Part 1: In Awe

A caterpillar on the raspberries.
Our autumn raspberries are now
starting to produce and they often
keep going until the frosts

I was marching down to put the chickens away when I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a lovely looking young buck eating the grass. It carried on eating for quite awhile, unaware I was watching it. Eventually I edged closer and it moved off. I had work to do and the chickens needed to be put away before dark, it was already past our usual time for putting animals away. I might not have been so enthralled if I had realised the darn thing had eaten my waterlily though. The little hoof prints gave it away. There was only the root left the next morning.

Freddie no longer looks like a baby any more

The alpaca house takes shape

On Tuesday a young friend came to help Ian get started on the alpaca house. He had some construction experience and so the two of them managed to crack on. It was mainly the young chap putting it up and Ian helping. It worked anyway and he got on much faster than if he had been on his own doing it. My contribution to the endeavour was to keep them fed. I had plenty of other jobs to do.

George is growing up too

Playing bumps

We had a coach load of visitors this week. We were told it was a group of old age pensioners and we were a little bit in trepidation. The last group of OAPs we had were all over the place, but this group turned out to be a mixed group, mainly OAPs though. They were quite attentive and moved in one group, instead of different ones drifting off at different times, which is a lot easier to manage. Maybe we are a bit more organised these days, not sure. We had a local translator and she did very well. Her and her daughter enjoyed the grapes as there were plenty ready and each of the visitors got a small bunch too.

I hope he doesn't become like the sheep and get his head stuck

Mother and son. Aggie is obviously struggling a bit with the
feeding. She seems to be losing weight. Ian is giving her extra

Sometimes I get organised writing the blog when I know I'm going to be away, but I had too much to do this time around. One of my tasks was finally submitting a paper one evening.  All the bits for it came together, the proofreading, the illustrations for the figures and the okay from my supervisor. The only problem though was that one of the figures didn't seem to upload to the final pdf. I tried twice and it still wouldn't attach properly. It was very frustrating since I knew I was going away and needed to get it sorted. It is also a bit nerve wracking wondering if it is all correct and i haven't made some horrendous mistake. Anyway in the end I just submitted it and contacted the editor about the issue. I was very pleased with the prompt reply and I heard this week it has even gone to review. That's a relief, it is at least one step nearer to getting finished with my PhD.

The chicken house relocated to become our root cellar - well
eventually. It is not in its final resting place yet

Mastering the art of alpaca yoga, aka having a good scratch

There was also quite a few other jobs to do before setting off, like cutting Brencis' toe nails and teeth. The boys had been delayed until Ian's back recovered, but Brencis had to be restrained to have his teeth done too, so he wasn't done at the same time. We tried to get restraints on him but he was being very difficult. Every time we tried to get his rear legs in the restraints he would react and nearly hurt himself at one stage. Ian then decided to try trimming his front toe nails. He seemed quite happy to let do that, he even let him move onto the back ones then. Ian surreptitiously slipped on the restraints and we could finally pin him down to do his teeth. He still wasn't happy though and I had to pin him down on the floor instead of holding his head. He's big and stroppy when it comes to doing the necessary work, but when it comes to visitors - he's like a big teddy bear.

An autumn dandelion

Even the big pond is beginning to dry up completely

I also had to help Ian with the alpaca roof. The roof was more difficult to put on than the other ones due to the fact the ground slopes away quite quickly. We also managed to put it on the wrong way around and only realised near the end. It meant manoeuvring the panels to have the overlap the right way round, with Ian at the bottom and me in the middle with wooden poles lifting them up and slotting the sheets in. It worked but I did ache a bit the next day. No problems carrying my suitcase though, all this carrying sheets of roofing panels with Ian and fetching and carrying water all summer meant that I have developed some muscles.

These apples have been gorgeous. The tree is beginning to
provide an abundance at last. It has been a long time coming.
The tree seemed to struggle in the first few years but it must
now have put down some good roots

My coffee at Schipol airport. How
did they know my name? 

My plane was early Sunday morning heading to France and so I took up the offer of an overnight stay in Riga with the folks who bought our apartment earlier on in the year. It was a late night but it would have been a very, very early morning from our caravan to the airport otherwise. I drove the car in that we had been borrowing all summer as our friends were returning on the Monday. It meant they had a car to get back home. It also meant I could meet up with our Indian friends one more time and I even took them to the airport. Maybe one day we could go and see them. That would be different, as neither of us have been to India.

