Chilly times

A bit dark and dreich today. As you can see the
snow came and went from last week, but we had
another dusting today.

My seeds are still sunning themselves in Portugal apparently. Obviously not in a hurry to move on to the frozen wasteland up north. It has been rather chilly just lately and not sure it has been above freezing all week. At least the wind dropped at the weekend and it meant I could get on with some jobs in the garden, albeit no digging. That would have been impossible as the ground is now rock solid. 

Chanel on look out

Mari's okay with her nice thick fleece to keep out 
the cold

I spent one day over the weekend at our apartment, just trying to straighten up - it's like semi-moving house twice a year for us. I sorted out some cabbages I had cut, so they are now sautéed and added to the freezer. Some wine that didn't work out from a couple of years back and hasn't matured well has been added to large jars with extra sugar and cloth covers to hopefully make vinegar. I guess it might be a while before I find out how that experiment worked. I managed to squeeze in the stores of flour and oil that were brought back from the land into my already stuffed cupboards. Prepper! Yup! Having said that I always was the kind of person who had large stores of dried and frozen food even before a pandemic, although I had been a lapsed prepper in more recent years. Not now though.

I love Aggie's curly hair

Frozen viburnum berries

On Sunday I went out to the land with Ian and, together with our neighbours who came to help, we got Brencis' toe nails cut and gave him his injection of vitamin D. He wasn't perfectly well behaved but we got the job done. Our neighbour rather liked giving Brencis a hug.... err I mean hanging onto him to keep him still. I'm so grateful for good neighbours who will do this sort of thing. Ian helped them with some shopping during the week as their car was in for a service and we got help with our alpaca - seems like a good trade. 

A glorious sunrise.

Having help these days though is fraught with decisions we would not be thinking about over a year ago. We are still in an area with very little Covid19, so relatively insulated from the virus. We are not entirely clear of the disease, under 5 people have it somewhere in our municipality, but areas not far from us have had rapidly increasing numbers. The country as a whole had a bad week for Covid19 numbers and the hospitals went into emergency mode as they are officially full. Latvia has patchy medical care, some parts are excellent and some are pretty poor - particularly in the more rural areas. Of course that meant that restrictions were imposed everywhere and we have to remember that only food shopping is allowed at the weekend. Of course there are all sorts of other regulations but generally they don't affect us in our day to day life and one of the advantages of living in a rural area.

Lady V poor lass with her wonky legs. She still
gets about though. Ian says she's been a bit
hungry just lately and perhaps her teeth are not
so good at grinding up the hay. She's been 
getting extra helpings to help out.

The other major job for the Sunday was pruning. Our blackcurrant bushes got rather straggly this last year and lots of berries were wasted as they ended up on the floor. We might not get so many berries next year, but at least we should be able to get to the bushes properly to pick them and slugs and snails won't be feasting on them. I also cut back the asparagus, marshmallow plants and tidied up my herb bed. After that I redistributed the mulch that Ian had added during the week - well I say redistributed, some of it was in clumps as it was fairly well rotted bark peelings that had frozen. I will have to wait until it defrosts before I can spread it out more evenly. I helped Ian to move the chicken ark that had been abandoned in the field after the chicken massacre earlier in the year. Ian had put it up on some logs to stop it freezing to the ground, which sort of worked as it was easier to dislodge it off the logs than it would have done if it had been left on the ground. 

A sign appeared on our oak tree one day this
week

Ian had a frustrating evening when he got back tonight, he went to do the five minute job of swapping the home water filter, only it started to leak when he tried to fasten it back up. Of course one shop was shut and the other had the wrong fittings. It's sorted for now, but he wasn't happy. He has also been finishing off some carding of fleece in the evenings and now onto the final spinning of a project that has been ongoing for a while. It is a winter job and spinning isn't good on the back - well not with the chairs we have and so he can only do a bit at a time. I do hope I get to see the finished product as one of our neighbours is having it knitted up into a jumper by his mum.

An officially recognised tree

You want to photograph me? Hahaha so funny!

I was pleased to hear the other day that I will get a pay rise next year. I'm going down to four days a week, which will give me some flexibility in my time, so the pay rise will offset that to some extent. I will have to think carefully what I do with my time so I don't just fritter away the opportunity. There's so much I could fill my time with, such as Latvian lessons, dealing with the mountains of fleece, creative crafts, reading and.... and..... and..... Boredom is not something I struggle with. Procrastination, perhaps! But not boredom. 

I'm not looking

I'm still not looking

Ilvija sporting the minimalist hairpiece

I did have a hiccup with work today. I needed access to google drive today for work files only to find they wouldn't open and I couldn't send a google email. So yes I was a casualty of the Google outage. Fortunately there were other things I could do in the meantime, but just shows the precariousness of relying on it. Backups of online material is needed too apparently. No good pretending the cloud is the answer to all our storage problems. We definitely need more flexibility in what we do and cannot rely on just one platform.

