Competition time

Lovely blossom, I thought it was a mock orange at first but
on closer inspection it didn't give off the heady aroma of
a mock orrange. Beautiful flowers though

Excited? Well you will have to wait as the competition is further down the post. First of all it has been planting, planting and more planting, weeding, weeding and more weeding this week. It's monotonous and boring really and my back aches, but when I step back and look at the result it is good and worth the while. Most of our recent plantings are growing well, some of the types of squashes are struggling a bit, but I reckon with enough sunshine they should recover as they can be fairly resilient (as long as we don't have a frost that is), if not, we won't have certain types of squashes. We have three different plots where we grow food as well as the greenhouse and some things grow better in the different places, something we are still learning about. At least, despite the still cool temperatures we have had just lately we have had a crop of peas and salad leaves from the greenhouse and our broad beans are nearly ready. One evening we had sauteed peas, radish and chinese cabbage with the roast carrots and beetroot thrown in at the end. The peas and radish were from this years plantings, the chinese cabbage was from the shop after the desire for something fresh and not stored in the freezer, jar or in boxes of sawdust overwhelmed me, and the carrots and beetroot are last years rather rubbery, but still tasty produce from last year. This mixture of veg is much more my style of cooking and something I would do regularly when we had a much larger household, it is more difficult to maintain when there is only the two of us and also when I rely on our own produce.

I love lilacs and we have loads around
here, all on the wane though now.

This time of the year does mean there is an awful lot to do, some of it can wait but often it is weather or time dependant. We got the oats in at nearly the last opportunity to get a crop, the weather being against us on that one and perhaps some lack of preparation - ie getting the seed bought, but it is not like we can just pop to the nearest shop to get some, we have to travel about 30 miles to get it, which means a trip has to double up to get other provisions and so takes time. The weeding, if left I am sure you know, can quickly overwhelm a garden and keeping on top of that can be a major task, especially if other things crop up to distract or take priority. I was disappointed therefore, this week to have to turn down the chance of meeting up with some old friends, but we had to acknowledge that we haven't got as much time and travelling quite a distance to see them for just a few minutes is not really something we can afford to do now. We are more than willing to do airport runs if it means we get a good chance to chat with someone - we don't mind chatting and weeding if the other person doesn't mind us carrying on, or there is always the evenings, we don't even mind giving up a whole day if we get a good chance to really share heart to heart with someone, but unfortunately from past experience meeting up with people at camps where they have come to lead activities is not the place for a good place to share. When we started coming to Latvia we used to teach English in some of these camps and in those days they were much less structured, they had an innocence about them, but times have changed and children have changed in the last 12 years. Today children expect more and camp leaders have got more organised, not always sure that is a good thing on either account, then again parents pay for their children to attend camps and I guess they are looking for some sort of value for money from them. What that does mean though is that camp helpers are busy and the chances of an uninterrupted couple of hours chatting is highly unlikely and perhaps a bit selfish to expect it, so we declined.

Hoppy having some time out of the box, so it doesn't get
run over in the bun fight when I gave its box mates some
potato, cucumber and oats.

Our little chicken hoppy, has been giving us cause for concern. There was one point I was praying for the little chap (or is it chapess?) and I wanted to see a miracle, a sign that healing will flow in this place. Well a miracle happened but not quite in the way I expected. For the first time ever here in Latvia I saw comfrey. I had been kind of looking out for it as it is good for composts and since one variety is called Russian comfrey I thought there was a good chance there was some somewhere, but never seen it, till the other day that is. We were wending our way home in the car and had just pulled off the land and travelled a few metres down the road when I saw some. I got Ian to stop the car and we both got out and had a look, sure enough it was comfrey and I took a leaf home just to make sure. The comfrey was so close to the edge of the road that it was in danger of being cut by the road maintenance crew when they clear the road edges, or removal by the grader when they level the dirt road and so the next day I got out my spade and removed it to our garden. As the stems were tall, I reduced the size of it as that should aid in the transplantation and it also meant that I had some comfrey to use as a poultice for the little chick's leg. We needed to get the inflammation down and the wound healing and the comfrey seems to be doing the trick. It also gave me an idea, I know there are lots of herbal books out there but I also know that my Latvian friends use different herbs to the ones we do for some ailments and I was thinking of gleaning the information from them to produce a different kind of book, one based on the seasons as well as the recipes from the Latvian countryside. Worth a try anyway and may save some of the knowledge from being lost in the process. Just have to make sure I take plenty of photos this year of all the different plants to go in the book.

