It came, it went

A magical Narnia like scene once again

I guess it has been that kind of a coming and going week in more ways than one. The Brexit deadline came and went and the UK is still in the EU for now. March came and went. The snow came and went. It is frightening how fast this year seems to be speeding by. We even moved out of the apartment and into the caravan for the summer on Sunday. Although it snowed last week, the days since have been sunny, which makes staying in the caravan okay. It is still in the greenhouse protected from the wind and therefore has some insulation of sorts and soon heats up with an electric radiator.

The snow then headed to the land and this is Ian's photo
just as it was arriving

The day after was a glorious but cold day

I do feel a bit responsible for the snow. I did say in last weeks blog that it would snow because I had planted some seeds outside, so lo and behold it did. It didn't last long though and now the snow is only lingering in the shadiest of places like the forest. The grass is beginning to show some small signs of recovery and the weeds are racing to get ahead. It meant I was able to forage enough leafy stuff to add to a meat soup. It makes a change from squash and onions anyway.

Dear, sweet little Freddie. He had his splint taken off
on Friday and so far he is doing well and his leg looks
good.

The young men of the group. Soon to be joined by two
little ones

Talking of Brexit, I got an email from the Estonian authorities outlining what will happen as a British citizen in Estonia after Brexit either with a deal or without. It was reassuring on the basis that they will issue British Nationals with the relevant ID and there will be no hurry. They will also allow me to return to the country, which is a relief. There is so much unknown, especially with the MPs in the UK Parliamentarians still discussing the issue at this time in the process. As the MEP Guy Verhofstadt said, please can the Parliamentarians vote "for" something and not just vote "no" all the time.  Such a shambles!

Oh Mr. P. You do need your teeth cutting.
Couldn't you have waited until shearing
time?

A stork visiting our pond

Anyway leaving politics aside for now, we've also had some comings and goings on the farm. The storks have come back from their long jaunt and visitors have been arriving to see us and the alpacas. The first group consisted of one of our local friends from the nearby sheep farm and camp and a guy from England who manages a large walled garden. I remember many years ago watching the Victorian Kitchen Garden that was set in a derelict walled garden and I always loved the idea of having a sun soaking walled garden. I did use to do some gardening for a friend at one time in the old walled garden on her farm, but that wasn't quite so grand as our visitors' 4 acre plot. We had a good time though talking about some of the ideas we use here on our farm and thinking how we could incorporate a no-till garden into the set up at the sheep farm with a demonstration plot too. This will be Ian's part-time job to develop over time with probably a bit of input and moral support from me.

Up close!

Brencis looking very stately and calm here. He's lovely
really and will come up and allow you to stroke his
neck - well most of the time and if you have food.

We also had another three groups who had come to see the alpacas. One group arrived as we were walking Josefs and so they were thrilled to see us walking across with him on a lead, but I don't think Josefs was that thrilled as were were just on our way back to his mum when we spotted the group. He was fine though and we soon wandered over to take him back. The next group were an international group, a Dutch guy with his Russian wife and two children now living in Riga. They came for the tour and then walked two of our alpacas. We took Tellus, who is a steady plodding sort of alpaca and Mr. P because Brencis is getting a little more unpredictable. He is just coming into full adulthood and I am sure he will calm down a bit later, but he's too big for young children to take for a walk. We hold on too while youngsters walk the alpacas but we still need the alpacas to be calm and sensible all the time.

George and Freddie, sill best buddies

You could even call them drinking buddies

The last group were an interesting group. They had come from the north of Latgale (East Latvia) and so north east of where we are. They have lots of animals, ostriches, emus, horses, goats and so on. They are another mini-zoo and had bought three alpacas last year from Lithuania. They had a good tour around and fortunately organised for a young woman to come and translate for them, so they could find out a lot of information. They also went away with some of the special alpaca food, lots of advice and we also got another booking for shearing. In addition to all that going on we got our first enquiry online for the felting course we will be having in August. All in all it definitely feels like we are heading into summer.

