers and the general public. Oh boy! Just condense 18 months of work into 1000 words please! Don't use anything too technical! Okay but it's one of the most technical papers I've ever written.... so....anyway it's done and sent off to my colleagues to comment on. Work seemed to be piling up this last week but at least I've managed to clear some backlogs in the last two days and can now get back on with the more routine side of things - whatever that is. 

A two-tone George

Golden morning rain with Freddie and Jakobs

A rainbow in our forest

The other end of the rainbow on the hill

Two-tone George on a frosty morning

Josefs and Freddie fighting

Still at it

Josefs taking a breather

Morning jog

Father and son wrestling now.

Now it's Freddie and George's turn. But don't
worry, Ian calmed them down after a while and
no one was hurt.

Ice on the car

A disagreement this time between Freddie and 
Jakobs.

An ordinary life

Schmack! These photos may look kind of familiar, they
were taken last week when the snow was on the ground and
the sun in the sky. This week, it's back to dismal and Ian
hasn't taken any new pictures! Can you imagine that!

Yes! We have finally moved out of the caravan and back to our apartment in the village. So instead of having to drag myself out of bed as soon as Ian is up, I get a cup of tea in bed. Ian is an earlier riser than I am and so in the caravan we pretty much get up when he does. There is not much choice really when there isn't enough space and we haven't an awning for him to go to. The bed has to be packed away so he can have his breakfast. Only in the middle of summer, on a warm day will he sneak out without waking me. I'd still rather have a cabin out on our land though.

Vanessa looks more and more like her mum

But maybe not from this angle. This is Veronica, Vanessa's
mum

The downside is that I have had to get the apartment sorted finally, so we can move about. The dump room was just that and so I had pulled all the stuff that was lying around on the floor out of there so that I could sort it out. And there it stayed for months. I hadn't had the time to deal with it. In fact we had been in the apartment for nearly a week before I got around to it, as I still had too much to do. Another downside is having to light the fire every day. In the caravan it is possible to switch the heater on without even getting up. Having said that, I don't light the fire until the temperature is below 16C, which is usually sometime in the afternoon, now that the place has warmed through.

I like the textures of the tree, moss and snow in this shot

I don't know what Herkules is laughing at, but looks like
something was amusing him or he was singing a solo

One of the jobs we had to do before moving in though was to shift wood from the land and stack it in the basement. Ian had loaded up the horse box and there it stayed until we had a freeze so that we could get the horse box off the land. We moved about 3 months worth of wood that day and we were rather tired. I stayed at the apartment and lit the fire, made something to eat for our tea and then crashed. At least with the fire on I could have a bath. Not something I do regularly these days, but I needed to soak my muscles after filling up boxes of wood and helping Ian carry it down the stairs to the basement.

Chanel, the loving mother, but not the brightest spark. This
could be her, "if you come near, I shall spit at you" pose

The girls looking very grubby against the white snow

My ordinary life this week, though was writing and writing and writing. In fact my supervisor complained with a smiley face at the end of his email that I was too productive. At least I have now finished writing the first draft of my PhD thesis, a paper that should have been submitted December 1st and updated a protocol that needed finishing off for submitting this week. By Friday afternoon I had done all I could and I actually took the weekend off. I don't always get weekends off as I've been trying to finish off my thesis and also I take off random days in the week, depending on whether a job needs doing or the weather means I can get on with an outside job. This week I just worked late to make up for the day off with moving wood.

Someone's taking an interest in the girls

Brencis doing a bit of alpaca pruning here.

Brencis finally got his Vitamin D injection this week. He is an absolute pain to work with, although a joy when we have visitors as he always comes to see people. We did have some help as our wonderful neighbours came down. It only took about 5 minutes to do with the extra help and a great deal less stressful than trying to do it ourselves. Our cat, Sofie, also thinks they are wonderful as she keeps disappearing up to their cow barn.

Sofie soaking up some sunshine

Valeria soaking up a bit of sunshine. Good job, there was
precious little of it this week

So my first day off in ages was doing the tidying up. As I mentioned we can now move around in our sitting room. The remaining piles of stuff to move are, at least, more manageable and I shall sort those out later on this week. All the food, bowls, and pans that were out on our land have also now been stacked away, which was easier said than done as it meant rearranging cupboards. I have also spent time reacquainting myself with what we have and where everything is. "Oh yes! I'd forgotten about that!" and "Oh! That's where it is!" is heard fairly regularly.

Our snow covered car. Now it is back to just red and brown.
It's supposed to be just red but not with the dirt roads which
are slecky (I think that is a Geordie word for slippy,
muddy conditions) due to the melted snow. 

These are the bales ,what's left of them. While I was working
on one bale a little mouse popped out from its tunnel. It
obviously did not approve of the changes I was making to its
accommodation

Sunday I went back out to the land. We had a bin collection and I wanted to get all the plastic off some rotten bales of hay into the bin. They were intended for growing squashes on but the conditions weren't right for them. They
will make good compost now. It makes us realise why we do not cover our bales with the stuff, there is so much of it. Ours are either kept under tarps or under cover in a building. We had that much of plastic off 13 large bales that some of it will have to wait for the next bin collection. It is a good job we don't throw much out most of the time. I have just signed a contract to only have our waste collected every three months and even with this extra plastic, that will be enough. Unfortunately, it is too dirty and degraded to recycle.

The little pond is full of blocks of ice where Ian has hacked
away so he can get some water out. This week the well though
is within 16cm of the top. That's a lot of water pressure

Ian has been working on next year's wood supply. This week
he's been busy getting the chicken ark repaired so we can
get the chickens that are still outside into the greenhouse. I
think they will appreciate that. There are days they don't even
venture out of the ark and then there are days they stop out
in some of the most stupid of weather and get too cold. Not
exactly renowned for their intelligence.

Besides doing that mucky job, I also planted garlic and sowed some seeds. I've been going to plant garlic for ages and just not got around to it. Apparently it is fine as long as it is before the shortest day of the year. Just in time then. I also had to wait for most of the snow to melt because I had to see where the beds were. We work with permanent beds and I had covered them with old hay. It was a fairly easy job to move it to one side and the ground was still soft. I dug out the weeds that were there, not that there were many and sowed the garlic bulblets and planted up some larger bulbs. I had let them go to seed this year to increase the genetic diversity.

Freddie's colour stands out nicely against the snow

George, just pondering life. He's a bright lad. He takes after
his mum in many ways, both good and bad. They are both
intelligent ones, but they also both eat through the fence and
have snapped fence posts in the process

I also experimented with sowing rocket, mizuna, chinese cabbage, onion and parsnip seeds. I've experimented with parsnip before and found I had far more success by planting the seed in autumn than I did by planting them in spring. They tended to get away before the weeds that way, rather than struggling to compete with the weeds when sown later. They are such slow germinators that the weeds have sprouted and away before parsnips even begin to show through. I've lightly covered them back up with the straw to stop them being washed away and give a bit of cover over the winter. We'll see what happens with that! I'm hoping this will also counteract any problems of spring droughts.

Mari, George's mum

Little Ilvija has started eating the grain and now eaten out of
Ian's hand. A step forward for training. Not sure what her
spitty mother will make of that though 

So today back to the ordinary life. Cup of tea in bed, read a little and get up after Ian has left to go to the land to see to the animals. Then it's back to writing and tidying up some things that need doing for work.