Summertime

Grey skies and a flower rich meadow

The strawberries are turning, peas are podding and it rained. Yes it's summertime! We have a trough behind our barn to collect some of the run off from our barn roof. I think we've had three troughs full of water now since the beginning of April. Normally in summer the trough fills often enough to use the water for boiling for tea or washing up. Not this year. We have already been bringing water from our apartment since early spring, as the well wasn't filling either. Even today the rain was not exactly the Latvian deluge type, more like a very heavy, drenching drizzle, which reminds me of Scottish rain. Enough to keep the plants going, but not enough to really soak the ground though.

I was gardening for the camp this
week and spotted this rather
elegant chap

The door on and part of the fencing done.

Ian has been busy on the alpaca love nest this week. He has put a door on the smaller side of the building we were using for storing hay and split it from the rest of the building. It is enough for the two females that we are expecting to come, if the people are still interested that is. We were in the process of putting up the fencing wire when we had the first of our Sunday visitors. There had been a group staying at the local hotel and one of the families decided to visit us afterwards, then another, and another and another. The first group had been and gone before the next group arrived, but then the next three groups arrived within a short space of time. I just sent them up to Ian as I was trying to get on with some project work. Needless to say the wire still needs fixing onto the posts. Tomorrow's job I guess.

Chanel was moaning a bit today and her baby was definitely
having a party. We won't have long to wait now I guess. Maybe

It's nice to see the butterflies are
back. There didn't seem to be
many at all last year, just
cabbage whites. This year there
haven't been lots of them, but
definitely more varieties. 

The plan this week was to do more hay cutting but the forecast was for rain, which never came until today. There would have been enough time, but we didn't want to risk it. Not yet anyway. They say the best hay is cut before Jani, which is the midsummer festival held on the 23rd June. After that the grass is usually woody, but then the other plants grow and so the grass maybe woody but it is then a herb rich mixture. Ian and I have been discussing the merits of this and wondering if the early cuts are more like a high carbohydrate meal to an alpaca and the later cut a nutrient dense version. We do know that sometimes the hay can result in tooth abscesses if it is too woody, as we found out the hard way one year. Poor Aggie did suffer for a while before we realised what the problem was and could deal with it. So we still don't know what is the optimum for our alpacas, but better to have hay in than none at all. So far we have four bales that Ian cut at the end of last week.

It's good to see the new girls using the shade or shelter under
the tree. It's beginning to look like a park where the trees are
all eaten below a certain height.

Yes it rained! At least they got a good shower and I hope
it washed some of the dust out of Mari's fleece.

While we've hardly had any rain at all, other parts of Latvia were flooded out. It's hard to believe the difference when we are only about 175km away. Just like last year we have been sitting watching the rain clouds to the north, south, east and west of us, without even seeing a drop fall on our land. We've even been into our village about 6km away and seen the roads awash after the rain. Whilst we need a good dry spell to make sure we get the hay in, we don't want to be in the situation like last year, where the grass really struggles to recover after cutting or seeing my garden dying for lack of rain.

A sprightly looking Mr. P.

Nom, nom, nom. Enjoying the respite from the sun and
flies.

I took Ian to my department do at the weekend. I nearly forgot about it but my supervisor rang me up to remind me, or actually check to see if I was going. The advantage of this particular do, was it was only about half an hour away at my supervisor's summer house and not 3 1/2 hours away in Tartu. We only went for a couple of hours as we have so much to do on the farm, all the summer chores that keep us busy and then we had to put the animals away at night too. We arrived in time for dessert of strawberries which went perfectly with the Swiss roll I had bought from our local bakery. We had the kebabs from the bbq afterwards, once the fire had got going enough to cook with. Once again we were having a meal under the apple trees. It will be a while before ours are big enough to eat underneath their shade. It will be even longer if the deer keep nibbling on them over winter. We must get some deer protection for next winter - if we remember.

Hello folks, Freddie here. 

Poor Herk. He really does not enjoy fly time. 

Talking of forgetting things, I nearly forgot about an online project meeting, as it wasn't on my calendar, fortunately my boss emailed to ask if I was going to be there. I hadn't planned anything else and so was able to attend thank goodness. I have another one this next week, at least that one is in my calendar. It makes me sound quite lackadaisical but I've actually been working above and beyond expectations apparently. Phew! Pleased about that, I must be getting something right.

