The sun has got his hat on - I wish!

At least we have seen plenty of rainbows.
I love rainbows

Well it's wet! The wetter than normal summer has morphed into an even wetter autumn. It is still incredibly mild for this time of the year and so things are still growing, that is if they don't succumb to rot or split like the cabbages due to too much moisture. My Borlotti beans blew down in the wind too, but fortunately there was a good crop of beans about ready for harvesting anyway and so it just meant having to pick them there and then rather than waiting a few days, also found a few more of Thelma squash growing amongst the beans. There have been a few crops that we are really pleased we tried this year, Thelma squash being one of them, they taste a bit like sweet potato with a similar texture and have produced enough small sized squashes that are about the right size for the two of us. We will still grow the bigger squash next year but mainly so that we can feed the animals with them. Another good cropper is Sangria chillis, there is no heat in them whatsoever, but in a year when the normal peppers have struggled to produce any peppers, these little conical shaped chillis have been producing their little heart out. In fact the plant that I took home and removed all the peppers from so I could grow a pepper for seed isolated from the rest of the plants is once again covered in flowers. It is advisable to do this so you don't get a hot pepper crossing with a mild one and vice versa. These little chillis also add interest to salads and stews with the mix of purple and red peppers (I will have to try and remember to get a photograph next week). The other success has been Amaranth and I produced a rather nice tasty bread today using 2 cups of white flour, 1 cup of ground Amaranth seeds and 1 cup of ground split yellow peas, some sesame seeds and home-grown poppy seeds. With a long proving time it also rose well.

Still pretty stormy looking

One of the comments on the blog last week was from my good friend Mavis, who came to visit us last year. She commented that she knows I enjoy the special moments when God speaks to me through the ordinary day-to-day things and she is so right. I love it! I know some folks have discovered gold and diamonds in special meetings, but I see diamonds glittering all winter, from the ice crystals that fall in the morning winter sunshine to the diamond encrusted fields of snow and I feel so incredibly rich. If you have eyes to see, then the world is filled with awe and wonder. Her comment also reminded me of our trip back from the bakery when we caught in a shower of rain; the sun was shining too and I knew there had to be a rainbow somewhere and sure enough it was high up in front of us and the bow seemed to finish over the local council offices. There needs to be a transformation of that place, a place where people have become hardened to the poverty outside, where little kingdoms of power are maintained and old ways perpertrated. Nothing very, very bad that I know of, but could be so much better, kinder and more considerate, more forward thinking, instead of resigned to "that's the way it is here in Latvia." The rainbow, spoke to me of the possibility of change coming to that place, something I have been praying for for months now. Now that excites me!

Ian has been feeling like Dr.Frankenstein
creating monsters, Here is his monster table.
I think it might be robust enough for him

Following on from the comment I made about thinking deeply last week there was an article by Anna Coote, who is head of Social Policy at the New Economics Forum which suggested that people should "slow down and think carefully about what really matters in our lives - and change our daily habits accordingly. Sound advice I think. If we don't give ourselves time to think, how can we ensure that what we do is inline with what we really care about? Or think is important? If we don't give ourselves time then we blindly stumble along from one thing to another not really checking to see which direction we are heading in. I'm looking forward to the winter, as I've said before it is thinking time. All gardening jobs are at an end and there is time to breathe. 

His monster sink in the barn. Never throw
anything away in our household. This sink
came out of the caravan. and the wood is all
wood leftover from other projects. Waste not
want not!

I managed to replace my hand blender, it is not as powerful as the last one but better than a bust one, it was also fairly easily obtained. I wanted one that had a detachable handle, I also wanted one with a pot that you could whizz up small items like herbs or breadcrumbs. Now that was two additional requirement and that is what I found. Success!  Now that might not seem like a big deal to you if you live in a city, or live in a different country to Latvia, but here it is. Finding something that fits the requirements can sometimes be a frustrating job, where compromise is the order of the day. You can get most things in Riga these days if you know where to look, but out in the smaller towns it is a bit hit and miss, it might be there and then again it might not be. We learnt in Denmark that if we saw something we thought we might need, we bought it, because when you did need it it wouldn't be in the shops. It is just because Denmark and Latvia both have small numbers of people : about 5.5m in Denmark and around 2m in Latvia. This does not represent a huge market and Latvians have less buying power than the Danish, so you can imagine the effects on the product availability. Thank goodness for the internet for some things.

That grey pipe in the picture is part of Ian's
drain repair to fix the broken pipe at the base
of one of the barn foundations. He had to dig
down a long way to sort that out and has been
an ongoing project all year.

