The Journey: I'm in the garden!

A promise of rain

At least that is where I have spent most of today. The rains finally came yesterday but what else would you expect on a holiday weekend. Jani is the biggest festival of the year and means beer, cheese, wreaths of oak leaves for the men and flowers for the women. It also means bonfires with shashlicks (basically marinated cubed meat). It did worry me, as much of Latvia was tinder dry and the Latvians love to head out to the countryside for their bonfires on Jani. So maybe it is a bit mean to be grateful for the rain. At least the rains came after sunrise, which is the important event to stay up for. I have to confess to being in bed during the whole thing. I need sleep!

Frederiks and George play fighting, although it looks more
like a game of Twister

Looks like they are about to break out into song now

Jani decorations at our apartment

The day before Jani we got a lovely present from our neighbour and a visit from her daughter to deliver it. They had baked pirags, which are like a bread dough around a ham and onion filling, there are other sorts but this is the most common. Our neighbour bakes very good pirags so we were delighted to get them. They were brought on a dish and beautifully wrapped in a cloth with flowers tucked into it. It only occurred to me afterwards to take a photo of it.

Eyre asleep in the greenhouse. At least it isn't
on my seeds

After the rain

As usual we did a lot of weather forecast watching and since the rain that was forecast was not diminishing the nearer we got to it this time, we took a chance to get seeds in (also Jani is often wet so that helped to sway our decision). Ian planted up another area of buckwheat to help us combat the dock problem and I planted beans, beetroot, carrots, a variety of salad leaves and radishes. Hopefully we should still have enough time for them to grow well. I planted the seeds into little troughs in the soil so that the water would hopefully soak the seed without washing them away. I also left a shelter belt of weeds to protect them from winds, since that has been an issue too just lately. Not helpful when it has been so dry and what little rain we have had didn't get much chance to soak the soil before being evaporated off by the wind.

Brencis

Frederiks coming to say hello during the photoshoot with the
shawl I made from George's fleece

Yesterday's rain was just the right kind of rain that we so badly needed. It was long and slow. It started mid-morning and didn't fair up until the evening. It meant we didn't get soaked sorting out the animals and we were out for lunch with friends anyway, so no sitting in the caravan or greenhouse twiddling thumbs. Actually I did get a bit of sorting out in the greenhouse while it rained and before we set off to go for lunch. This is the last bit of sorting out after the flat move earlier on this year - sorting out the stuff that got dumped at the far end of our very large greenhouse.

I picked our first tomatoes of the season.

I love the clouds in this shot. I had to leap out of the caravan
to take the photo. Usually it is Ian who takes most of the
photos, but I can take credit every now and again.

I mentioned last week that our cat caught a mole and brought it for tea time. We thought that would be the end of the problems of molehills appearing at the front of our greenhouse. No such luck. The cats caught another mole and still there are molehills appearing. Moles are supposed to be solitary animals, but occasionally use a mole highway. So it would seem that the front of our greenhouse is in fact one such highway. Not helpful! They already play havoc with the alpaca houses as they tunnel under the stones that keep the houses above ground causing the houses to sink. The soil they push up to the bases of the houses will also cause the bases to rot if we don't clear it from time to time. We have enough clearing to do without their contribution.

The clouds this week have certainly been interesting

Felted collar using Mari and Agnese's fleece with a touch
of alpaca fibres from one of the alpacas we sheared elsewhere

Heather the felting tutor returned home this week. As I mentioned last week she spent most of the time getting to grips with the alpaca and what we can do with it when used on its own or just with silk. She now has a small collection of items that she will be exhibiting, so it will be interesting to see what the reaction is to that.

Felted shawls and blankets

We managed to get a quick photoshoot in
between the overcast skies. It was close though

Mari's fleece felts beautifully

Heather working on darning in some detail

The day before we were going to the airport I found out a friend of ours was visiting Latvia with her husband. I first met her when she was very small in my Sunday School class, which kind of ages me. We also brought her on her first trip to Latvia when we were doing kids camps. At first we felt we couldn't really meet up as her plane was getting in about the same time as Heather's was leaving and therefore we would be dropping Heather off two hours before. We didn't really feel able to hang around that long with all the chores that needed doing. Of course though we had stopped with Heather for one last chat and a wee bite to eat and so time had run on and as we left Ian and I talked about stopping for lunch as it was later than we thought it would be. It then occurred to us that our friend and her husband would only be about another 3/4 of an hour and it would be rude not to stay and say hello while the opportunity arose. We kind of feel a bit miffed when others do not take the time to see us due to their schedules and so it would be wrong for us not to. We were glad we did turn around and due to the wonders of FB managed to let them know we were there at the airport. We drove them to a nearby mall and had lunch there and it was great to be able to do a bit of catching up. I made sure they had the right kind of bus tickets and explained how to use the buses and so off we went on our separate ways.

The rose that Heather gave me last year has burst into bloom

We actually have a decent number of apples on our apple tree
this year. It's been a long time coming

We went to a meeting this week. We were introduced to a chap and I thought his name sounded familiar, it turned out I had met him a couple of years ago on the way back from Estonia in Valmiera where he lectures. The meeting was to do with setting up a marketing strategy for the area for which the group have won a substantial sum to get it up and running. It should be interesting how that progresses.

I finally got the last of the squashes and cucumbers out. It was
easier to have them in the greenhouse to water them, but
hopefully we will get more regular rains now - but hopefully
not as much as last year

Chicken apartment living. This is a faster
solution to get the chicks out of their small cage.
They are getting too big and needed more space
another ark would take too much time at the
moment and so we decided to add another section
underneath the other chicken hutch. There should
be enough room for them all. I just have to remember
to chuck my weeds in there to keep them occupied.

As usual a weedy garden, but tidier than it was

The buckwheat is growing well

Cranberries flowering

The buckwheat has germinated in the second plot too. It
doesn't take long as Ian only seeded this on Thursday

The grass looks much better now it has rained. You can see
the other chicken arks under the oak trees. We had to do a cull
of cockerels this week. There were three cockerels in one of the
arks and they were fighting each other and harassing the hens.
The hens were loosing feathers on the backs of their heads and
egg count was down. We were rewarded today with five eggs
from this ark today.