Didn't we have a lovely time, the day we went to...

Agnese

It has been our turn to do most of the visiting this week and it has been a rather nice if tiring change. Our trailer was due for its annual technical inspection and so that entails a trip to the big town and a chance to pay a return visit to the teacher who we have been helping in English class and who helps us with translation from time to time. He and his wife wanted to show us their gardens and summer home, just outside the big town. Shortly after arranging the visit, the young man who Ian had met previously at the technical station also rang and said a German friend of his wanted to meet us. We were a bit surprised, but agreed to meet up in a small town on the way to the technical station and spent about 3/4 of an hour on the forecourt of a petrol station gassing (okay talking, I couldn't resist!) to the German friend, discussing in general terms about the Baltic states and trying to explain that the prices of agricultural land in the UK was rather more than in many countries in Europe. Here you can get agricultural land for around €1000 per hectare, in the UK it is more like €36,000 a hectare. Before you all start rushing over here it is now more complicated to buy than it was last year when we got in before a change in the law requiring purchasers of agricultural land to hold a specific agricultural qualification.

Another rainbow over our land. Still a bit wet this week

Someone had a close call with the bank on the corner of our
land. Not quite sure what made the mess, possibly a
piece of equipment on a tractor, because there are no tyre
marks

So after that exchange we toddled off to the technical station where the trailer passed without any problems (I was going to say hitches but that is one pun too many). Funnily enough we met the young guy who had wanted us to meet his German friend too, he also was having his trailer tested. Ian and him seem to be making a regular habit of meeting there. We finished up our business in the big town and then headed for our translator friend's place, where we were treated to a lovely lunch after looking around his allotment. It was going to be a barbecue but unfortunately the weather was not on our side that day. During lunch we found out that our friend also had a German friend he wanted us to meet, but first we were going for a trip to the summer home to look around. It was a gorgeous old place, with so much potential, but of course as so often is the case, it also needs a lot of renovating which is expensive, if done with traditional techniques. Our translator friend's wife dug up some good old fashioned scented stocks and a strong type of mint to take home. We also were given chocolates at lunch time but we managed to leave them, unfortunately. I was surprised that they rarely stayed at the old place, I could understand in winter, as it would be cold, but in summer I would have wanted to stay out there all the time. It had a lovely view and seemed very peaceful, but I guess they were involved in too many activities where they live to spend more time at their summer home.

Just chilling outside. Ian does occasionally herd them out
onto the field to eat. They can be a bit lazy at times

Sorry no photos from our visits - too busy talking. These
are the pied flycatcher chicks in the bird house on our barn

So onto the next visit. The German friend was opening up a dog and cat shelter and in the process of building all the necessary enclosures for the endeavour. From his appearance he did not strike us as the devoted animal type with his tattoos and all but he certainly had a soft spot for them and a ring tone on his phone that had me looking for the cat I had stood on every time. No I didn't stand on a cat there, it just reminded me of the sound our poor little kitten made the other day when she got under my feet. The place he had bought several years ago was a hogweed infested site and he still battles it in a few places, but with hard work and persistence he had made a large area safe. If you don't know, hogweed is a highly dangerous plant that can lead to some very nasty burns when the sap gets on the skin and then is exposed to sunlight. He showed us all over the place and explained his plans and then asked us for our story. Needless to say we went home with a jar of jam and a bottle of mushrooms at a rather later hour than we should have, but fortunately our animals went away without a problem. One of the most interesting aspects of the day was that our translator friend had to translate from German into English and vice a versa and he was translating for people who were enthusiastic about his country and loved living there. I mentioned as we were leaving that sometimes it takes outsiders to show people the good things they have around them and I think our translator had enjoyed hearing the good points of being in Latvia. It is easy to get negative when circumstances make it difficult to make a living and so many leave.

