A quick update

A very, very fluffy alpaca

I still have lots of deadlines to keep me busy and the weather has suddenly turned rather warm. It's over 15 degrees warmer than it was last week and much more humid. Our alpacas are struggling and so we are are shearing, or at least trying to. We are having to time our shearing in between the showers, as we don't have a nice big barn to do it in. Shearing also means I have to catch up with work in the evening, so no long-winded blog this week either, just some pictures to be going on with.

Ian has been doing a lot fixing on the
greenhouse. The old plastic is definitely showing
a lot of wear and tear, especially in the windy
weather we were having in the last few weeks

Aggie is smiling because she's in the shade.

We had help to shear Brencis because he is such a handful
when it comes to shearing. However, he wasn't too bad at
all. We still needed a bit of extra help, but we wonder if he
was just looking forward to getting rid of his winter coat.

I thnk it's Vanessa. So hard to tell with
these girls after they've been sheared. Even
Ian is getting them mixed up.

So here we have a white fawn alpaca. Errr! How long have
we had fawn alpacas?

Mari is looking as fluffy as her son 

Mr. P doing his cardboard cutout impression. He's so dark
when sheared he looks like a shadow. You can also see a
fluffy George in the background eating over the fence. Tut
tut! George.

We wonder if Turbjørn has injured his neck or if he has
arthritis setting in - common in alpacas unfortunately. We were
very gentle with him when it came to shearing. 

We've had plenty of dramatic skies and some dumping of
rain. Good for the garden and the grass is almost growing
as we watch. Soon it will be haymaking time too.

I know the feeling Herkules. Another one who had to be
handled very gently this year and sheared carefully. He's
full of wrinkles and as skinny as anything. Fortunately he
is very much better than he was a few weeks ago. 

The view of a hare from our caravan. There seems to
be a lot of them this year. May be it was the mild winter.
Just hope it wasn't off to eat my vegetables.

I found this little chick near our outside loo. One
of the parents was feeding it. It wasn't in a very safe
place because our cat could easily find it. The nest
may be in our barn roof, so no way of putting it safely
back in its nest. I got out the cat basket and popped it
inside. At least it could still be fed and get out when
it wanted, but at least allow it time to recover and
keep it safe from our cat. At least she can't get into it, without help.

Our sign has been cleaned up and re-varnished ready for
re-opening. We have had some visitors, just small groups and
no talk about what we do or the shop set up. We will open up after
my defence with a coach load. Ooerrr! Still the infection
rater for Covid19 these days in Latvia is very small.

Before shearing. Too hot and melting!

So some other snippets of news. We have done our regular shearing in Estonia. Ian is so much faster these days that we managed to do 14 in one day and still be home at a reasonable time. That doesn't sound much when some people can do many more in one day, but then they don't have great food on offer either. Again we are fairly safe doing this as our friends are also living in remote areas. When it comes to those we don't know or in less remote places, like mini-zoos then we will be much more cautious. 

More progress on my PhD too. A copy of my thesis has now gone to the library and some copies have been printed. Hopefully I will get my own copy soon. 

A new sport?

Bales collected together.

Have you heard of Crown Green Bowling? Perhaps not. It is a genteel game, usually played by older people on a crown shaped, i.e. not flat, lawn in the northern parts of England and Wales. A great deal of skill is involved to ensure that the bowls travel in the right direction over the curved terrain towards a smaller ball, known as a jack. Now as you can imagine, if you follow this blog, the idea that I have taken up a genteel sport usually played by older people is not something I'm likely to do, but I did play something a bit similar today. I shall call it Crown Green Bale Bowling. The idea of the game is to assemble bales of hay into groups. Now our bales are not the huge ones, they weigh about 25kg and not 600kg and upwards like some you see these days.

The view from the oak tree hill of the cut hay

We can now see our alpacas again

Our fields are definitely not flat and so it is possible to launch some of the bales down the hill to gather them together for easier collection later, or at least it is in theory. Usually the bales don't travel very quickly and have to be encouraged along the way or more likely rolled manually depending on the gradient. However, occasionally there is a rogue bale, perhaps where I haven't anticipated the angle and gradient correctly and those are the ones that gather speed as they roll off in the wrong direction. At this point you will see this not so genteel older lady haring down the field in pursuit of a bale of hay before it ends up at the bottom away from the others, or worse in the pond.