Turbjørn

Tellus looking like a wise old sage

What are you guys looking at?

Oh so that's who you've seen. Some female red deer

They stayed around long enough for Ian to run back to
get me and then back again to get his camera with the
long lens on. Not the best photos but as you can see from
the photo of the boys' the sun was going down. It's sights
like these that makes putting up with the cramped and
sometimes cold conditions of living in a caravan all
worth while.

Transition time

I think this is a great shot that Ian took of a stork
visiting our land. I never cease to be amazed by
the storks. Not sure I would want too close, they
make quite a mess but they are still fabulous to
watch while they are around

It is that time of the year when we transition from being in the apartment to out in the caravan more, in fact Friday to Monday this last week. It has been relatively pleasant, a bit windy and sometimes cool, but it has been nice to be outside more. So lots of pictures and not so many words

They even visit the pond on a regular basis to catch frogs.
I hope they don't catch the fish though. We have seen the
fish in our top pond after the winter, but not this one but
they could be deep down hiding - hopefully

The storks eat the frogs but fortunately they don't eat the
frogspawn. It doesn't take long after the snow has gone for
the frogspawn to appear

A beautiful day today

Beds rotavated and some seedlings in under cover,
as well as other seeds such as cabbages and caulis.
The brassicas are always best under cover on our
land because they get attacked by flea beetles
otherwise, which puts lots of tiny holes in the
leaves

This week we have beds prepared for seeds and some planted up with cooler weather plants, we have areas smoothed out after wild boar activity (not recent fortunately, we seem to have escaped anything major for a while, so hopefully their numbers really have been reduced), weeding done, even the first washing on the line out on the land. It is early and we could get caught out by late frosts, but the sort of seeds I put in are more likely to suffer from dry weather, which could still come and so they are better getting off to a good start in the rain we will have over the next few days.

This is my first vegetable garden out on the land and
the soil is now quite dark for the most part as we have
added a lot of organic matter and wood chippings to
it. Some of it got a bit overgrown last year, but at
least it has had a good weeding to start the year.

Aggie was giving me a funny look because I was
laid on the grass to take this photo. She looks very
fuzzy but it was rather breezy

The biggest disadvantage with this time of year is the lengthening days, which is good on the one hand but does mean if I stay at the apartment and Ian goes out to the land he comes home very late to eat or we start eating separately - not something we are a fan of. Throughout our married life we have sat down to eat our evening meal at the table together and when our kids were at home we ate together with them too. That is one of the biggest reasons for making the transition to staying out in the caravan, the other is to save fuel of travelling backwards and forwards. When we are out there I only have to travel back twice a week, to get the washing done, take a shower, to pick up our milk delivery and do some shopping. Before anyone asks, daily showers are not only bad for the environment (think of all that hot water down the drain) but also bad for the skin's environment, a wash is quite good enough! Of course we do go into the village more often than that when we have forgotten something or need something from home, but our fuel consumption is a lot less even so.

Ian spent time re-modelling the scar around our well today.
He re-sculpted the bank to stop surface water flowing into
it, then rotavated the area around it 

He also scattered some grass seed on 

then raked it in

The inspector came to investigate. Which reminds me, the
inspector really did come to investigate today. A nice man
with a GPS came to assess our land for the EU payments,
he went away with a few photos of the alpacas too. 

The lambs are getting big as you can see, this one
is nearly as big as her mum now.

One thing I didn't mention last week was the trip back on the plane. I had the window seat and two blokes got on and sat next to me. They were f...ing this and f...ing that, which I absolutely hate, but then they ordered lemonade from the stewards and after the stewards had gone they started to top up their cups from a large bottle of vodka they had with them. Slowly over the course of the flight, they were getting louder and louder and at a few points in time even started singing. I wasn't really sure what to do and felt quite intimidated by their behaviour. I was saying a few prayers for sure. Just as we were starting the descent the one next to me had a nose bleed and asked his friend to get some tissues. I knew I had some in my bag so offered him some rather than let him bleed all over the place as it was quite a bad one. I also felt it might help to connect with him and help de-escalate what was happening. I think the nose bleed did that enough anyway, it seemed to calm them down a lot. It certainly isn't something I would like to have repeated again though.