A fledgling that had an altercation with our window at our
apartment. A little stunned, but judging by the lids after it
had flown, it appreciated the food and water

Gorgeous colours in this sunset. Unfortunately my camera
did not do it justice

Our next visit was somewhat longer. We weren't sure how long we were going to be away or what time we would be back. The days can be long in summer, but even so the animals need to be away by 9pm and so we organised with one of our neighbours to put them away in case we weren't back in time. Our mission was to pick up a seed processor that a previous visitor to our farm had said we could have, but what we weren't sure about was whether we were going to end up with a full tour of their farm or just pick it up and go. We weren't exactly sure of where we were going when we set off, just the general direction, but fortunately a text got through and we were given directions to a place we could meet up and be guided in the last 8km. We quickly got onto politics - not my fault honest! It was interesting to hear someone speak up for Putin, not in an unthinking way but from someone who has considered the subject long and hard. I don't agree with all that was said, but I took the point that Putin does indeed give many of the Russian people the sense that he is for his country and cares deeply about it and the people. How many politicians can we say give that impression?

A photo I found on my camera of Ian cutting hay a few weeks
ago

The beast itself on our land

After quite a long discussion over tea, bread, cheese, meat and biscuits we went on a tour of the farm before heading back for more discussion and tea. We were offered blackcurrants and raspberries and since ours were not ready yet we accepted, only we ended up picking them ourselves, on our own while they got on with other chores, which was fine, especially as we got to keep the much needed food grade buckets we were given to put them in. We were not allowed to go though without having a meal which we were not expecting, but grateful for, apart from the fact we were heading to another friend afterwards and we rather suspected that there would be more food. It is a good job that in Latvia we are always prepared to eat whatever is put before us and Ian can eat anyone out of house and home anyway with his appetite. Before finally heading off though with the seed processor or winnower we were also given metal spikes for earthing rods, bee pollen and a full super of honey (that's the frame that the honeycomb is built on which contains the honey). Such a generous heart! They kept apologising for talking so much about politics, philosophy and the difficulties of farming, but that was no problem for us. We are quite open to talking about most subjects and to be honest it gave me some fresh insights into how different people think and the problems they encounter in the countryside. I admitted that I was mentally taking notes for my research.

Inside! Not sure if it is supposed to look
like this inside or if some bits are missing

Vents on the side to open and shut. Pieces of wood nailed
on to stop some parts of the wooden structure from falling
off, but it does work. Ian oiled it and put it back together
and tried a bit of the grain we had left over from last year
and there was clean grain at the bottom. Perfect! Ian says it
is wonderful to work on, because the parts come apart to be
cleaned and then go back together, not like modern rubbish!

Those who have followed my blog will know I am studying to complete a PhD with an Estonian University, you may or may not know the full title of my research which is Mainstreaming Participatory Development in Rural Latvia and Estonia. Now if you are scratching your head and wondering what on earth does that mean, then it simply means putting people at the heart of development and helping them to realise their hopes and dreams for the area they live in. Not as a nice little add on, or, as is usually the case, we have made our plans and to get the money "we have to make a semblance of asking the people what they think" type of way. I have been thinking of this in terms of Latvia and Estonia, countries that have gone through the Soviet system and so not attuned to making their own decisions, but having decisions made for them from some central authority many miles away. I have watched the EU debacle over the Greek crisis and realise that it is not just Latvia and Estonia that need to look at how to help ordinary people develop the place where they live. The dictates from the EU to Greece rides roughshod over the ordinary people who are crying out against the bankers. As our discussions with the farmer the other day shows, there is a great need for politicians to listen to the people in a way that shows care and concern.

Brencis and Agnese coming to see what I was doing

I mentioned that we were going on to see other friends after picking up the winnower. It was a good job they are good friends of ours, as we had to keep them waiting for our arrival. We knew they would understand, or at least we hoped so. They have been in Latvia long enough to know the unpredictability of visiting people, especially for the first time and people you don't know well. We were right about the food, but it had been a long day and after a cup of tea and a good old natter we were ready to eat again. We set off back to our land rather late though and rolled onto our land at 12pm. We parked up with the winnower still in the trailer and set up the bed in the caravan and went to sleep. We didn't even bother going home. The problem is that we hadn't planned on stopping out and so we had to go back home in the morning after letting the animals out and had breakfast there. Not sure how Ian managed as he usually has breakfast as soon as he gets up, but he did. We picked up what we needed for the day and then headed for a lazy day out on the land - if you class picking a bucketful of gooseberries and mowing lawns as lazy that is.