My late night view of Riga

Watching the sunrise from the
balcony during breakfast. Each
morning she baked some bread
-not home-made but still nice, the
jam though was home-made.

I stayed in an AirBnB for the first time on this trip. It was a little difficult to organise as the host only spoke French, but we managed. It was her son who let me in eventually as he wasn't actually at the flat when I arrived. She has been on an event somewhere. She asked me if I had eaten and I hadn’t – apart from sweets that my Indian friends had given me the night before as a thank you for picking them up – so she offered to feed me. First of all she suggested we go for a walk (marche was the actual word she used). I picked up my bag, as I thought she meant a perambulation to get my bearings, oh no! That wasn’t what she meant, what she meant was an hour hike up the mountain that the apartment blocks back onto. It was great. It did prove one thing though – that the summer walking around the farm means, that actually I’m quite fit comparatively. I wasn’t puffed and had to keep stopping for her to catch up.

The squashes have started to grow well now.

Josefs is definitely cute

The flat was in an ideal location as it was a 20 minute walk along leafy roads to the campus where the conference was being held. Just a nice distance to clear my head in the morning and the evening. I palled up with a lady from Sweden and a young chap from Belgium and we spent quite a bit of the day together and in the evening headed into town for the reception and a bit of food at a restaurant. The food for the conference itself was interesting but difficult for me as it was all in little plastic containers and meant I couldn't really guage what I was eating. I think I ended up putting too much weight on, or maybe just bloated I hope.

A street in Clermont Ferrand

Clermont Ferrand Cathedral. It is
not really mucky, it is the built from
black volcanic stone

Harvesting between the showers

A barrowful of potatoes, fairly blight free, scab free, wormhole
free and fork hole free

The seasonal cycle turns and another milestone of the year passes. We are heading into autumn and so  harvesting of the main crops begins. The forecast for this next week is not good and so I took advantage of a dry day to start taking up the potatoes. I was going to write digging them up but some of them didn't need digging up. This year we tried a different approach, in winter and early spring of this year Ian put some of the manure from the alpacas on the ground and then in late spring he put in the potatoes by making a hole through the manure pile to the hard soil underneath. Alpaca manure is not as strong as other manures and so can be put directly on the garden. Later on in the year, as the potatoes poked through I and one of our helpers put old hay around them to encourage them to put out more roots and keep the weeds at bay.

The dark rich soil and not a bad
return, with each pile coming from
one original potato

To harvest the crop I took up the hay and found the potatoes, as some were on the surface of the soil just under the hay. It was then just a matter of sieving with my hands through the deep black soil to find the potatoes. The soil, despite all the rain we have had was rich and crumbly and so easy to find the potatoes. One group of potatoes though were a bit more rooty with weeds, which made it harder, so Ian used a fork to take those up, while I forked over the other beds for stray potatoes and any roots before covering up with hay again. It was much less stressful than in previous years as it didn't feel like a major exercise to organise, especially now all the gardening is done out on our land - we finally gave up the allotments last year. I got started on them and when Ian had finished doing what he was doing, he joined me to help.

The boys, by and large behaving themselves. Mr. P (our black
alpaca) was up to see the girls again, but was rather
disappointed, they were not having any of his advances. We
are fairly sure they are all pregnant now.

Another milestone that happens about this time of the year is escaping animals. They all seem to make an attempt at it. With the alpacas it is usually because one of them decides to start eating over the fence and so the electric fences get switched on more at this time of the year to remind them of their limits, but it isn't usually a big deal. This week it wasn't our animals that were the problem initially, it was our neighbours cows. They have escaped a few times already and that is why our other neighbour wanted to put up a fence last week. Well they escaped again this week and caused us a bit of a problem this time.

One layer of panelling completed. It will stop like this for
the time being, as we don't need the extra room yet and it
works better like this for a barn.

It had been a rather pleasant day to start off with too. Ian had been putting up the panelling around our newest alpaca house at last and he ran out of nails, so he needed to take a trip into our village to get some more. I had been doing some computer work and fancied a break and so I suggested a trip to the bakery, where we had a nice cup of cocoa and a pastry. On the way back Ian saw the neighbours cows out and so when we got back, as I went to go hunting for mushrooms he did some investigating.

