To cap it all

With our normal washing machine disconnected we decided
to try out the new portable one that we have for washing
fleeces to wash our underwear instead. It worked well enough
and even spun out the clothes quite well. It might still use
too much of our precious water on the land though. 

This week we emptied the cellar of our old apartment and moved most of the remaining stuff out from the apartment itself. We also finished putting wardrobe together in the one we will be living in over winter so that we could put the clothes away. It is nice to be able to find other clothes again to wear. On the Thursday I took the car to the garage early then went back to our old apartment to clean it, since just about all our stuff has been taken out that needs to be taken out. I had arranged to meet up with someone to talk about weaving that morning too but somehow I managed to mess up the times. At some point what should have been 10am meeting in my head turned into a 10:30am meeting. It meant that the poor lady ended up waiting for me and I didn't show up. I was mortified, when I rang and found out my mistake. I hate it when others do it to me and so to do it to someone else was awful.

This little madam decided to worry our friend who was
looking after our animals by disappearing overnight. I did
explain that she does do that every now and again and is less
often now than it used to be, when she sometimes
disappeared for a week at a time

I said last week, very tongue in cheek, "Not much on my plate then!" but it was at the point when I realised my mistake that I knew I had too much going on in my head. I was making too many mistakes like that. I can be forgetful but I don't often leave people waiting without at least calling to explain. I went back to the apartment and sat down and wrote an email to Ian to explain what had happened and said I wouldn't be back until later on in the day as I wanted to get my head clearer and I wasn't in a good mood at all. I also wrote down in the email about all the things that were in my head and needed sorting or I was dealing with. Bless him! When I did eventually go back to our land on the last bus (only about 6ish) he was busy making shelves in the barn so that stuff could be organised and it means we can clear out the greenhouse in time for our felting workshop at the beginning of June.

Rain clouds. Not much but at least it is some rain for our
plants

A friend also realised that some of things we were talking about could be causing me a degree of stress and offered to take some of the workload off me. I hadn't said anything about what had happened and that things were piling up on me but it was such a relief to be able to say that her actions were really, really helpful at the minute and yes it would take some pressure off me that I rather badly needed. Of course, just sitting down and writing everything out was also helping me to sort things out in my head and made me feel a bit more balanced and less overwhelmed. There is still a lot to do, but I am starting to tick things off the list and another job was postponed by someone else until later on in the year, which again was helpful.

Ian has been busy cutting grass again. The alpacas don't like
long grass and Ian also likes to keep the grass short in some
areas like the orchard and around the current bushes.

I managed to book a flight to Slovakia for around mid-June to attend a PhD course. I was quite pleased to find out that flights to Vienna were cheaper and it is relatively easy to get to Slovakia from there. The only problem is that it was easy to find out how to get to Bratislava and quite cheap too, but the next leg was not as easy to find out. I sent an email to the university organising the course and they will send me details later, so not a problem - I think! I will worry about that nearer the time of course.

The view from the "office" yesterday

We went without a car for 2 1/2 days and Ian went to collect it around mid-day on Saturday. He rode there on his bike, which he hasn't done for a long time. He felt surprisingly okay and I was surprised how quickly he got back. It was rather an expensive job though and the car still needs a couple of jobs doing on it. When I say it was expensive, that is all relative but it is certainly more than we have paid for a long time. The car is getting old and so in many ways only to be expected.

Looking the other way from the "office"

Potential client?

The office. Ian starting the shearing. I had my own shearing
the day before. A friend of ours came to get some of our eggs
to put under a broody hen and since my hair was getting a
bit long she cut it for me. It won't be long before I'm as
white as that alpaca.

I have finished planting out all the tomatoes  and pepper plants in the greenhouse and the trees I bought outside. The spaces in the greenhouse we have left now will be planted up with basil or other plants that can tolerate warm weather. Outside we have been having to do quite a bit of watering.  We are resorting to emergency measures with the water as we are seriously short of moisture in the ground and it is only May. Since last week we have only had one very small shower on Thursday and little more again today. Just barely enough to wet the ground and not much more. This is not helping the germination of seedlings or helping plants just getting established. We have now set up a water tank next to the garden and filled it with water pumped from the newest pond. We might have lost many strawberry plants in the newest bed I made, but at least I should have been able to save some anyway. It is mot too much of an issue as there are still plants that are growing well that were made when there was more moisture in the ground and those strawberries are very prolific and will soon recolonise the plot.

