The Journey: Indian Spice

My friend from India

A while ago I went to Peyresq, France for a summer school in connection with my PhD studies, as you do! It was a wonderful time up in the Alps (blog post here) with other PhD students, who were about the same age as my children. They were lovely and didn't make me feel old at all. We kept in touch but contact dwindled over time, although I did get to meet one of them when I went to Berlin. The offer was open though, if anyone wanted to visit they would be more than welcome. One of them did get in touch with me fairly recently, he was from India and had since married and moved to Germany for a year. He fancied a trip to see Latvia and Estonia with his wife and they would love to call in and see us and spend some time on the farm. The timing was perfect as our other guests had left the week before.

The nights may have been cool but the talk around the table
was warm

It wasn't raining all the time but still plenty of talking and
eating

The weather was not great, but in many ways perfect. We badly needed the rain and it also meant there was not much to do but sit around the table and talk. As anyone knows who follows this blog, we love to sit around a table to talk and eat. So we not only enjoyed the delicious vegetables from the garden and greenhouse but also some genuine Indian food made by our visitors. It is a good job that Ian installed a light in our greenhouse earlier on in the year, as the chat lingered late on into the evenings even though some of them were a little on the cool side.

I had to go and drag them away from the alpacas as Ian
was on a roll. Maybe it was a bad idea to say they had time
to see the alpacas before we ate

Love this picture of the two little ones. It looks like they have
had a falling out.

Of course we talked about our studies, but we also talked about farming. It was quite an education for city dwellers, especially city dwellers coming from a city the size of Dehli at over 20 million. I can't even begin to imagine a city that size. Riga is only around 800,000 and the population of Latvia is less than 2 million now. They would love to move away and get some land and they were exploring the options. We took them to see our goat farming friends and they commented on the contrasts between our conversations which included beavers and beaver dams, wolves and bears (no we don't have many, but there are some) and cheese recipes from Latvia and India, with the kinds of conversations they would normally have with their friends about cars and taxes, car parking spots (not easy in Dehli apparently) and traffic, things to buy and holidays to go on. So quite a contrast. Still it has been a great time with lots of ideas for them and we all have plenty to think about. I loved it when discussing changes that needed to happen in city management and my friend turned to his wife and said that maybe they were the ones to influence the change. I do hope so!

We went for walks too. We were on a mushroom hunt, which
is the best sort of hunt for vegetarian meals. The mushrooms
are just starting to appear now that the mornings are damp,
even if we are still not getting a huge amount of rain

Trying out the tractor

Ian has been doing quite a bit of preparation for our new arrivals next month. We need to build a new alpaca house, which will give us the room for expansion to our maximum capacity of around 20 alpacas - not that we are getting that many alpacas but we need to be prepared for that number when they have babies. This meant first relocating the old chicken house. That will be seeing a new use as a root cellar, but that will be a tale for another blog. First it had to be removed from the paddock area. Ian accomplished this by first taking off the roof then fixing some planks on the bottom to make it into a giant sled, which could be pulled by the tractor. He also moved a concrete beam from one of the old electric poles into the paddock for part of the base of the new alpaca house.

Ready to eat in the greenhouse. Thanks to our friends for
these photos. We didn't get the chance to take many, but the
ones below are by Ian

Rain clouds building, but still not much rain

We also finally got around to cutting the boys toe nails, since Ian's back had improved enough to be able to tackle the job. Well all of them except Brencis, as he needs to have fighting teeth removed too and that means pinning him down on the floor. There have been a few groups of visitors to see the alpacas this week too. One of the groups took three of our boys for a walk. The boys were very well behaved, even Freddie who was being taken for his first trip out with paying guests. We just had time for a sit down before the next group arrived. One of the groups of visitors this week arrived just as we were about to sit down and eat lunch, so Ian ate cold soup, while I sat and chatted with our Indian friends.

Rain to the north of us

A rainbow anyway

Summer is racing away and the land is beginning to take on the hues of autumn. I'm getting back into academic mode and so may or may not blog next week as I am away, leaving Ian home alone again.