I'm not sure if this is one of the edible ones
or not, so I took a photo to compare. 

So now picture the scene. I am wandering through our forest hunting for mushrooms. There are so many delightful looking mushrooms, and plenty of the edible ones that I know well enough to pick. Some are huge, chanterelles were also now appearing in different places to the ones where we know they grow regularly. The mushrooms were here, there, popping up everywhere. I love mushroom picking, as it is a great excuse for a wander around the forest, meanwhile……

Our winter squash collection is growing

Ian is not having such a delightful time. He had spotted that our neighbours cows were now in the road, he tried to phone our neighbour and couldn’t get through. He drove up to see her and on the way spotted three rather familiar faces - our sheep. Not where they should be but on our other neighbours land. He tried to phone me, again and again… my phone was back in the caravan. Whoops!

Finally apples from our trees in our small orchard, well more
than about three like we had last year. 

I got back to the caravan and discovered the number of missed phone calls. I rang to find out where he was and what the calls were for. He wasn’t best pleased. Our sheep are out, the neighbours cows seemed to have broken the wire, or freaked our sheep out. Either way our sheep were across the road and not where they should be. I had to set off to find them armed with a bowl of feed.

Maybe not so clear as I had hoped, but I love
the Cross design in the middle of
the courgettes

I saw them on our neighbours field but realised that the fence we had agreed to was now between me and them, somehow they had got through. I found out they must have just worked there way around it and so I trundled around to entice them back. I had to do this slowly to give Ian time to re-build the fence in a different area as it needed moving anyway.

We are gorging on grapes at the moment

At first the sheep were happy to follow, but when they realised that I wasn’t giving them much food from the bowl the older female in particular was starting to look towards going somewhere else. It also started raining. I had to keep moving. At one point she was quite determined to move off in a totally different direction. She then heard a sound and stood listening, she could hear Ian across the road hammering posts. She knew what that sound meant, it meant food! She started to trot off. Yikes she was heading for the road on her own. I phoned Ian and told him I was going to have to move to get her attention again. He wasn’t finished. 

I started to move to a safer crossing place away from the corner where the trucks coming hurtling along. I didn’t have much time to listen, I had to keep moving to keep the sheep behind me. I went across the road the sheep thankfully followed but then hesitated at the edge, reluctant to make the way over the rise onto our land. A car was coming! Fortunately it encouraged them in the right direction. Ian was trying to lay the wire, the posts were hammered in.

A picture from back in mid-August in
the paddock where they escaped from.
Madam who was not convinced by my
feeding occasional bit to her is on the
left

I took the sheep into the centre of the newly enclosed area and I started to drop feed to keep them interested. The lambs were fine with this, but madam was not. She expected a full bowl and that chap over there was one who usually provided it, so off she goes to Ian. Too late she and the lambs who were now following her crossed the one strand of wire. Ian managed to encourage them back in but when they realised that Ian was trying the same trick I was, whilst I was trying to wire up the fence in Ian's place they decided to take off up the hill. Smart!



Our friends who made a rather nice
wine from these are collecting these
ones to have another go at making
wine with them. They are going to take
all of them. I tried ours and it is still
a bit rough - will keep us in mulled wine
over winter though

Ian was worried they would freak out the alpacas. I headed on up with the remaining feed, over the hill to see the sheep trying to head towards the alpacas - you know the big sheep with the long legs and necks. The gate was open on their old paddock though, I managed to get the sheep’s attention and went into the paddock. This time I put the bowl down and let them eat it all, while quickly covering the gap with the wire. I also realised at this point the other gate was still open, so had to nip back behind the wire, re-close it and then head up to the other gate before they noticed. Fortunately they were still too interested in the feed.

Eyre enjoying cleaning out the pot of sour cream ready
for recycling

At least now the sheep were penned in and the alpacas did not freak out, although Brencis kept making a noise as if to say what are these strange stunted alpacas? I was also by now saturated. Good job my new raincoat arrived the day before. After finishing off making our mushroomy meal we headed on into the caravan to change and eat. Farming can be exciting, but not always quite the kind of excitement we want. Still everyone was fine, the sheep under control and we dried out, so no harm in the end.