A few signs of spring

Coltsfoot. This is usually the first flower of spring to appear
although there doesn't seem to be many of them this year

This fungus is so incredibly bright red and stands out
on the forest floor

The yearly carpet of wood anemones - I love them.
They appeared about the same time last year, but
earlier than years previous to that. In fact if you go
back a few years, sometimes our land was still under
snow and ice at this time.

Blackcurrants are budding too

Mint appearing from under the winter cover of spruce
branches - this helps to protect them from the harsh frosts

Hollyhocks

Welsh onions. I have all sorts of onions left to sprout in the
garden because they start to come push up leaves so early
in the year that we can be eating leaves almost as soon as
the stored onions are finished

The lovage is another early plant to push up after the winter

Oh yes! And ground elder, the scourge of the garden, but I'm not
so bothered these days since I found out it is perfectly edible at
this stage and gives a sort of parsley flavour to meals.

This is the Schisandra Chensis in the greenhouse. We
use this in salads, in teas and as a spice too. We
don't get that many of the supposedly amazing
berries that give so much energy, but we aren't worried
since we found out all the other uses for it.

So this was pretty much our week. There was a slight misunderstanding at one point. Ian asked for another replacement Stanley flask recently as the vacuum stopped working again, despite their 25 year guarantee - we think there was a problem with the lightweight ones that hopefully has been resolved with their new design, which is what they replaced it with. A nice lady came to give us the replacement since she is from the area, so she got her relative who speaks English to phone to arrange the drop off. No problem, it was someone we knew. The problem in Latvia though is that we know quite a few people who have names that are similar, so if we want to talk about someone we have to add a description too, unfortunately they don't add those descriptions to their phone calls, so while Ian was convinced it was the guy who had dug the well who was coming with his relative, it turned out to be another guy with the same name. Never mind, Ian got a new flask as the lady came to visit with her grandchildren the next day.

I've seen the light

I wonder what these two are discussing?

....... you know, the one at the end of the tunnel and I don't think it is a train about to hit me - at least I hope not. I have actually finished off a lot of stuff this week, or at least posted them off to others to see what they think, before they push it back my way to do more work on. It feels good to finally see the workload depleting, unless my supervisor makes up more work for me tomorrow when I go and see him. There was also no further catastrophes on the travelling front. My Latvian classmate gave me a lift to Valmeira where I managed to grab some lunch and the late bus back to Cesis. It had only ten minutes to spare according to the timetable to catch the following bus and so it was a bit worrying, but it was a needless worry, as it actually got in 5 minutes early. I got back home on Tuesday and it felt like I had been away for a month, but it was really only a week. The last long stint away was to Peyresq in France, but that was so peaceful and remote with only around 30 people there, can't remember exactly how many, but it was around that mark, unlike the over 600 mark at the conference the other week plus catastrophes which didn't help.

Our very fluffy cat having a wash

It was nice for a couple of mornings to take my time getting up and not having to rush out somewhere. I took the Thursday off, but that meant getting up early to get out on the land with Ian. He is an early riser and the sun is up, so off he goes to see to his animals. Still the for the rest of the day I just pottered about and we sat and chatted for quite a while. I also helped Ian with the injections of vitamins and worming/anti-bug medications, which basically meant passing him the needles and then holding the heads of the alpacas after Ian caught them - support role really, but not one he can do alone with the set up we have at the moment. Ian is working on some ideas to make life easier for himself if I am away and he needs to give injections. Alicia our old alpaca is much easier to do something with, but if Snowdrop ever got sick, he'd be in trouble, she is so big and not as compliant as Alicia. Having said that, Alicia is getting rather canny when it comes to injection time, she knows and doesn't necessarily run away, but just sidles off.

