Lithuanian Road Trip

We had an early start this morning and only just got back. I have another road trip tomorrow and so won't be able to update the blog until later this week or next week.

Apologies

The blog will not be out tonight, we have some meat to deal with and it won't wait. One of the disadvantages of winter disappearing.

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.........

Too busy

Too busy spending time with my daughter and her family that is. I'm getting plenty of granddaughter time too and loving it. Hopefully when I am babysitting tomorrow the little one will sleep and I can then write my blog, if not I will update next week.

Confession time

These flowery sheep were outside the train station at Jelgava
where I was last Monday and Tuesday

Oh dear! Humblest apologies, I just ran out of time to add the photos to the blog last week. Or maybe I just didn't get my act together and then I forgot. I have been busy though, between gardening, sorting out some details about my course, sending emails regarding that, and doing some babysitting too. Amongst all that, there is feeding folks and we don't finish eating sometimes until about 9:30pm at the earliest, which doesn't leave much time for anything else. I still hadn't downloaded the pictures until this morning. Not to mention the two days in Jelgava on a seminar, and a lovely visit to a young lady who we have known since we first came to Latvia in the year 2000. We also got to see her family and I have to confess that I spent rather a long time talking to her husband about agriculture and Latvian society in general.

Thursday afternoon was spent in Cesvaine, for more dental
work. It's a nice place to visit and you could have seen the
castle, but my camera batteries ran out. 

I have further confessions to make too. I fouled up on checking the post this week. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, but this time it was. We are expecting the replacement shears to arrive so we can finally shear the alpacas and I forgot until 7pm Friday to check the post box, sure enough there was a letter to say a parcel was at the post office and guess what? It was the Friday before a bank holiday weekend and the post office is not open now until Tuesday morning. I was popular, especially as it is hot again. In fact it has been that hot and humid that my glasses that I have started wearing permanently have been steaming up.

Campanula is back out again, always
such a glorious sight and no tending
needed as they just grow in our fields

Further confessions? I snore! My room mate on the course I was doing, had the foresight to include ear plugs, so that was a relief, unfortunately the same cannot be said for Ian one night. After a particularly bad night he got up early, went out onto the land and went to sleep in the caravan for an hour and a half. Normally I'm not that bad, honest! It is quite embarrassing really and makes me a little anxious when it comes to sharing rooms for a summer school in France, which I found out this week I have been accepted onto. It doesn't bode well for other future events where I maybe expected to share. I do hope and pray that I can get single rooms as often as possible, or maybe I shall just have to take ear plugs too, for my room mates.

It was good to see our seeder worked
well and the beans are coming through
in nice straight rows. Many of the plants
I transplanted have taken, despite
the heat.

As I mentioned, there has been a lot of gardening going on this week and the strawberry glut has begun. I have already had to freeze some. I can now see my squash plants from amongst the weeds and piled the weeds up around their roots, to help keep them moist. Worrying about snails this year, doesn't appear to be the problem, worrying about the water situation is. Our ponds are dropping dramatically and some of our plants look a little wilted in the heat. I am trying to hang off actually watering them by hand, as I want them to send out deep roots and there is some rain forecast. It feels like a nervous game of chicken at times, to water or not to water. Our chicks also progressed from house chicks to land chicks today. They were getting too smelly and noisy to have in the house and it is warm enough for them to huddle together and keep warm, now that they have proper feathers on their bodies. They have moved into Hoppy's box - whose Hoppy? You will have to read a previous blog to find that out, if you don't know.

If only all gardening was this simple, no work needed -
well maybe keeping the ground elder at bay to stop it
taking over

This week the pressure to get the garden sorted, do some studying for my course and still remain human has been quite intense, as everything is taking far longer than I would hope. Not only are things taking longer than I hoped, I found out my study plan that took far to long to put together, has to be amended and so there will be extra work involved in that. At one point I had to take some time to sit and pour out my heart to God. Fortunately God knows my needs and later on in the week I have my young helper coming, a young lady who has helped me a couple of times before and she comes just a few days after my son and his family return to the UK.  An extra pair of hands in the garden will be most welcome, not that my son hasn't been helpful, he has, he has been helping Ian from time to time, but he has also got to spend time with his young family and his wife has to spend time with the baby, as she is still feeding him herself. Our grandson is also a little too young to help, maybe in about two years time!

I know it kind of looks like a big toad, but it isn't. It is
actually the first mushroom of the year - or rather it was
nearly our first mushroom of the year. Someone must
have stopped to pick flowers and seen it, because by the
time that I got to the land for our barbeque, the mushroom
that Ian had taken a photo of, had disappeared.

We did kind of celebrate Ligo this year with our son and his family. Ligo is the midsummer festival here and is a big event, only it isn't quite midsummer but two days later. People generally head out to the countryside, especially if they have a summer house, no matter what the state of the summer house is. They pick wild flowers, of which some were picked from our land, but that's okay. They decorate their cars and houses with oak leaves and sometimes flowers. They light bonfires, have a barbeque, eat cheese, drink lots of beer and sing traditional songs. Well we went out to our land, we did the barbeque, we lit a fire and used the charcoal from the fire for the barbeque, but we didn't drink beer and we didn't stay up to see the sunrise and if there were any fireworks this year, we didn't hear them. We were fast asleep.

Something to crow about?

I think so! Our little grandson, doing his beached whale
impression and even better, he learnt to roll from
back to front and then to his back again - fun times ahead

Update: Thanks Pene for the corrections, it is indeed my grandson and not my son in the picture above. Whoops! 

Confession

I know I said I would delay the post, but I thought I may as well just blog as normal next Monday instead. Some things I was going to blog about are ongoing and can be said just as easily in my next post and to be honest apart from working my parents hard (they did volunteer), not a lot happened while they were here apart from we talked, but as my friend Mavis said here, it's good to talk. So see you Monday