Relaxing

Yes in the greenhouse again, but we
forgot to take pictures this week and so
these are the cast offs from last week.
So cute though, I'm sure you don't mind

I took the opportunity to relax a little this week and do something completely different with our little granddaughter around. She has been such a joy to have around with her little giggles and inquisitive nature. I'm sure her Mum winced occasionally when she was scrabbling around with her food, but we are all well aware that kids need dirt in their lives to build up immunity and reduce problems with allergies. She ate lots of fresh food though to compensate, although tomatoes aren't too her liking - except once. If she was whinging a little due to tiredness or hungry, she was offered plums, apples, pears or cucumbers all freshly picked and not a chemical residue in sight. Sometimes our daughter cooked too and it was nice to have someone else do the cooking. One night they took us to the restaurant - a treat as we have only been once in the last year or so and that was recently when our friends took us out.

Showing Mummy how to collect tomatoes. Shame the wee
one doesn't like them 

We sat around and talked a lot too, yet still got wood stacked in our basement for the winter and radiators attached to walls thanks to our son-in-law. We continued our walks around to see the alpacas and chickens and of course, the wee one preferred to see the chickens - much more interesting to youngsters. According to the little one, chickens go "arrrrggghhh!" not cluck cluck and she is sort of right really when you really listen to them.

There has been plenty of sun this week.
Rather nice! Only problem is that we
have had just a touch of frost and so
that prompted some hurried harvesting

Our sheep are finally sheared, but were greatly threatened with having a rendezvous with our freezer in the process. They escaped twice after shearing, but we think it was because they were unsettled with having strange people around who helped with the job. Our sheep are very easy to keep and move around, but as soon as we need to do anything like shearing or injections, they are an absolute pain to get hold of. You wouldn't think that one of them actually likes a nose rub, would you? At least they settled down for Ian when he took them some food in the evening.

The amaranth is in the two strips in the centre. Not exactly
well advanced. Not done so well this year with this

My daughter and family returned on Friday and I went with them to the airport, as I had a dental appointment in Riga. They ordered a taxi for me from the airport as I had to take their child seat with me and then we have it for any little visitors in the future. I was a little late as the taxi got stuck in traffic, but that was okay. I don't miss city traffic, that's for sure. The dentist whipped out the broken tooth and then took two x-rays, one of the tooth and one of a tooth that is sensitive to pressure from time to time. Since the broken tooth is not hurting, she arranged another appointment to deal with it for three weeks time. This time it only cost me €12.30 - not too bad then.

Sunflowers again and showing the autumnal look to the
trees

As I had two hours to kill after the dentist I decided to walk back into the city centre to catch my bus. The child seat was very light and quite easy to carry ....... for the first hour. I did something that is not like me at all, I took a wrong turning and ended up walking for two hours - not quite what I had in mind when I thought about killing time. To cap it all I got there too late to buy a ticket at the kiosk and the bus was really full, so I had to stand for over an hour. I was so pleased to reach a stop where people were actually getting off the bus and not on it and I got to sit down then. I then spent an interesting hour chatting to a young man, who I've met before. He was enthusiastically re-telling me many a tale of changed lives when people listen to God. He is a young man with special needs and yet he has a deep wisdom to know that listening to God and acting on it will help him and others immensely. I love it when God uses the people considered weak or foolish in society's eyes for his purposes.