Concentrating hard

Those shears are sharp. I hold the animals head down to
keep it still

We have also now organised getting our milk from our neighbour. We went up to take milk bottles ready for filling and she was in, so she gave us some milk from the morning milking. As she says, the morning milk is the tastiest - something you don't really appreciate with supermarket milk. Whilst we were chatting, aided by her son who was home for the weekend from university, her husband came out. He said with a big grin on his face that he went to make coffee and, spreading his arms out wide to emphasise his point, there was no milk in the house - apparently we had the last of their milk and she hadn't done the evening milking yet. Not too worry, it was time for her to go milking and for us to put our animals away and so he didn't have long to wait for the milk for his coffee.

Taking a sample for testing

This time holding the animals head still while Ian shears
the tail

For the last two days we have been shearing up in Estonia again. This time we had 17 alpacas, which is more than Ian can manage in one day without straining his back. He could manage more if he was just shearing, but we often help with getting the animals to the shearing area and then there are toe nails and teeth to check too, so it all adds up in time. Those who do more in one day, usually have a larger team. It is also a time when we get to socialise with other alpaca owners anyway and so is not a high pressure event. This particular gentleman and his wife are also good hosts who feed us well. A coffee break for instance means sandwiches or some savoury pastries, large home-made cookies, some fresh honey still on the comb and maybe some salad too. As for lunch! That was a tender slab of spiced, roast pork each with roast potatoes, leek sauce and salad with more of those home-made cookies. I don't think I need to eat for a week. We were put up in a local hotel overnight too and so it made for an enjoyable and reasonably relaxing time, even with the long day, due to the early start and late finish on the Monday.

Clipping toe nails - yes a pedicure too

Ian is holding down the animal while I clip around the ankles
which cannot be done with the shears as the ropes holding it
down are in the way. It might look kind of drastic but the
animals are much calmer once they know they can't get away

Taking time to get up

Off she goes

To cap it all! She was stuck again when we got back

I did manage to create chaos again though before we left. This time I forgot to shut the door on one of the arks and the chickens escaped. Not great when you are trying to get away early. I don't think I was particularly popular when the incident was discovered. We managed to capture the chickens - or at least we thought we had, until a friend of ours who was putting the animals away at night discovered one was still out. He wasn't sure how she had escaped. At least he managed to get her in and she seemed happy enough to be reunited with her flock and so he guessed he had managed to put her in with the right group. Our stupid sheep was also discovered once again with her head stuck and making a right racquet and our friend ended up cutting the fence to free her. Obviously she is not going to learn her lesson.

One stuck sheep and two more sensible ones, who don't bother
sticking their heads through to get grass, maybe just their noses.

Our friend ended up cutting the fence to
free the sheep this morning. She had been
there a while, but did this teach her? No!

The Spring flood!

Spring has sprung. The alpacas in the distance (the white
specks on the opposite side) have been let out of their
paddock to feed on green grass. Unfortunately we still have
bare earth from the winter damage too.

Whoosh and now it's spring! Well that's what it feels like. We left Latvia with a half metre of snow, or thereabouts and temperatures of -18C and when we return the snow is gone, although there are the odd spots where snow has been heaped up in shadowy areas and they still linger, but that is all. It was quite disorientating, all the landmarks we were used to over the winter had disappeared, all the high banks at the side of the road had melted away and there was even a blush of green around the fields. We've had lovely weather since we arrived back, but it is still cool due to a cool wind, but it has meant we can get on with some of the many jobs we need to do to be able to feed ourselves and the animals over the next year.

The voles were busy over winter too. Those
channels through our little blackcurrant
bush cuttings are the remnants of the vole
runs. Hopefully our cats have been doing
their job, as I haven't seen many of the little
critters around.

We said we would hit the ground running and we have, fortunately our flood is more the flood of work that needs doing and not the real floods that parts of Latvia have suffered due to the rapid Spring thaw. On the first day after our return we headed out to the land and stayed out there until about 8pm, so we took all our meals with us. I also took my computer, as I still have my statistics to revise for and an assignment to finish. So in between revising, I planted onions and peas, unwrapped the young trees in the orchard from their winter plastic coats, sorted out the herb bed and flattened molehills of which there were many in the orchard plot. That was the first day.

A combination of damage from clearing snow, trying to
drive on muddy roadways and laying the cable at the
end of last year. Hopefully by the time Ian has graded this
lot and a spot of rain on it at the weekend, we will have a
green and pleasant land once again and not a muddy mess

I am so grateful for spending time making the beds from rotted wood chippings two years ago as they are so easy to deal with - no digging over at all, just remove the weeds and rake over a bit. I did add some alpaca manure at the end of last year to the beds as wood chippings alone are not enough to feed the plants, but apart from that I haven't put a lot of work into them. It does mean I managed to sow onions, parsnips, peas, carrots, beetroot, spinach and salad leaves outside with no bother this week. It is a good job that the beds don't need digging over much anyway as my arm still aches, although it is much better than it was. It aches because I am doing more and more with it, and it protests. My guts are still not right either after that course of antibiotics I had a few weeks ago and I had to resort to the medicine cabinet yet again this week (not that you really wanted to know that, but that's my life at the moment).