Another challenge we face is not knowing the language yet (I know, I know, it is about time we did). This means tagging along with folks if they are going somewhere that we need to go. This week one of our friends was going with her daughter to the eye hospital for a regular check up and so we got her to book us in too, as it is a long time since we have been to have our eyes checked. It was good news all round, our friend's daughter no longer needs glasses to correct her vision, our friend doesn't need glasses either and Ian and I don't need to change ours. Sorted - till the next time! One funny incident happened in the café where we went for a cup of tea, while some drops were taking effect on Ian's eyes. There was a lady at the counter who had previously tried to talk to Ian outside the eye clinic while I and the translator were inside, she leaned across the counter and loudly whispered in a conspiratorial tone that we spoke English, just so the lady at the counter would know!!! Or words to that effect anyway. Ian seems to think she might work at the hospital since a few folks stopped and chatted with her, but it was funny that she thought she felt the need to warn the lady behind the counter, after all, we might not know much Latvian but we can order a cup of tea and decline any sugar without too much difficulty.

Man does not live by bread alone, but
a good cup of tea to hand is also very
helpful

Ian is in his element with his new cycle computer. He loves to make charts and along our last 30 years that we have known each other - yes we passed that milestone this week along with our 28th Wedding Anniversary- he has made charts of things like our daily electric usage, and his daily blood pressure. Well the cycle computer takes this to a new level, there are even more parameters he can keep track of, the temperature when cycling, his geographical position (a bit of a joke when he is not able to get out and must use his stationary trainer bike, although one day the computer must have been having difficulty locating the satellite as it recorded him going up the road to the technical school and then straight back down through the allotments and that was really without leaving the comfort of his training room) oh and oh so many oodles of other little tidbits of information. So happy!

Master bedroom

I have spent a lot of the weekend on Skype talking to our son about design ideas for our new house - well maybe! Our son is studying automotive design and so loves to play around with new concepts in design and has the right kind of computer programmes that can put flesh on ideas. I have an idea of what kinds of things are needed in our new house - my dream list if you like; we have an outside measurement - much greater and we run into problems with steep slopes and disturbing the land too much, we also know what we will use the house for and so fitting it into the area in an aesthetically pleasing way has been a lot of fun. Still not sure how it will work out in practice but we have enjoyed the process, altering things according to my knowledge of the lie of the land and some practical considerations and his ability to fit things into a space and think of some novel ideas. 

A little dark, but I hope you get the idea. A utility room
under the stairwell. This would be situated next to the
outside door, essential when there are animal bowls etc, to
clean and vegetables to wash.

We went to an agricultural fair this last week and we see we have started a trend. There were two stalls who had started importing small balers this year. Now why couldn't they have done that last year when we had to import ours from England? We have cards from both of them so we can check for spare parts, which is useful after a slight altercation with a tree stump during the baling season this year. It is about time too as the smaller bales are much more sensible for people for many people to use than the big bales. We saw the difficulty our neighbour had trying to collect the big bales off her steep slope. She thought our bales were small because our baler was broken, bet she's wishing that the baler they used on her slopes was broken too.

Surprising finds

Our three ponds full!

We are amazed by the amount of life in our ponds even though they are new and can spend quite a while gazing at the busy water boatmen, backswimmers, pond skaters, frogs and now a newt. Where do they all come from? Frogs I can understand because they are all over the place and right now the whole of the countryside seems to be alive with tiny tiny frogs, but where did the newt come from? It must have travelled quite away. Water boatmen and backswimmers can fly as I discovered on the internet, so that explains their presence (what would I do without the internet?). Unfortunately we also had some very unwelcome pond life this week in the heat, algae! I made up some mini bales of straw and chucked them in the pools and it seems to be helping, no idea why that idea works but it seems to, and I can't even remember where we first heard that gem of advice but I know it was a long time ago maybe even pre-internet days. At the start of the week we had some blessed rain  which filled the ponds, all three of them, that is a lot of water over a day and it emphasises that we don't just need a soakaway around the polytunnel we will need storm drainage. Pond number 2 though, we found out, does not hold the water and drained away quite quickly, so it looks like we might need to line that one, we were hoping the clay filled soil would retain the water but obviously not. So our ponds remain works in progress as we reshape and dig more out until we have something along the lines of what we need that will keep the water in. Eventually they will get landscaped and seeded which will also help with water retention, the ground cover helping to keep the ground moist and therefore less likely to steal the water from the pond in the dry spells.