There's just one problem! Her hair is that long........

She has to strain her head right back to get to the end of it

Since Spring seems to have arrived I decided to plant seeds, but since this is Latvia I played safe - well safer - and planted some in the greenhouse and covered them with fleece. I planted parsnips outside, but under black cloth to protect them, they take ages to germinate anyway and will stand a some frost. Inside I planted collards, spring onions, little round carrots, kale and corn salad. So I hope we have something to eat from that little lot sooner rather than later, our veg store is running low on variety now. It was with this in mind that I headed out into the field and snipped away at the just emerging nettles for a good spring tonic, the first harvested crop of the year. It was nice but a little gritty, must find a better way of rinsing them without stinging myself. Don't panic, for those who don't know, nettles are safe to eat after cooking, honest!

Oh yes! The sky was definitely blue that day

There have been plenty of other signs of spring, such as the kiwi plant in the greenhouse has started dripping from the buds, which means it's waking up from its winter sleep and some of the winter barley seems to have survived and started sprouting again, only hope the chill we expect this week doesn't finish it off. The storks are also back, the true harbinger of Spring around here and the first Ian knew of their arrival was when the chickens went berserk and started flying off in panic, pinging into the wire around the alpaca paddock in the process. Other signs are the bees, the wagtails, the ospreys and frogs in the pond. It is still rather chilly at night, the greenhouse can register -6C overnight, but then be up to +25C half an hour after sun up.

Spot the chickens! Hiding behind the alpaca

Ian had more visitors this week. The first he knew was Alicia screeching, a sure sign something was up. Ian went to investigate and found three adults and two children, heading for the alpaca paddock.  It was a lady who works in the local supermarket and her family, and she once translated for us when we visited the local orphanage. They spent about half an hour at our place and Ian let the kids feed Tellus, Ian also managed to get hold of Tellus, so they could feel the fleece. From hanging onto him the other day for his injections, I know he has a lovely thick fleece on him. He'll be a challenge to shear soon.

This is a series of pictures. Our attempt to capture a picture
of both of us, using a timed shutter with the alpacas. So
here is the first, just setting it up

I had an interesting email yesterday, from someone I don't know and at first I wondered if it was spam, because there was a link in it, but it was such a well written and lovely email my gut reaction was that it was not. I admit to sending it off to my son-in-law to check, since he is the tech savvy one and he thought it was probably not. Well I took a risk and I'm grateful I did. Hichu, wrote a piano piece entitled "A Journey to Somewhere" and put it up on the internet and then tried to google it, to see if it would come up and my blog came up. So if you want to listen then here is the link. To me it speaks of the halting and uncertainty of setting off on a journey to somewhere and is a lovely tune.

Come on boys, where are you?

I had a vague note from my oldest son, saying a present was on the way and was booked to arrive Saturday after 6pm. That actually got me worried, as I was thinking "no delivery company delivers on a Saturday and especially after 6pm." I asked for a tracking number, but he wouldn't give me one as he said it would spoil the fun. I was intrigued. At 6:20pm a ring on the doorbell and standing at the door was a lady with a bunch of flowers. It wasn't my birthday present after all (my birthday is later on in the month) it was a Mothers Day present. I know in most of the world Mothers Day, or Mothering Sunday is usually in May, but in the UK it is related to Easter, so is usually in March. The lady said some very nice things, well they sounded nice and I nodded and smiled, as you do when you haven't a clue what someone is saying as it was all in Latvian. That wasn't the only surprise I even got a phone call while I was travelling on the bus up to Tartu from my youngest son. We were never very good as a family about doing things for Mothers Day and so I was a little taken aback by all the attention, but rather nice.

Close but not quite

I think the biggest shock though was a post on  my youngest facebook newsfeed that quoted the verse below, I would think most have you have seen some version of it.