Hoppy's box mates. Two got taken out last night for bullying
Hoppy and were put in the big box, but they in turn were
getting picked on by those in the big box so had to be put
back. I think they have calmed down a bit though after
the experience.

The chicks in the big box, no longer yellow fluffy chicks
as they gain their feathers. They are a varied group of chicks
some buff colours and some speckled grey and some white.
Will be really interesting to see what they turn out like

One of the stork chicks outside our other apartment. There
are definitely two and may even be three in there

The flower bed outside the other apartment. I'm really pleased
how this is turning out but I think I have a purple and blue
theme going on here. Click on the picture to see the flowers
better

Well while I have been weeding and planting, Ian has been constructing again, here are the results so far. I'm not going to tell you what they are, I want you to guess and all will be revealed next week when we show the finished constructions.

Construction No 1. Can you guess what this does?

Construction No 2. Photo 1
Is it a coffin? No! (Yes Ian has a macabre sense
of humour at times)

Construction No 2. Photo 2
Is it a bobsleigh?

Construction No 2. Photo 3
Sleigh?

Construction No 2. Photo 4
Nearly there but not quite. Any guesses yet?

Construction No 2. Photo 5
Maybe this will help? (Vital farm equipment Paul)

Chamomile

An interesting comment was posted by a friend of mine, Liz, on someone's blog, the question was essentially "Did they give the money to the wrong people? What would have happened if the money instead of being given to the banks was given to people to pay off their mortgages? The money would still go to the banks then, but people would have been better off in the process.What would they have then done with the money released from not paying off mortgages? Some of them would have squandered it surely? But what about others? I also wondered what would local farmers in this area do with a cash injection? Would they have replaced or invested in new equipment? Would they have repaired dilapidated housing and barns? Would they have tried some new innovative approaches to farming? Would that have had more effect on the economy than giving it to banks to fund bankers bonuses? At this point I guess we will never know.

I shall leave you with a video that someone posted a link to on facebook, that basically explains in cartoon form what I've been trying to say about the Latvian crisis for the past goodness knows how long. How we measure success is important and this really puts it in perspective and besides is funnier than me pontificating on the subject, yet again!

It is finished

Winter has nearly finished, not much left to go now. Mind
you I've said that before, about three times this winter.

It is finished indeed and no I'm not just talking about Jesus' mission to save mankind accomplished on the cross, I'm talking about my thesis. I finally completed the writing for my course and now it is just awaiting some photos, a grammar check and then it needs assembling into a complete document to send off to my tutor for his perusal and marking of course. It has taken me four years to get to this point, the first year I studied Development Management with the Open University, but due to the increase in fees I started a bit of hunting around for another course and found Managing Sustainable Rural Development with the University of the Highlands and Islands. I am so glad I did as I think this course is much more applicable to Latvia, where I now live, than the OU course, good though it was. The OU course was aimed more at developing countries, rather than a European setting, but it still gave me a good foundation in what development is all about  and the history of it that has helped me enormously in the current course. It also gave me a good start to get back into studying, for which I am very grateful, as it has been rather a long time since I was at Uni, in fact in the meantime my eldest had started a nursing course and is now nursing - that should give you an indication of how long ago it was. The course also gave me a Post Graduate Certificate in Development Management, maybe it will come in useful at some point.