Member of the pea family

After the rain the temperatures rose and it has been very hot up to 31C (88F) in the shade that has meant a switch to Mediterranean type work practices - up early to work in the garden, home for lunch in the heat of the day and even a siesta one day then work in the cool of the evening. We are not eating like the Mediterranean's though with very late meals, instead we continue to have an early evening meal and then Ian eats his way through the evening. Trying to keep his weight on is a challenge at the moment but at least we don't have the normal problem that in trying to keep Ian's intake up high enough to keep his weight on mine goes up to compensate, mine is dropping too thank goodness. How much of it is sweated off, I have no idea. I do try and keep the fluid intake up as I just drip most of the time. Okay enough information there!

Not sure you can really see the detail in the hat, but it
pretty. Honest!

Had quite a successful week of purchasing items that normally I cannot get easily, first it was steel capped work boots for me, and considering I am a size 4 (37 European, 6.5 American) they are not the sort of thing that are readily available. At least I can now stop digging in my good walking boots, and I don't have to wear wellies (rubber boots) all the time. The next successful purchase was a hat, again I have problems as I have a small head (shame my girth is not as dainty as my feet and head - whoops sorry too much information again) and so when I was living in Colorado and managed to find an Australian hat that fitted I bought it. It was great for keeping off the sun and fitted in nicely with the culture but somehow it doesn't quite fit in here when walking to the shops or at the agricultural show we attended, fine for on the land but not around town. So now I have a pretty hat, that I can wear out and about that doesn't come half way down my face. Also the perfect travel hat too as it folds up without crushing!

These blackcurrants are huge, they are the size of a small
grape. The teaspoon gives an idea of scale. They are from
the garden at the other flat and a surprise find last week.

I mentioned that we went to an agricultural show this week, it is so long since I have been to one of those and it brought back memories of some pretty hot days working on my parents jewellery stall that they used to run at agricultural shows in England. Sometimes we were in the shade of a hot sticky craft marquee and sometimes in our own caravan. There were some good times but mostly it was actually quite boring, once you had seen one agricultural show you had seen them all, well that is what it felt like as a teenager; the upside of it was the wonderful settings for some of them and the earnings were good. My favourite memory was getting up early for the Rose show at Cartmel in the Lake district and seeing the mist clearing away as the sun rose, and the deer making their way across the parkland, it was magical in a magical setting. I think they moved site since so don't know what it is like now. This Latvian agricultural show was just a local one with the usual big tractors and huge implements, makes us wonder what many Latvian farmers with their small plots of land make of it all. Some of the tractors are so huge they would barely turn around on our land and we have 33 acres, admittedly it is a long narrow strip with forest down one side but still a standard size for a Latvian farm. It just appears that the tractor companies are not really interested in the small farmer, probably because they do not make much money and they cannot get credit for the type of farming implements they could really do with.

A tasty way of using up a radish glut courtesy of Sophie  Grigson
only I used a red grapefruit instead of an orange as they didn't
have any oranges at the local supermarket and I added some peas

Thanks to a kind comment by Denise Thornton on last week's blog I found out all I needed to know about the wild parsnip  and that confirmed to me that we don't want it around. It is hard to believe that seeds are for sale - don't buy them whatever you do! A friend of ours was strimming by the lake when he felt his arm burning and rushed up to the house to clean off whatever it was that was burning. When we were talking about the wild parsnip he showed us his arm with little burn marks all the way up it, he didn't know what had caused it at the time but he does now. Denise's blog seems to be a mine of information and it is interesting to see someone trying to manage land from a conservation point of view but in a different country and yet some of the issues we face are the same like the wild parsnip. Another piece of infomation I found out on her blog was that you don't have to preserve wood. At first I found that hard to believe, especially in such a wet country like Latvia but when I think about it, there are lots of grey wood buildings around and they have been around a long time. Often the barns and houses are unpreserved wood but they might be raised up off the floor on stone foundations - makes sense when it can be under snow for a long time during the winter. Mind you does the wood rot in the cold? I guess it might not and it might only be at risk of rot setting in during the cool wet spring and autumn days rather than over winter as you might think. A challenging thought to our throw chemicals at it way of life of the 21st century.

Sunset

Another surprising find this week is that clay pot irrigation is 10 times more efficient than surface irrigation. We are struggling at times to keep the polytunnel watered properly and it set me thinking about some drip feed irrigation when I came across the article above, it would be interesting to find out how efficient this system really is and whether we can make some easy low tech plant watering systems. We have commissioned some pots from a local potter to try some ideas out, so watch this space!