The sun does shine sometimes

Carrots, squash, onions and grapes ready for
roasting

The rest of the week was fairly mundane. I have been marking work, working on my paper, and harvesting beans and tomatoes. Ian has been moving fences, writing updates for our alpaca adoptees and pumping out the well again. We are pleased that we have found the well now gives us about 75-85 litres of water a day up to about 700 litres or so, when it then starts to slow down. Mind you, it has been wet just lately, so of course that might help. I'm glad we don't have the sort of escapades our sheep put us through every day of the week.

Still waiting

Early morning sunshine

Gosh it has been busy this week. I half expected a Masters thesis to land in my lap to mark, so to speak and sure enough it did. There was not much time to mark it as it was just one more thing to add to the numerous things that needed doing this week. I did spend quite a bit of time on it though, because it was only fair to the person who had put so much effort into putting it together. I had to put off marking an exam for the course I tutored, as I knew I couldn't do both and the Masters student's work had a deadline for marking and a defence this week.

Morning mist

I also managed to get our apartment sorted into some sort of shape for a family to live in over the summer.  They are safely installed now, only they are coming and going, which has actually been a boon for us as we had someone help us cull two of our sheep this week and we needed to prepare them for the freezer. This was much easier in the apartment and being nice and tidy, it was lovely just to get on and sort it. Still took us until midnight before we were back in our caravan.

Aggie looking unusually alert in the cool misty morning.
Normally she just looks tired

The sheep were noisy, demanding things. We were half considering giving them away to a charity that wanted animals for work experience for ex-offenders but we couldn't give them these particular animals. It would not have been fair. Since they have gone the other ewe and the two lambs that were born earlier this year have just got on eating and not made much of a noise. There was no chorus at around 7pm demanding their grain. Actually chorus is too kind a description. The three that are left  just ran up tonight and followed me inside, good as gold. I even had the lambs eating out of my hand. This is preparation for moving them further away from the area they are in now. They need to be able to follow the food.

The alpacas are there somewhere

The week feels a bit of a blur and it is hard to remember what happened. I had time to Skype with my daughter and her three. The two oldest ones read me books, the eldest has memorised most of the books, but the nearly two year old just babbled along - most amusing. He still calls me MAM-MA at the top of his voice. I got a bit more done on my analysing of work to be done for a paper that needs to be re-written and I was so close to finishing that before the thesis landed on me.

A white rainbow

So other random things? We had another coach party. We had a visit from our neighbours who haven't been around for a while, in fact they haven't been around for a couple of year, so nice to see them again. I have planted tomatoes, but still have loads more to do. I have planted herb seeds. I have sorted out restaurants, car hire, invoices, helped Ian move the chicken arks outside onto the grass and done lots of weeding. It doesn't look like I've done lots of weeding, but I have honest!

Griezites-henge

Ian has been trying to get the place shipshape and looking good. He has mowed grass, but of course with warmth and rain it needs doing again. He has moved the tractor equipment away from in front of the girls paddock to near the forest. He fixed the toilet that was sinking in one corner and he started building the next alpaca house, or maybe workshop, shop, barn - whatever it is needed for basically.

Working hard

Impressive he can still get in that t-shirt. You would be
shocked how old it is. 

We both saw a baby moose with its mother. Ian saw it being chased by dogs and I saw them later. I wondered why I saw them in the day time and the baby was behind the mother. I stopped the car as I felt it was panicking the little one but it decided to go down the bank towards the river. I had no idea what to do, I couldn't go and check to see if it was okay, because a moose mum is not something to be messed with. I stood on the car runner and listened and I couldn't hear any distress calls from an animal in the water and decided the best thing was probably to hope it had found a safe place and let it's mum find it.

Looking rather skinny now after shearing. Mind you, Brencis
looks bigger than we thought he would. He's getting a big
chap now. He also decided to act up before shearing and so
he took quite a bit of convincing 

I don't normally mention what happens on Tuesday in a late blog as that is the beginning of a blog week (if that makes sense), but I will this week as it is destined to be busy again as our first felting course of the year starts next Monday. So today I nipped back into our village, picked up the milk, transferred some towels to our other apartment, picked up a big pot for making stock out of bones, kept my eye on some new chicks we have and so far we have ten, we have got the boys sheared, I planted fodder beets, beetroot, carrots, peas and then put the animals away - since Ian is back at the apartment mincing up the bits of mutton, finishing off the stock after our hot plate stopped working and getting a shower.