We think we can see a water lily flower below the surface. Yay!
So pleased that I managed to save it last year from the deer.

As I said last week, George is looking so grown up these days

The cranberries are doing well. It is
probably a good job they are on a well
rotted wood bed with a high water
table below.

Josefs looking very cute after the rain.

A view from the other end of the land of the boys.

Confession time

These flowery sheep were outside the train station at Jelgava
where I was last Monday and Tuesday

Oh dear! Humblest apologies, I just ran out of time to add the photos to the blog last week. Or maybe I just didn't get my act together and then I forgot. I have been busy though, between gardening, sorting out some details about my course, sending emails regarding that, and doing some babysitting too. Amongst all that, there is feeding folks and we don't finish eating sometimes until about 9:30pm at the earliest, which doesn't leave much time for anything else. I still hadn't downloaded the pictures until this morning. Not to mention the two days in Jelgava on a seminar, and a lovely visit to a young lady who we have known since we first came to Latvia in the year 2000. We also got to see her family and I have to confess that I spent rather a long time talking to her husband about agriculture and Latvian society in general.

Thursday afternoon was spent in Cesvaine, for more dental
work. It's a nice place to visit and you could have seen the
castle, but my camera batteries ran out. 

I have further confessions to make too. I fouled up on checking the post this week. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, but this time it was. We are expecting the replacement shears to arrive so we can finally shear the alpacas and I forgot until 7pm Friday to check the post box, sure enough there was a letter to say a parcel was at the post office and guess what? It was the Friday before a bank holiday weekend and the post office is not open now until Tuesday morning. I was popular, especially as it is hot again. In fact it has been that hot and humid that my glasses that I have started wearing permanently have been steaming up.

Campanula is back out again, always
such a glorious sight and no tending
needed as they just grow in our fields

Further confessions? I snore! My room mate on the course I was doing, had the foresight to include ear plugs, so that was a relief, unfortunately the same cannot be said for Ian one night. After a particularly bad night he got up early, went out onto the land and went to sleep in the caravan for an hour and a half. Normally I'm not that bad, honest! It is quite embarrassing really and makes me a little anxious when it comes to sharing rooms for a summer school in France, which I found out this week I have been accepted onto. It doesn't bode well for other future events where I maybe expected to share. I do hope and pray that I can get single rooms as often as possible, or maybe I shall just have to take ear plugs too, for my room mates.

It was good to see our seeder worked
well and the beans are coming through
in nice straight rows. Many of the plants
I transplanted have taken, despite
the heat.

As I mentioned, there has been a lot of gardening going on this week and the strawberry glut has begun. I have already had to freeze some. I can now see my squash plants from amongst the weeds and piled the weeds up around their roots, to help keep them moist. Worrying about snails this year, doesn't appear to be the problem, worrying about the water situation is. Our ponds are dropping dramatically and some of our plants look a little wilted in the heat. I am trying to hang off actually watering them by hand, as I want them to send out deep roots and there is some rain forecast. It feels like a nervous game of chicken at times, to water or not to water. Our chicks also progressed from house chicks to land chicks today. They were getting too smelly and noisy to have in the house and it is warm enough for them to huddle together and keep warm, now that they have proper feathers on their bodies. They have moved into Hoppy's box - whose Hoppy? You will have to read a previous blog to find that out, if you don't know.

If only all gardening was this simple, no work needed -
well maybe keeping the ground elder at bay to stop it
taking over

This week the pressure to get the garden sorted, do some studying for my course and still remain human has been quite intense, as everything is taking far longer than I would hope. Not only are things taking longer than I hoped, I found out my study plan that took far to long to put together, has to be amended and so there will be extra work involved in that. At one point I had to take some time to sit and pour out my heart to God. Fortunately God knows my needs and later on in the week I have my young helper coming, a young lady who has helped me a couple of times before and she comes just a few days after my son and his family return to the UK.  An extra pair of hands in the garden will be most welcome, not that my son hasn't been helpful, he has, he has been helping Ian from time to time, but he has also got to spend time with his young family and his wife has to spend time with the baby, as she is still feeding him herself. Our grandson is also a little too young to help, maybe in about two years time!