At 6 yrs "Mommy I love you"

At 10 yrs "Mom whatever"

At 16  "My Mom is so annoying"

At 18  "I wanna leave this house"

At 25 "Mom, you were right"

At 30 "I wanna go to Mom's"

At 50 "I don't wanna lose my Mom"

At 70 "I would give up Everything 

for my Mom to be here with me"

We definitely went through the stages 10, 16 and 18,  just not sure they were at that age though and so for the turnaround to "Mom you were right," feels rather odd at times, but nice.

Arrrhh! There we go, that's better

Another milestone passed this week, we finished watching War Time Farm. It was a fascinating story, as they said in the programme, we hear a lot about the effects of war on the cities, but not in the countryside. It was also quite surprising how much changed in those few years and in someways how much high intensity agriculture of today stems from that era. It is a good job that finished though 'cos we have farming to do.

Finally both of us, and an alpacas behind. 

Puddles and squashes

Autumn begins

I forgot to mention last week, the storks have gone! We saw some circling around on a Sunday a couple of weeks ago and then we saw just a few after that - the stragglers. Definitely all gone now though (well that's what we thought until we saw one very lonesome looking stork on the way into Riga). With the exit of the storks, the trees have taken their cue and decided it's autumn and autumn colours are beginning to tinge the countryside. We even had our first proper rainfall in a few weeks, enough to actually wet the ground. We badly, badly need the rain as our ponds are almost down to a puddle. I have never seen them so low, even in the last hot dry summer three years ago, which is bad news as we still have the greenhouse to water and now have to think about bringing in water for the animals as there hasn't been enough rainwater collected off our caravan and the pond water is too low to give them that. At least the cooler days means they don't need quite so much water and there is lots of moisture on the grass first thing in the morning. That is something that has really surprised us this year, that despite the lack of rain, there is so much dew that the grass is actually growing quite well.

One of our pond puddles

We managed to collect the most important crop of the year in this week, our potatoes. As usual the potatoes were grown on two separate crops, one had a good amount of potatoes but a lot of blighted ones too, one had lots of small potatoes but some of the plants were still green too. We decided to only lift half of those and see if leaving it till later would mean a bigger crop. Not sure if maybe the different variety we bought in this year was just a later maturing crop or it was due to the place they were planted and the type of year we've had. Oh well! As a gardener you are always living and learning and there is always next year. At least this year we have more potatoes than last year, that's a blessing as we are not planning lots of trips away, well Ian isn't.

Well I'm okay now! 

Another surprising thing this year, we saw a  squirrel. A very skinny looking brown/red squirrel. We didn't get a good look at it as it was while we were driving along and it very nearly ran out in front of us. Now that would have been just typical if the first time we see a squirrel in this country we ran over it, but fortunately it took a double take and decided to scamper back into the woods. We feel sure it has heard there are hazelnuts on our land. That's another first too, we haven't seen those around our place, hazels yes but none with the nuts on. I have some sad news too this week. We lost six chicks in all, to whatever ailed them last week. Not exactly very good at all, but at least the rest have perked up and looking pretty good now. Even the big chickens are looking much better after their bout of illness, not related to the chicks, but some mould in the buckwheat made them wheezy. Just one hen is still causing us some concern, but they are starting to roam around again and it probably won't be long before they are all being a nuisance again.

Gaining trust!

I have been rushing to get some work done this week for my paid employment before the start of the new university semester. I have taken a step back in my job and I will no longer moderate the student cafe that I have been doing for the last 9 years, a younger lass is taking that bit on. It means I don't have to be online all the time, which makes it easier when I am jetting off here there and everywhere. I also felt I was getting too old for chit chat with teenagers all the time. I love talking to teenagers, but not for a job any more. I'm still around for trouble shooting and I have some bible studies to do. There is still some details to work out as to what else I do, but it will be nice to make a change.