Still waiting to hear if he is the father of a girl or boy

So all of that and we are still waiting for cria to be born. We half expected one to go into labour today, especially since we planned to do some shearing, but no. Maybe next week.

This picture amuses me because the shadow looks almost
the same as Mr. P

How elegant! Having a roll in the dirt after shearing

Look what you did to me!

Now the flies can get a bit nearer! (Look carefully to the left)
One of the downsides of shearing

Sunbathing without the fur coat. 

Are we nearly there yet?

"We are going on holiday" but what does that mean to a
two year old? Hahaha

We are on holiday! We being me, my daughter, her husband and two young children. Being on holiday though is quite a difficult concept for a two year old - the baby is oblivious to this anyway, all he knows is he has the attention of three adults in rotation. My two year old granddaughter, however, hasn't quite grasped that we are on holiday, all day, every day while we are away from her home. She has somehow managed to mix up being on holiday with the holiday cottage and so she thinks we are going on holiday every time we set off to go back to the cottage.

A tad damp don't you think? This is Lake Windermere

The weather has not been particularly good. In fact it took us an hour and a half yesterday to do a thirty minute journey due to the number of floods. This meant there were several places with only single file traffic. There was also a lorry stuck at one place it meant the cars had to drive on the pavement to get passed. If you take a look at the video on this link, you can see the lorry and the cars trying to get by. It is a good job we came up in the Land Rover.

Painting a picture on the touch screen

We decided to go to the Beatrix Potter Attraction in Bowness on Windermere, since it was indoors out of the rain and might entertain a two year old. The place is only small but they do pack in a lot of little scenes and my granddaughter was quite happy to see them all. A more boisterous, active child might not, but she is into books and has a good level of conversation for her age and so we had quite a chat as we went round. Her favourite part though was a touch screen table where she "painted" a picture. It was amusing to watch her use her finger to pick up the paint and then dot it onto the picture. She kept looking at her finger as if she really had paint on there before daubing the picture with it. Being out of season it was also nice and quiet and she had no competition for the activity. I dread to think what it would have been like in high season. Since she is getting quite bossy just lately (over tired we think) she would have probably told everyone that they would just have to wait. She tells people this with an over exaggerated shrug of her shoulders and by flapping her hands to lend her full weight of authority to the matter, as only a two year old can do.

No pictures this time of the Duddon. It is a bit difficult from
the back of a car and the roads are too narrow to keep
stopping and I think it would have tried the patience of a
certain little lady. Anyway typical stonework from the
Lake District

Today we went to the Duddon Valley. It is one of the prettiest and yet under visited valleys of The Lake District. At one end it has two passes that are some of the hairiest roads in the country with so many tight hairpin bends, both of them are also pretty steep. Hardknott into Eskdale, which we didn't take is the steepest. Coming over Wrynose, the other pass, at the top end of the valley it is fairly bleak and open, with many of the traditional hardy Herdwick sheep determined to make life difficult for drivers by sauntering along the road or trying to dart out in front of them. We had to crawl slowly towards a cattle grid before they cleared out of our way at one point. I am very familiar with the Duddon (you can see pictures from an earlier trip here, including the Herdwick sheep), as my Godmother used to own a hill farm in the area and we would pay regular visits as a family during my childhood. I often wondered if I would have been able to cope with life as a hill farmer in The Lake District and would loved to have given it a go and I guess it is one of the reasons for having our land and alpacas now. Just need to spend more time there at some point.

The weather might be dreary, but I still
love the Lakeland scenes, this is
Grasmere near where we are staying

Despite coming in from a different road to the one I was familiar with as a child, I still managed to find the track to the farm where my Godmother lived when I first knew her. I say when I first knew her, I arrived as a little baby to see her for the first time. I took my little granddaughter for a little walk while her baby brother was being fed and showed her the beck (brook) where I would fall in on a regular basis whilst trying to "fish" - I never caught anything, except perhaps a cold, but I don't think it really did me any harm. It was too cold and wet to go on a hike with a toddler and a baby today, perhaps another time, so I couldn't show them the isolated farmhouse that my Godmother retired to, up the very steep track. We had a picnic in the car though further along the valley at Ulpha bridge, a popular spot for those in-the-know and then headed to Broughton where we had a drink and a piece of cake (I am on holiday and it is back to the cake free diet later).