It is amazing how much the grass had grown. Such little rain
but it seems like it was just at the right time. We got almost
double the amount of hay from these areas this year.

Ian and his stork pals. They sometimes get rather close and
have to run to get out of the way. It is comical watching them

As you can gather Ian has been cutting and baling hay this week. I help with gathering the bales and  stacking them. We haven't stacked them yet, we will be doing that tomorrow to allow them to lose some field heat overnight. We only bale and stack on the same day if there is rain forecast, it is better to wait otherwise. He was going to start cutting properly earlier but there was a forecast of rain. We did get some much needed rain in the end, but not as much as was forecast (yet again!), but at least it was enough to keep the plants going.

It is still dry and dusty though

This is on the verge of the field.
It has plenty of flowers to get
seeds from later. Interestingly
we found out that the purple and
yellow flowers (well not really
flowers but bracts) are actually
parasitic. Well I didn't know that.

The day before Ian cut the hay we had a phone call to ask if a group could come and survey the field for a biodiversity assessment. We are pleased we didn't get it cut after all. We were a bit skeptical at first as we knew they were meant to be doing an assessment ages ago and thought that had finished and wondered why they were doing an assessment on a major holiday weekend. The problem in Latvia, if you can call it that, is there are too many places with high biodiversity and so I think it might be taking longer than anticipated. Anyway, it was indeed a legitimate group and so we had a fascinating time wandering around our land looking at the various biotopes and discussing how best to manage the land for biodiversity.

Lots of flowers but not special enough! We need to reseed some
of the marsh orchids into this place.

It just so happens I found one, down
by the barn

We were also able to give them valuable details of where we had re-seeded after pig damage and where we knew there were plants they were looking for, for example cowslips, which are starting to spread all over the place. I only said last week that our meadows are flower rich, maybe not as much as they could be, but we still have a lot of the different plants they look for, just maybe not all in one place. I shall certainly be looking for seeds from the various plants on their lists. I downloaded the booklet the lady was using to show us some of the plants they were looking for from the website of the organisation. It is very handy.

We have loads of vetches this year. I need to find out exactly
which sort this one is. I have been photographing them to
compare later with the book I downloaded 

A butterfly orchid

The top of our hill with the old oak tree is apparently a special sandhill biotope and over the hill - which we didn't think was anything special also qualified due to the number of plants per square metre. Apparently the ski hill, where we get most of our hay from, was declared a special area before as the satellite picture picked that up. That has been meadow for many years and never re-seeded and so it is full of flowers and different grasses. On our trip around I also spotted a couple of butterfly orchids. We were quite pleased about that, as we hadn't seen many in the last year or two, probably due to various factors, but mainly because the animals are grazing in those areas. We will make sure we cut later to let them re-seed themselves.

I thought at first this was an orchid.
It is in an area we have found orchids
before but realised it wasn't the
butterfly orchid we had seen before.
Apparently it isn't an orchid. It is a
woodland plant, but that is as much
as I know at the moment

Our potatoes are enjoying the alpaca manure, not bad
considering the lack of rain.

It has been good this weekend to take some time off from computer work. As I mentioned earlier it was a holiday weekend here in Latvia. There are lots of activities and many families gather in the countryside to see the sunrise on St. John's day. There is a rhyme that basically says the person who sleeps through the night and doesn't see the sunrise on St. John's day, will sleep the rest of the year. I'm afraid we went to bed. We have a lot of work to do on the farm and by 11pm we are ready to sleep. We also have a heavily pregnant alpaca that is due any day now and so we want to be up early enough for any possible births. Fortunately alpacas usually give birth in the morning or at least early part of the day, so we don't want to be sleeping late.

A sit down protest. This is to stop them going in and using
their house as a toilet during the day. They do have plenty of
shade, there is a huge oak tree at the bottom of the field.

Apparently daises aren't special, but I think they are. They
also make a great resist dye plant.