I know it kind of looks like a big toad, but it isn't. It is
actually the first mushroom of the year - or rather it was
nearly our first mushroom of the year. Someone must
have stopped to pick flowers and seen it, because by the
time that I got to the land for our barbeque, the mushroom
that Ian had taken a photo of, had disappeared.

We did kind of celebrate Ligo this year with our son and his family. Ligo is the midsummer festival here and is a big event, only it isn't quite midsummer but two days later. People generally head out to the countryside, especially if they have a summer house, no matter what the state of the summer house is. They pick wild flowers, of which some were picked from our land, but that's okay. They decorate their cars and houses with oak leaves and sometimes flowers. They light bonfires, have a barbeque, eat cheese, drink lots of beer and sing traditional songs. Well we went out to our land, we did the barbeque, we lit a fire and used the charcoal from the fire for the barbeque, but we didn't drink beer and we didn't stay up to see the sunrise and if there were any fireworks this year, we didn't hear them. We were fast asleep.

Something to crow about?

I think so! Our little grandson, doing his beached whale
impression and even better, he learnt to roll from
back to front and then to his back again - fun times ahead

Update: Thanks Pene for the corrections, it is indeed my grandson and not my son in the picture above. Whoops! 

Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

Love the colour of this flower and must find out what it is

First of all let me get the official announcement out of the way. I am really pleased to announce that I am going to become a grandma. Ian is chuffed too about becoming a grandad. Our middle child's wife is expecting in January so I guess I had better get the knitting needles out in preparation. There is another announcement too and that is the tickets to bring our alpacas across from Sweden on the ferry have definitely been booked and the vet goes to see them on Thursday to verify they are fit to travel on Friday. Just wish it didn't mean such an early journey to pick them up, we will have to set off at something like 3 or 4am in the morning. Staying over only adds to the costs and also we have a horse box to lug around and so not so easy for parking and visiting. So hopefully by this time next week we will have them safely ensconced in the paddock that Ian has made.

As you can see we have had sunshine and showers so far
this summer

It might have been a cool summer so far but the berries, particularly the strawberries, don't seem to be bothered even if other things are rather slow like the beans. Our three plots have at least staggered their production of strawberries as we are getting bucket loads of strawberries every few days at the moment. Unfortunately the sun is not around long enough to dry our strawberries in the solar dryer and so we are having to resort back to the electric ones, of which we have two that have been going almost constantly for the last few days. I have also made strawberry jam, frozen cooked strawberries and bottled some in a light syrup for breakfast toppings, and still there is more to process. At the moment it seems a bit onerous but I don't think that we will regret it later on in the year when the gardening is finished and the snow lies thick and deep and we open an instant bottle of summer sunshine. Well we can pretend the sun shone a lot! At least we have more than in the UK. It also means that it is not quite as frustrating for Ian as he is waiting for a tractor tyre replacement and can't get on with large swathes of cutting, turning and baling but he has had enough dry weather to strim hard to cut areas and use the two-wheel tractor in other areas that the big tractor cannot cut. It's a long slow process but he is determined to get it cut and cleared this year.

One to go and one to stay!

We decided that time has nearly come to cull some of our chickens, the broiler ones and so we are planning on giving them extra feed to fatten them up over the next couple of weeks - they still feel a little scrawny under their feathers. The only problem is that there are three males and one female and we plan on keeping the female, if we had kept her in with the fellas then she would probably eat herself to death so she still needs to be on fairly restricted rations, this meant moving the female in with the smaller chickens. It was quite funny moving her in with the smaller chickens as she is almost twice the size, but at least we reckoned that moving her into their domain would lessen the chances of too many fights over the pecking order and our hunch seems to have pulled off. There were a few disputes but nothing serious. The head male seems to have laid down the law and she doesn't seem to aggressive despite her obvious size advantage. At least it gives her a chance for laying eggs and we shall see what we get from her and how long she lasts.

Hoppy is still going strong as is always the first
in for food. It is learning to hop around quite
well even in the long grass. 