First area ploughed

Ian's been busy too and he has two areas ploughed with the two wheeled tractor - much better on slightly wet soil than getting the big tractor out. They are ready now, one for buckwheat and one for an oat clover mix. The oats didn't do well in the wet last year and lodged (fell over) and got a disease called rust (because it looks like rust spots on it) but the clover is still there and some will be turned in and some allowed to continue growing. We are going to plough strips into the clover, as we don't need the whole field for peas, beans, squash and marigolds. Just in case you are wondering, the marigolds are for the chickens to give nice golden yolks and can be used in food for us as well. Ian has also borrowed a grader from a friend, to level the damage done by the wild boar in the autumn of last year. Normally he would use a chain harrow on the fields after winter to level small damage and molehills, but the damage this year was too extensive and needs a more robust piece of equipment.

We managed to fit in a quick visit to the local Spring market this week, so we got some lovely local cheese and two sacks of seed potatoes. One lot of our potatoes we don't want to use again for seed due to the possibility of blight, so starting with a fresh batch seemed the best move. The other batch are full of small potatoes that have sprouted and we will chuck them on the ground and cover with straw, if they come they come, if they don't they don't. Well that's the theory anyway.

One of the difficulties we have of living here is not speaking the language, but it is not always a problem and we are not the only ones that struggle. I saw a local I knew and stopped for a chat, he's actually German and doesn't speak much Latvian, so our conversation was conducted in German and English, but somehow we managed to understand each other. Shows how communication can happen despite the barriers. He now knows we were in the UK and Australia visiting grandchildren and I now know he saw our neighbour driving our car around.

The mess we call the greenhouse, before we
took out the caravan and chicken arks. All
the fleece hanging down is because of the
cats, who have treated the fleece as a
challenge, to see how far they can walk
across it before falling through it. That was
up there to give a bit of shade in the summer
and prevent a little heat loss in the winter!

The post holiday blues, caught me out though and I was feeling a little overwhelmed on our return. The statistics still looms large and I have still to fix a date to take the exam. I have got as far as fixing the week, but not the actual day. The gardening jobs are also stacking up, and we needed to move the caravan and chickens out of the greenhouse, so that is available for planting up with tomato plants which are busy taking over our living room. It took a walk and a song to get me set right again, or at least the title of a song. Adele's song "I set fire to the rain" seemed to shake the lethargy. It is such a ridiculous concept really, but I have felt in someways that we've done that before, done things against the odds and things have turned out okay. If we've done it before, then we can do it again. We feel God has given us this path to walk and if he has, then he doesn't do that without providing the skills and the wherewithal to do it. And if we stray from the path? Well I also trust God to let us know.

Ian backing up to the greenhouse

Caravan on its way out after nearly 7 months of being cooped
up inside

Summer position

Sometimes we expect life to be conducted at 100mph and sometimes it just feels like that is what it is doing, whether we like it or not. But life isn't like that all the time, or it shouldn't be. Life is full of ebbs and flows, season of activity and seasons of dormancy where nothing seems to be actively growing, something that Mark Pixley in his blog talks about. Living life at full pelt will lead to burnout and that is something I'm very conscious of, I've seen it happen far too many times for my liking. Some people can hack it, but from my observations they can only do that by screening out other things and in so doing don't absorb the stress. I wonder if they miss out on other things though, well that's not for me to know. I think one of the antidotes to living life at full pelt is to have a garden, especially a vegetable garden. It is in the garden that you can begin to appreciate the ebb and flow of the seasons. It is in tending the garden that you can see the point of removing some of the good things in life to let other things grow and develop better and at the end of the year, when the frosts come, there is not much to do apart from tidy up and dream of next years crops and pour over seed magazines, the ebbing of the year. I'm not the only one who thinks it is good to reconnect with a garden, as Nancy Sleeth says

"Oh, if every church and school had a garden, how different this world might be! Caring for a garden provides something that cannot be purchased at the grocery store: the satisfaction of eating food planted, tended, and harvested with our own hands. A garden cultivates gratitude, reminding us that every ounce of food that passes our lips ultimately comes from God. And as any experienced gardener will attest, a garden keeps us humble — constantly aware that the enemy, entropy, is very much alive."

Seems like as good a reason as any!