I was also up late one night this week, trying to finish off some work for the project. My colleagues were away again and so it was up to me to get it done. I managed with half an hour to spare for the deadline. Happy days! It did cause a bit of a problem though, as it is not easy for Ian if I am working late when we live in a caravan. If I'm up working, he's up too. Heh ho! I had another Skype online meeting this week. Normally I would Skype from in the caravan but that particular day it was far too hot. I also do not normally do video Skype calls because there are too many team members and our signal for the phone is not fantastic, but this was only a meeting with two others. I made them jealous because I was there with a blue sky and a few clouds as a backdrop, whereas they were both in offices. I even got to show our alpacas to one of them after the main meeting was finished and we chatted about some other things that needed sorting.

This is a good indicator plant, or is it a characteristic plant. I
did get a bit confused by the terminology and not sure if it was
a translation problem or not. Anyway it is typical of the type of
biotope it lives in and we have plenty of it.

Not a native biotope, but my herb garden. I don't think I've ever
seen so many flowers on the lavender. Obviously enjoying the
dry conditions.

Awww! Jakobs and Josefs having a hug! Actually not, they
are play fighting and trying to bite each other. 

I finally got our chicks moved into one of the arks and out of the cage they had been in since they were hatched. This now means a nightly ritual of capturing the little darlings to put them away, until they get the hang of putting away time. I usually put feed in the hutch area so they come into feed and then close the door, all operated by a simple pulley system. The problem is that until they get the idea that the food is in the hutch area, they don't go away. I was relieved that on the first night four of them came to investigate. That meant only having to capture four of them. The second night, only two went in. Pah! I left them for a while and when I went back, only two were still out. Phew! Climbing into the chicken ark to capture them is not so easy, but at least it is easier than the ark that the older chickens went into. There would be no way to capture them in that one. It was never meant for long term use, but ended up being used for that.

Group hug! Or an alpaca game of twister

Jakobs looking very cute.

We have four different arks. Most of them are totally enclosed, but the other one is under netting to stop them getting out and stop the hawks from getting to them. The cockerel in that one, will not go away with the girls, but each night he almost seems to check that I have put them all away before he hops off to sit on a bale of hay. It is funny the way he cocks his head to one side and fixes me with a look as if to say, "Okay! All present and correct! You can shut the door now!" He then sleeps on top of the box where his girls are after I leave the enclosure.

Herk still looks kind of tired these days, but it is only on the
hot days when the flies have been bothering him

Chanel is also looking tired, but she is due to give birth any
day now

Inside this amazing nest are five baby swallows. It's just they
wouldn't cooperate for Ian to get a photo of them.

One of the parents having a rest from darting this way and
that. We got to watch some amazing arial acrobatics this
week as they had a territorial dispute with some others and were
backwards and forwards getting insects for their little ones

Is it summer yet?

The chickens on the field where the alpacas have been. A
chance to put some fertility into the grass before the alpacas
go back on the field later on in the year.

The caravan's out, the chickens are out, the greenhouse is now a greenhouse again, ready for planting up instead of a storage area (well it will be when it is tidied up) so that must mean that summer is on its way. Well maybe! It does mean that we are now stopping out in the caravan most nights and only go back home to get washing done and collect the milk. The mosquitoes are also already biting, so they must think it is nearly summer too. I wasn't happy about that. They suddenly arrived and I found bites before I really realised they were flying about. I need to get a repellent organised for spraying on me and the animals.

These chickens have got the job of turning over one of the
gardens in preparation for next year. Saves me. Last year
they were totally free range, but the foxes and birds of
prey had been slowly reducing their numbers and so we have
decided to keep them nearer to the where we are. 

A yearly job of moving the caravan outside

Trying to plan all the jobs we have to do has been quite a logistical nightmare. There are jobs to get the gardens ready, jobs that need doing before the grass grows and hides all the logs and twigs for chipping, jobs to get ready for our visit by a coach load of pensioners, shearing to prepare for and studies to complete. It keeps us out of mischief I guess. Ian decided he really needed to shear at least some of our alpacas before he goes shearing the ones in Estonia just to remind himself of the sequence. It was a bit slow going and he will have to get faster, but at least we now remember the order to do everything and some of the things we need before we head up there, so it should be a lot easier.