I had one of those funny moments this week when you try and work out what on earth is going on! I was kind of semi-crawling under a low apple tree to pick the last of our strawberries from that particular plot and I had to lean with my fist on the ground to get to them. There was a kind of squeaking noise as if the ground itself was protesting. Now I know I am no svelte figure but I'm not that heavy. I peeled back the straw and the protestations continued but I could see nothing. I watched a little while with the protestations continuing and suddenly saw a movement, but not the thing responsible. I got a stick from the apple tree and gently prodded around, eventually unearthing a soil coloured toad from the ground - still protesting. It sat for quite a while very still before I thought the best thing I could do was walk or rather crawl away and leave the poor thing alone to recover.

A member of the pea family of which
we have many growing wild in our
fields

We had to make a rather long trip the other day to a place called Rezekne which is two hours away as we found a firm that makes and sells natural twine for balers. It is fantastic to find a product that is actually made in Latvia and made from a sustainable source and ours is a mix of hemp and linen. I don't like seeing all the plastic twine around in fields and didn't really want it on our property if we could help it. Neither do I like the idea that we are using more plastic made from fossil fuels, although I realise that even producing the hemp/linen twine uses fossil fuels as does our travels to get the stuff. Mind you we fitted in a trip to some folks along the way that we know and so that was good to be able to catch up with someone that we don't see so often, so it wasn't just a trip for the twine. Sounds a good enough excuse to me anyway.

First glut of the year

A glorious daisy plant that I haven't even planted myself

It didn't take long but we now have a strawberry glut. We have had strawberries in salads, strawberries for dessert, strawberries in ice cream, strawberry sauce, strawberry and gooseberry jam (using up some of last years gooseberries before the next lot arrive), as well as eating them straight from the plant; we are now kind of strawberried out but at least they freeze and we have tried drying some too to see how well they last. Other plants are beginning to get there at last and we have had the first sugar snap peas, swiss chard and some thinnings from our kale. Everything is still rather slow though due to our late start with the greenhouse, my studies and the dry weather. The wetter weather has certainly been welcomed for bringing the plants on, but not always so appreciated by everybody in our house (hehehe).

Okay I know you have to look hard
but you can see our prayer flags out
there in the field, waving away keeping
the hoover birds off our buckwheat! 

We were so excited to see that our buckwheat has germinated and growing well despite the attack of the hoover pigeons last week. They did seem to look like little vacuum cleaners as they strutted along and, as I said last week, it was so disheartening to watch them, especially when they didn't really seem that bothered by our presence at times. I had read that shiny things waving about is supposed to scare them off and so I thought foil strips would work but I wasn't so sure that they would last very long, as the foil we can get seems to tear so easily. In the end I made foil ribbons by sandwiching foil in cling film and then ironing the strips - at least that felt less likely to tear. We also noticed that wearing red and waving madly seemed to scare them off eventually and since I have loads of red ribbon we decided to try some of that too. Ian then tied the foil strips and the red ribbons to long sticks and placed them around the field and it seems to have worked. Ian watched one day as a group of them flew in the direction of the field, and seemed to be heading downwards before suddenly back tracking and flying off. Result!!!! Now our field just looks like it is surrounded by prayer flags fluttering around in the wind.

There they are, tiny buckwheat plants

This week we have been for a look around a friend's new factory unit, well when I say new, it is new to them but really it is a relic of Soviet history - it was fascinating. Old tins with Russian language labels, cart wheels, and many other fascinating things littered the place, Ian was in heaven pulling out items to show me. Our friends thought that Ian would love to help clean up and so spend time spurching (a good Northumbrian word for a rummaging through stuff) through all the paraphernalia but Ian looked a little apprehensive at the thought, we both had visions of our car becoming filled with all sorts of interesting looking items that might come in useful and goodness only knows where it would all go, we would need another apartment just to hold it all, or another barn built. So is anyone interested in a genuine bit of Soviet history? An empty tin that once contained tuna, empty bottles of smuggled alcohol, genuine 80s Soviet phone made in Latvia, cart wheels etc. and that is just some of the weird mix of things there.

Glorious sunset on Ligo evening. The day after seeing
our third longest day in 12 months, since we spent
midsummer down under at Christmas time.