The bees are still busy

Our son-in-law loves a good challenge when talking and he certainly posed some interesting ones this week. After we had spent rather a long time picking a poor harvest of potatoes, he commented that he could buy lots of bags of potatoes if he had been working for that length of time. He's right of course and we could argue, they won't have been picked by us, the ones from the supermarket would have chemicals added and all sorts of good reasons to continue growing our own. However, the one thought that struck me, long after he had gone, was that it demonstrates the price we put on our food. Not everyone can become a software engineer of course and just about anyone can grow potatoes if they wanted to, but the price we pay in the shops doesn't just represent that the farmer has better machinery to pick potatoes, it also represents the low wages we pay those folks who sort through the potatoes that the farmer lifts. Somewhere in our system we have decided that those who produce food are not worth as much in the economy as those who design clever systems to make our life easier or help industry to run smoothly - all well and good, but with no disrespect intended, we can live without those things, we can't live without food though.

An acorn year for sure! Hmmmm! Lots for the wild boar to
eat over winter then.

A big announcement this week we have a new grandchild on the way. My oldest son and his wife are expecting again and so our grandson is going to become a big brother. Time does fly and it is funny to see how little he looks and yet when his father was born, his big sister was only 15 months older, younger than our grandson is now. My grandson will be over two when his little sibling is born, in fact more like the gap between his father and baby number 3 in our household. Gosh we were all young then. 

Phew!

Our patent pig proof protection! In
reality they are heavyish logs with
strips of wood nailed on from our
old greenhouse, which have more
nails sticking out. We have two rows
nailed on, which hopefully will stick
in pig noses if they so much as get any
where near our blueberry bushes.

Let me sit down and catch my breath a bit this week. I know some of you think we rush around doing a lot, but that's not true normally. Our life is different and varied and that is partly because we don't have nine to five jobs and so it leaves us free to lead a quite eclectic life with plenty of time to stop and observe, drink cups of coffee by the pond and spend the evenings just perusing the internet (sorry have to admit that). Last week was different because it did seem to pass by in a whirl. Last Monday I mentioned that we found out there was a possibility that we could get some local transport for the alpacas we wanted to purchase, the only problem was that there was a finite time to get them and that time was very soon ie next week and so that meant a sudden rush to Sweden to go and look at the alpacas and the farm where they live to see if the whole idea was feasible. Monday we booked the tickets and by Wednesday we were off to Sweden. The timing was great though because it was dry, if we had been at home Ian would have been itching to get out and about doing things, but still having to wait for dry conditions underfoot. It did mean that Tuesday and Wednesday morning was spent trying to get things sorted before we went like planting some new blueberry bushes we had got with some hopefully pig proof protection.

Leaving Riga

We took the overnight ferry from Riga to Stockholm, which was a novel experience for me. I think I may have been on an overnight ferry once before but not slept in a cabin and even then I cannot be 100% sure of that, as it seems to be only a vague impression and I would probably have to check with my parents to find out if I was imagining it. Our journey out of Riga took far longer than I thought it would, as Riga is not on the coast exactly and took an hour and a half before we reached the open water through an industrial landscape of towering cranes and silos. The big ship of course has to travel slowly in the river so it doesn't churn up the bottom, hence the long slow cruise past. We saw coal wagons that come from Russia being unloaded adding to the massive piles of coal and a ship being loaded with the coal, constant busyness, constant moving in a dirty soulless looking environment. I found it quite fascinating really. On the way back we sat on the opposite side of the ship and this was far more rural, with houses and boats, such a contrast! We had some noisy girls in a nearby cabin, but the noise from the ship drowned them out and so it wasn't too bad and it was certainly more comfortable than trying to sleep on an airplane and not as confined.