Morning mist

There has been frustrations galore this week. I had to redo a proposal for a doctoral seminar. Basically it means writing a piece that they think is acceptable to be discussed amongst my peers, well I made a complete hash of it. I hadn't been able to get hold of my supervisors (holiday time) until this week to get it amended and so I had to redo it all before Friday. I got something together anyway that was acceptable, but it was just a hassle I could do without. Deep joy! I wouldn't mind but I made some terribly basic mistakes, the sort of mistake that had my kids done it when doing home-ed I would have asked them if they had actually read what they were meant to do. I think my mind is still too distracted and I need to de-clutter it sometime. At least I don't feel so tired as I did about three weeks ago, the iron tablets seem to be having an effect. Going up and down the stairs doesn't seem such a hassle either now.

Horsetails looking bejewelled in the dew. Pity we don't
actually want horsetails in our field but they look pretty

At least I managed to get a poster printed on time. I have to take that with me to a course I am attending in France this week. I was so pleased that they were able to do it and have it delivered to the apartment by Friday. I was even more pleased when I saw the van roll up outside the house, I could have kissed the guy, but I don't think he would have appreciated it. I even have business cards now, the poster and cards are all designed by my youngest son. He can do the work a lot faster with the software that he has than I can. The problem with the poster though is that firstly it didn't come in a cardboard tube, just thin card surround it and bubble wrap and secondly it will only go in one of our large cases and not wrapped in the card or bubble wrap. I have wrapped the poster around certain items of underwear and put a large towel on top of my clothes and under the poster. The bubble wrap was then put across the top of it. Hopefully that will stop it from getting crushed and I just hope I don't get stopped to open my case.

Another beautiful summer's day in the nearest big town to
us.

We have made some progress on the house. We now have our address and we went to the notary to sort out a contract with the owner of the land, to get a lease. Only the owner of the land is in Canada and we have power of attorney for her. This meant that one of us represented the owner and one of us represented us. So Ian is leasing the land from me in effect and he has to pay me 10 Lats (£12) a year (I won't spend it all at once, honest). We had an issue at first as the notary would not handle the writing of the contract, as we don't speak Latvian, but she said we could write out a contract between us ourselves using an online template and she could notarise it (legalise it), as long as we had a translator present. Off we went to the architects office and the architect wrote out the contract, she also managed to get a translator - an English teacher from one of the local schools. A very nice fellow indeed. Needless to say we now have his number in case we need his services again and I'm sure we will. He nearly didn't take any payment either as he said the architect had done most of the work, we still gave him a token payment anyway.

Nice and clean and don't the squashes look nice on the
windowsill

I spent Sunday cleaning though. We have visitors today and our apartments needed floors washing. The problem with summer is there is not that much time to do it and so it needed to be done. It wasn't just the floors though, there were squashes that needed a wash and laying out, onions needed outer skins taking off and soil removing before putting neatly into some baskets. All jobs that have sat there for a couple of weeks. We have over 100 squashes now, to last us through to next year. They are not just for us but also the animals. I like squash because you just plant them, they may take a bit of time to really get into their stride but then they just sprawl over the place and take care of themselves by smothering everything in their path. The squash just then need cutting off the plant, curing the outer skins so they are nice and hard and then leaving until winter time. Some squash last just up to Christmas, some into the new year and some we have this year, should last through until this time next year if we wanted to. They are great winter food and when they do start to go off they can be made into preserves or frozen at a time of the year when there isn't that much to do and it isn't that much of a problem to have the oven/cooker/fire on all day. Easy! This year it will be even easier as the animals will be getting the majority of them. Even if we are a fan of the squashes we grow, we can't really eat that many of them.

Close up on the bedroom windowsill

Bedroom 2

Kitchen windowsill

Living room windowsill. Do you think anyone will notice
that we use this apartment as a storage place too?

See you hardly notice them

Not so sure where these will go though! 

It's a hard life

There is definitely no blog next week. As I said I am swanning off to the South of France, ten days up in the mountains. Life's tough heh!