This week the Latvians celebrated Ligo which is their midsummer festival held on the 22nd June and we were invited to join some of our neighbours by the pond with the obligatory bonfire and barbeque, drinking beer in Ian's case and pear juice in my case. It was an idyllic evening of chatting and eating, with just enough wind to keep the wee biting beasties at bay and yet just warm enough to sit outside, especially welcome as we had had a lot of rain this last week. None of us were up to waiting for the sun to come up around 4am and so at 1:30am we headed back to our apartment with the stars glinting faintly in the still just light sky, full with food and friendship. I was chatting with our friend today about the festival and she was saying that for most festivals in different countries people organise parties where they invite people to come, but Ligo is different as parties just happen, the whole day is about parties, with people coming together in an organic kind of gathering and not a formal organised event. That sounds like the way God would organise something, with people coming together to sing, to talk, to just hang out around a bonfire and then move onto another gathering to sing some more, to talk some more, to eat some food, enjoying each others company and appreciating the good things that God has given in the beauty of his nature.

Ian mowing the "lawn" wearing his funky headgear. Actually
it is my anti-mosquito net that we bought in Oz
earlier this year. 

We have been here over three years now and we have found in that time that things take time to happen here, whether it is really getting to know the neighbours because it takes time to nurture and deepen the relationships, or time spent just getting something built, or the time taken to pull a project together. Of course somethings can happen quicker and it is not just things working in Latvian time, sometimes it is because I will sit on something rather than push something through. I get the feeling though that it is not good to push things through all the time, either that I am getting too distracted with other things. It is good to try something in a small way first, sit back a bit and see what is the next move, a bit like our land really. Sometimes we have some definite idea of what we want to do and work towards that, but as we work at it and occasionally take a step back we can see we need to adjust our focus, change direction or re-plan what we want to do, for instance we were going to have two greenhouses built but the only place for a second one would be nearer to the trees and that means more shade, to put it somewhere else will mean tearing up more land and we are more and more loathe to do that. We are growing to love the variety that marks out the land, the patches of wild strawberries amongst the taller grasses, the orchids nestling amongst the shadier areas, the sheer variety of grasses on one piece of land is quite staggering. Whenever we try and identify a plant we can't just look it up under the grassland section we have to look it up in all the sections as we have patches of dry grassland, rich meadowland plants, woodland plants, you name it we have that habitat somewhere on the land.

Weird looking caterpillar

Another thing we have discovered over time is the costs incurred for honesty. Doing things properly costs money and, in Latvian terms, lots of money. Our greenhouse project will cost a lot in architect fees, fees for putting it on the map and goodness knows what other fees and they add up. Our chimney installation for our wood burning stove cost quite a bit for such a small project too. Setting up contracts with notaries also costs lots of money with money getting paid to the state in fees for this that and the other. All in all, honesty costs a lot of money and is absolutely no incentive for doing things the right way at all. I can understand that the state needs to levy charges for some things but some of it seems unnecessary and some of it seems to be there to put people off instead of encouraging an honest approach to business, or making alterations or whatever the project. To move forward and bring more businesses out of the grey economy I believe that the costs of honesty are going to have to fall and people need to see some benefits to working everything above board. Sticks are all very well but a few carrots may help too.

Our miracle pool is a rather odd colour at the moment
as the rain has washed a lot of silt into it making it a sort
of beer colour.

It is easy to tut tut at such disincentives and roll our eyes at such vagaries of the Latvian system, but it is not the only system that is broken and needs fixing. Latvia at least has the excuse that it will only be celebrating 20 years of freedom from the Soviet system this year, not a long history at all and much of the Soviet system lives on in peoples minds making progress slower than some would like. So what excuse do countries  for discouraging honest dealing that have had a far longer history of independence? A Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has written a rather interesting article regarding the way that facts regarding who owns what has been quietly destroyed to the point where no one knows who owns what leading to the debacle we have recently seen with sub-prime mortgage scandal. One thing for sure is that they are facts Jim, but not as we know it. It is scandalous really, allowing those in positions of wealth to exploit the system, instead of governments doing what they can to control the greed.   This system of destroying facts certainly provides no incentive to newly developing countries to get things right. Reforming the Latvian system seems like childs play compared to the reform needed in the financial world of more advanced economies. Time for a change methinks!

Our bottom pond recovering after the drought with the
addition of some grass seed to hide the scars 

St.John's wort