A little creativity to stop me burning my fingers

Last week our car passed its technical inspection, or to be more precise the previous week, but who's counting? It is always a relief when our car gets through the technical without a hitch, especially as one year the inspector, who was inspecting our car, shook the car so much to test the suspension that we suspect it damaged the wheel bearing. It may have been going anyway, as the roads around here are tough on cars, but the shaking it got would have made it far worse. Even the tyres passed which is surprising, as we are still on the original tyres and we've had the car 4 years now, we will change them this winter though as they are slowly starting to perish. As you can tell the dirt roads we have around here maybe tough on the suspension, but they are not so tough on tyres, unless there are nails in the roads of course and we have picked up a few of them along the way. The dirt roads have been particularly bad this spring and we have never seen such a bad state in all the time we have been here and not to such a large extent, think giant washboard and you might get the idea. We have a robust 4x4 and even we were travelling at 20km an hour to save the car and I have never seen so many Latvians travel so slowly, it was like serious off-roading on road. We were expecting the roads to remain bad over the Easter weekend and so were very surprised to see the grader out on the Saturday and I'm glad to say the roads are greatly improved.

We even have flowers now

That reminds me we learnt the word for potholes in Latvian this week, fortunately it was through the insurance lady when we were sorting out the comprehensive insurance or kasko as it is called here - it is a name that kind of worries me, as it reminds me of the word catastrophe and I know that is what we want to insure against but I would rather not be reminded of that, comprehensive sounds so much more friendly. Anyway just in case you are wondering the Latvian for potholes is bedre and there are plenty of them around on the tarmac roads at this time of the year (yes we do have some around here, they are not all dirt roads). For small cars they are definitely worth insuring against as some of those holes are deep and you can bet they won't have enough money to do a good job on the roads and so once again as soon as the frosts are a thing of the past then the guys with their lorries of hot tarmac will be out patching the patches. Getting our insurance was quite a mammoth performance as we managed without an interpreter (although we had been in about a month ago with an interpreter to check things through and so she knew we would be back). I think we were there about an hour which included her photographing the car and getting us to test the alarm. The question is though, how do you test the alarm without actually breaking into the car? We managed in the end by winding down the window, locking the car and then Ian waving his arm madly through the open window and eventually it went off. Nice to know it is not over sensitive - I think! Next she needed to take some photocopies of the registration document, but wasn't sure which way round to do the copies so that the front and the back of our document was visible on the same page, side by side (it would have me confused too), meanwhile the photocopier jammed too. Well eventually Ian and the insurance lady managed to get the thing sorted and we were finished, apart from nearly leaving the registration document in the photocopier - bit of a problem as you are supposed to travel with that at all times here in Latvia.

Coltsfoot

Having finished my thesis meant I had a real sense of freedom for the start of this Easter holiday, rather apt really. Friday was a lovely day, if a little cool and so I went out to the land with Ian to soak up some sunshine and do a little pottering about. On the whole it was a fairly restful day, until Ian wanted some help shifting some timber that is. He was sorting through the timbers to see what was leftover from building the barn, as we want to build a shelter for the caravan. It is a bit old to be left standing outside and it would be better under some kind of protection. We are thinking of making it a more enclosed shelter then we can have an area in front of it that we can sit and relax out of the weather, rather than sitting in the greenhouse. It was a bit tricky negotiating with some rather long pieces of wood and I managed to slip in the mud, no bones broken, no ankles twisted but managed to get caked in mud. Yuck! Must remember to leave some spare clothes in the caravan.

The little finger puppet I made. The fabric
is some I had dyed a while ago and had tested
machine stitches on it. So as you can
see there is a reason for me never throwing
out scraps of material

On the Saturday I still went out with Ian, but took some sewing, as it was lovely just to sit in the warmth of the greenhouse and sew. I sewed a little finger puppet for our neighbour's little girl as we were invited to her first birthday party. I love going to the kids birthday parties as it is a great chance to sit and listen to Latvian in full flow and our neighbours fill us in with some of the conversation so we don't feel left out. It is also lovely to feel included, even though we are quite a bit older than our neighbours who have children, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter. We were treated to rasols or a sort of sausage and potato salad and cake and plenty of cups of tea. We also got to try maple juice, the sap from the maple tree. We've tried birch juice before and that can be okay but usually it tastes of aspirin to me, but this maple juice tasted of a slightly sweet but refreshing water. I guess that is another new taste to add to a whole host of other things we have tried since living here. The storks also arrived back outside our other apartment on Saturday and so now it finally feels like Spring may have arrived.