They've spotted something

One of Ian's little followers

We're watching you

It's still there, we are watching! Apparently GT 
aka Ginger Tom went for a walk with Ian and 
Brencis the other day, they are getting quite
adventurous.

An ordinary life

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

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

Vanessa looks more and more like her mum

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girls looking very grubby against the white snow

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

Someone's taking an interest in the girls

Brencis doing a bit of alpaca pruning here.

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

Sofie soaking up some sunshine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie's colour stands out nicely against the snow

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

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

Mari, George's mum

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

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

Company's coming!

Beautiful winter sunrise

I can't remember where that phrase is from but we had been busy preparing for company this last week. I was so busy that I forgot to post my blog last week and apparently I did something similar last year, according to a Facebook trip down memory lane. So to save you an over long blog, I will post the blog I meant to post last week and post the next instalment tomorrow hopefully, but bear with me if I don't as I am still kind of busy.

Mari

Cold but the snow nearly all disappeared

I was ticking off the jobs to do; in reality they are jobs that have been on the list for ages but this last week there was an added impetus to get them done. I have been trying to put those things away that have been hanging around waiting for a home after our move back to the apartment. Some of those things, like dried herbs which are currently in plastic bread bags need jars to be stored in and I am fast running out of old jars of a reasonable size, so that is still a work in progress. As fast as jars are being emptied they are getting filled again.

Ian has to now bring up the water from the well, since they can't
eat the snow and the water freezes over night

Another batch of snow, just about gone

In the middle of that I have been trying to think of one hundred and one things to do with squash, since a few of them seem to be starting to go rotten at the same time. I don't think they cured well enough in the damp autumn and the lack of sunshine. So far this week they have been added to potatoes - which helps my lower carb diet, the puree has been baked with eggs, dried tomatoes, mushrooms, frozen peppers and frozen beans, they have been pureed to put in bottles, they have been made into lemon squash cream based on marrow cream recipe)- which tastes a bit like lemon curd, they have been made into a type of Christmas pudding, a small amount has been frozen, some made into soup and the rest dried. If there was a way of squeezing it into a recipe, it was squeezed in there.

The ice can take a while to go and is treacherous in places

Herk looks better this year after being on the proper alpaca
feed with added zinc. Still not perfect but better

We have also been processing the lambs this last week. I mentioned before we weren't able to keep them, so we asked a neighbour of ours to help us dispatch them. He got them into a small enough size for us to deal with and we finished off jointing them and preparing the meat for the freezer (and hence not much room for the squash). We have only had chickens raised on our land that we have culled for the table before, so it was bit sad to be dispatching something bigger, but needs must. If the female lamb had looked like she was thriving, we would have kept her, but she wasn't. We did get the old chicken hut sorted out so that if the next round of lambs are born soon, we have somewhere to put them, where they can be kept safe and out of the weather. The hut had been used as storage for windows and doors since we had given up free ranging the chickens after loosing too many to foxes and birds of prey. We will also get the horse box sorted out as an emergency shelter if need be too.

Lady V having a scratch

We have also started on the routine husbandry of the alpacas, aka cutting toe nails and checking for signs of mite infections. Aggie as usual seems to be struggling a bit with the mites and so she was given an injection. Since being pregnant she has got a bit more spitty, so we tackled her with some trepidation, but she wasn't too bad. I handled her in the same way as I used to do with her mother so I didn't get covered and she didn't jump around as much as she did when she first got pregnant.

Aggie and Lady V

Chanel looking all sweet and innocent

I still needed to wash my coat because Chanel was a bit excitable and being smaller it is harder to hold her head out of the way, still could be worse if Ian wasn't so calm with them. Lady V is much better these days, but Ian wasn't sure if she was showing signs of mites too or if she had just scratched herself. Since she responds better to the spray we used that as a precautionary measure. Funny how each animal seems to respond differently to the different treatments available for the same issue. It will be the boys turn when I get back home from my trip (but that will be in tomorrow's post).

Trimmed toe nails, didn't get around to the nail varnish though

Mr. P is easier to photograph in this weather, he is also turning
more brown as his fleece gets longer

We were pleased to hear that Ian's lab results were positive, well we were when we realised that it meant they were negative for anything that shouldn't be there like signs of infection, in other words the results were good. Confused? So were we at first. We had a bit of a laugh over that, obviously something was lost in translations somewhere along the way. At least it means he won't need an operation, thank goodness, at least this year. He will have to have regular check ups though to monitor the situation.

The boys tucking into a new bale of hay

And the reason for not posting? Well that was because we had a visit from a felter from Edinburgh, Heather Potten,  and her husband. I went into Riga to meet them and take them to a lady who also does felting in Latvia, but a different style called Ieva Prane and then guide them to our home. Well we got chatting and chatting.........