She wanted her photo taken, but all I
got was this serious look. Those are
her paintings in her rucksack. All 4 of
them

Before we came up to The Lakes it has been filled with a similar routine to last week, with an activity in the morning such as toddlers, messy play or pre-school and then my daughter doing some more renovation work while I baby sat in the afternoon and the evenings. All of us, including my son-in-law who was working on the house in the evenings, were pretty tired by the time we stopped to come on holiday and although they have a lot of work still to do, it has been nice to sleep in a bit and not have to be up late in the evening trying to get things done. I did try and help my daughter whilst the two year old was at pre-school but of course the baby had other plans. At least I moved a pile of tiles and picked up the loose plastic spacers, the sum total of my physical work on the renovations to their home.

A walk home from pre-school on one
of the few sunny days

Back home in Latvia Ian has been trying to do some more sorting of the third alpaca house. He has bought fence posts and on a particularly rainy day went to Jekabpils the big town to get some U-nails to attach the fence and a hole borer to make putting fence posts in easier. The weather hasn't been kind to him either and so the top pond is full and he hasn't got the fence in yet. He has wired in some lights and sockets into the alpaca house - next will be the kitchen and bathroom - only joking. Our plan will be to have an area where we can support any pregnant female should we need to and so already having lights and sockets means we can connect up an extension cable from the greenhouse without a problem if necessary.

Looking backwards down the hill towards the town

The leaves are still on the hedges here,
but I am guessing back home they
won't be

Ian has also being helping some neighbours to transport a couple of wild horses. These must have been a little wilder than the ones I saw recently and one did not want to cooperate and go in. It did eventually but a rear triangle got damaged and our neighbours have taken the broken one away to get another. I do hope they do and don't forget about it.

I love the colours of autumn

A house nestled in the valley with the stone walls

He has also been having some minor issues with the newbies, which is only to be expected as they settle in. One issue though is not so minor and that is our largest female alpaca, Veronica, is still taking exception to one of the newbies. Ian has been locking Veronica away in the training pen or separately in the paddock while the others are out in the field until we find out a way of dealing with the behaviour. At least the rest of the herd have accepted the new ones though. Hopefully we will get a reply from someone who deals with alpaca behaviour fairly soon with some suggestions as to what we can do.

A fern growing naturally in the moss covered stone walls

As you maybe able to tell from the title of the blog, my little granddaughter was not terribly patient in the car on the way up. We were hoping she would sleep a little longer than she did. The refrain "Are we nearly there yet", uttered by so many children on long journeys could equally be uttered by many on their life journeys. For some the refrain refers to the idea that the world will get worse and worse and worse and then Jesus will come back and sort it all out. I confess I believed that once, but I don't now. I believe that Jesus wants to sort it out through people, just like he has always done, as far as I am concerned. According to statistics the world is not getting worse, it is actually getting better in terms of crime rates and poverty. The world has always been a dangerous place to some degree somewhere. Catastrophe, as we have unfortunately seen in Paris but also elsewhere in this world has been just around the corner, but so has goodness, so has mercy, so has love. There are real hurting humans out there of many colours, who need other loving humans to give them homes, food but above all dignity. If we stop seeing others as barbarous backward heathens, or some variation of that and try to see the humanity and the needs, maybe we will stop thinking that all we need to do is bomb the life out of each other.

Not sure how much longer the iconic telephone boxes will
be around and so I thought I had better take a picture

A house on a grander scale

When I was younger we were afraid that the Soviets would set off a nuclear bomb and obliterate us in our English homes. What I didn't realise was that the same fear existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Different groups of people expecting annihilation from the other, separated by fear and a lack of knowledge of who the others were. If I could say anything that might make a difference, I would say go into the highways and byways and invite someone from a totally different background to eat with you. Talk about hopes and dreams and aspirations and see how similar they are. One by one around the table discovering how human nature longs for safety, hope and like I've already said, dignity.