One of the many islands we passed on the way into Stockholm

I hadn't realised that Stockholm is situated on an archipelago a truly amazing sight to wake up to once out on the deck (no ocean view from our cabin I'm afraid). The islands rose out of the mists in the morning and we could see little cottages nestled amongst the rocks and the trees, as well as some quite grand houses. Some cottages were quite isolated, whereas some islands were quite densely populated. We stood for hours watching the islands sail by until the cold finally drove us in. Once in Stockholm we became quite nostalgic for Denmark. We lived in Copenhagen or København as it is known locally, for three years and in that time we got very used to the zone system of travel, which made getting around by bus, train or metro very easy. The Stockholm transport system isn't quite as easy to work out and there certainly isn't the information that there is in Copenhagen. In Copenhagen all the bus stops, train stops etc. have maps with the routes for the buses and trains on and it is easy to see what number buses and trains you need to get to where you want to go. The zones are also easy to work out. We thought we had worked the system out in Stockholm (once we found the bus stop that is, no information in the ferry terminal to say where they were), but when we tried to purchase a ticket it began to look rather complicated. In the end we decided to try walking to the train station as it didn't look to far on the map that Ian had picked up off the ferry and indeed it was a brisk walk but doable. We did manage to purchase some tickets in a metro station but once on the train we found out we hadn't purchased the right ones and ended up paying extra, which was fine and the conductress was very nice about it and very helpful. No complaints there then.

Yes a wind blown me with cute curly haired Gotland lamb

We had a marvellous few days just north of Stockholm as the farm is situated in a beautiful place by a large lake. We stayed at a little Bed and Breakfast place and the lady, an English lady who had married a Swede, had just got some orphaned Gotland lambs that needed to be fed by bottle. They had beautiful curly black fleeces which was so soft and so that breed was put on my list of interesting fibre producing animals for the future. We got to see our three alpaca boys who we hope to buy, but they were a little aloof without a bucket of food, so we didn't see much of them close up. By the time we get them though they will look rather different, as they will have been shorn, teeth cut if necessary and certainly toe nails cut - they were a little curly and ready for cutting. It was good to see the set up and noticed their land was just as wet as ours was when we left, which means that our rather wet land is not an issue. We were reassured that our accommodation arrangements were satisfactory and our winters were not a problem, in fact their fleece will benefit from the cold. Feed will also not be an issue as we should have enough hay from our ski hill to feed them and they need only a little additional feed on top of that.

The three boys in the foreground.

Besides being reassured on the practicalities of raising alpacas we had a great time talking about a myriad of topics, as the couple who own the farm have lived in many places and so a wealth of experience on different cultures to talk about, which if you follow this blog you will know suits us very well, as we do like to talk to different people. We even managed to squeeze in the niggley little detail of looking through a contract for purchasing the animals, left till the last moment of course. We helped with the yearly barn clean as well, as we had interrupted a rather busy week for the owner to come and look, for which we were rather grateful, but were paid well with a fine feed afterwards. We also helped the bed and breakfast owner to pick wild anemones for a friend of hers and wired in her electric fence to keep her lambs in. I guess not every guest to the B&B would know how to wire in an electric fence.

Even the forests are suddenly carpeted with wood
anemones.

We arrived back to glorious sunshine and some very green grass. Everything looked so different, that we felt we had been away much longer. We hit the ground running though as we need to get so much done before we get alpacas and if it is as soon as next week we have a fence to build, but still fit in getting the gardens prepared for our veg growing season and a field to sort out. We had lunch and then headed on out to the land and finally got all that hay in off our land as the ground was so much drier, we even managed to get the horse box out of the barn with the car, which only four days ago was a mud bath (it's not perfect, but it at least walkable in now). Today we got the caravan out of the greenhouse to make space for the tomatoes, melons, chillis and cucumbers, and rotavated the gardens - well I prepared one garden and marked out areas not for rotavating whilst Ian got on and rotavated. I then headed indoors to get a bible study done and some paperwork which needed doing. So I admit, this week is a bit of a rush and we do feel the pressure is on to get work done, but that's okay the summers are short here and we know this is the busy season, there will be a quieter season in mid-summer when the planting is done and the crops are hopefully growing and again in the winter when it is time to relax - or work on my next academic project perhaps. After all as the good book says

                                           There is a time for everything,                             and a season for every activity under the heavens                                                      (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

A bit difficult to see but a parade of the King of Sweden's
guards as they went to change places with those who had
been guarding that week. 

One of the females - lovely coloured coat

Clown the father of the boys, getting a bit old now and
in grand retirement as there is now a new boy on the block.