Purple flowers too. Must try and find out
what they are, wouldn't mind but I planted
them. 

Sunday saw us heading off to see some friends of ours that we have made through my course. Simon has written academic papers about Latvia, some of the few that I have found whilst investigating topics for my coursework. I realised that Simon was not a common name in Latvia and did a bit of digging around on the internet and found some contact details and contacted him. I was really interested to know what his research had shown about Latvia and Latvians as I thought it might be useful. Although Simon does not live in Latvia, he does have a house here and when he comes along with his wife, he gets in touch and we meet up. Simon and his wife have a wealth of experience of different countries and development and they love Latvia and so we always have much to talk about. We had a very pleasant day with good food and talk and a walk around the area but it was a little disheartening to walk around as Simon showed us the new wild boar damage they have and it was pretty extensive, not deep but certainly a lot of turf turned over. After my research on wild boar damage in our area I can see there could be trouble ahead in his area unless the hunters get on the case and take some decisive action, which they maybe doing fortunately; hopefully they won't end up with the same scenario that has happened around here with wild boars digging up year after year after year.

Gathering up the hay, yet again. This will only be good for
mulching and composting but that suits us fine.

At least the snow on Sunday didn't amount to much and didn't even stick, which was a little surprising since you may recall, if you follow this blog, that as soon as the snow has just about gone it has snowed again. Our friends to the south weren't quite so lucky though this time as they had about 4 inches of snow (10cm). That did mean though that Monday saw another glorious if cold day, another good day for those piles of snow to continue to melt away and for the ground to start to dry up. We pottered around the land in the morning waiting for the ground to melt a little and I got some tomatoes potted on into bigger pots and in the afternoon we started on picking up the hay off the field that we hadn't had the chance to gather up before the weather turned bad last year. Most of it was remarkably dry, but some was heavy and sticky and the ground became squelchy in places - there's still a lot of water in that ground. I seemed to spent a lot of time shifting hay by hand over the last few years, hopefully this year it will just be in small bales and not using a pitchfork. We need to shift the hay, otherwise it makes it difficult later on in the year to cut the new hay and also it gives the grass a chance to grow back better. It is also less of an attractor to the wild boar and there is enough of that damage on our land this year already from before the winter. If the weather stays dry enough then we might be able to get out and start to sort out some of the damage and get some grass seed down, now that will be nice. Hopefully I won't be too sore tomorrow either. Nearly forgot, we sold another 7 bales of hay to our neighbour and so we have just about sold all our spare hay now and nearly covered all our costs - very pleased.

Sophie

Ian ordered me a birthday present this week, not so unusual you might think but it is. I have been known to wait two years to get a present and not only is this present actually ordered, it is ordered in plenty of time that I might even get a present on my birthday, as it isn't until much later on in the month - now there's a novelty.

There's no pontification this week but I will share a little about our cats, as I haven't shared much about them lately. They are quite talkative cats - is that because they are female cats or are they just noisy? I do wonder as we've only had male cats before. I think Sophie has learnt off Bella, who is definitely the nosier of the two. Bella just tends to be noisy when she wants something but Sophie seems to try and communicate. It is hilarious though when Ian sort of says "neowww, neowww" and Sophie then rolls over on the floor - I thought it was only dogs that rolled over for their owners. Being the fluffier of the two she also slides across the floor easier, which she seems to think is a great game and lets Ian do it quite a few times and comes back for more, he's even started calling her Slidy Soph. The cats are also enjoying their freedom a bit more as we let them out of the greenhouse and even took them down to the barn this week as we hope they will keep the mice at bay in there. Well there is another week on the Baltic equivalent of the Archers combined with the Little House on the Prairie as one friend described our tales.

Bella being noisy