A job for this week. Tidy this lot up!

Mr. B and Mr. P. after shearing. Also after they have both
rolled about on the molehills - hence the dusty brown
appearances of both of them

We always start any shearing with Turbjørn because we know if he has to wait he will be very difficult to control. He is the alpaca that gets the most agitated and being a big animal we sometimes struggle to get him calmed down enough to work on him. The others are much calmer animals. The shearing sequence is white animals first with the darkest animals last. Poor Mr. P. being black got rather anxious as he was kept waiting and so we had to put Mr. B. in with him, once Mr.B was sheared to allow him to calm down before he was sheared. At least being a smaller lighter animal, he wasn't so difficult to pin down anyway. Part way through the shearing Ian noticed a mouse at the back of the alpaca house, fortunately it decided on a quick exit rather than interfere with the process. Also fortunately, neither of us are particularly freaked out by mice being in close proximity.

Earlier on in the week it had been rather wet, so Mr. P had
a slicked hair do.

We bought another small greenhouse, partly because my office
and greenhouse combination is not likely to be ready very soon.
This will be where we will start some seeds off like the cabbages
and squashes

Lightweight dumbells? No not really! This is Ian constructing
a frankenshifter. For those who have followed the blog for a
while, you will know what we mean. Ian has made a few
Frankstein constructions - in other words used parts from
other things to make something new. In this case these are the
wheels and axle from a small trailer with off cuts of wood
from one of the alpaca house constructions. We used this to
move the chicken arks out to the fields - easier than carrying
them.

I had planned on being in Tartu today, but someone I was due to meet got delayed during the week and couldn't make it. I had arranged to meet my supervisor too, so instead I re-arranged to Skype with him rather than travel up for one appointment. Horror of horrors though I forgot. I am having difficulty with the notifications on my computer. Both Outlook and BusyCal don't always notify me of an event or a task, or just as bad, notify me after the event. I don't have a good memory anyway and so I rely on my computer, it is not helpful therefore when it messes around with the things I need to remember. If anyone out there knows what is wrong, I would love to know. I obviously need to put it right, especially when I have multiple tasks and meetings to remember.

The finished construction. The chicken arks rests on the top
of this and we use the handles on the arks to push 

Not a Franken creation but Ian using the carder last week, to
card the wool from our alpaca fleeces

At least this week I got two important things ticked off my list. Paper number two is just about finished and now needs my supervisor and co-authors to check it over. A short paper for a conference was also submitted with less than an hour to go before the deadline. It was a good job I thought I was going up to Tartu, because I had stayed overnight at home rather than out in the caravan with Ian. He likes an early night and so wouldn't have been very pleased to have been kept up waiting for me to finish the submission process.

Another construction underway - a toilet.
With 54 pensioners coming next week
we thought it would be a good idea to have
a toilet for them to use, rather than
trying to climb in and out of our caravan.
This will be a composting toilet and we will
use sawdust in it.

We are beginning to feel more confident that Estelle is
pregnant. She is suddenly starting to fill out, but a better
indicator is her behaviour - the poor lass seems very weary
and not her normal self.

There hasn't been much in the way of perusing just lately, too many deadlines for that to happen. One thing did strike me though was how annoyed I get with end time prophecies these days. These are the prophecies that talk about how there will be great calamities and then God will come in and sort it all out and wrap up the world. I am doing research for the future, my focus is on the future and I feel it was something that God told me to do. For me one of the most important parts of the Bible is where Jesus teaches his disciples to pray "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven". It speaks of the future, it speaks of God and man working together on Earth. This is what drives me, not the thought of it all burning up or deteriorating into a horrible mess.  Time is short indeed, but it is short for doing something concrete about bringing our planet and the people on it to a place where it can recover from the damage we are inflicting on this beautiful place called Earth. So we have to work together to accomplish that - now that sounds more like the kind of plan of a God of love to me.

We might not have the wonderful bluebell woods of the UK
but we do have wood anemones and the carpet of flowers
is getting bigger every year

They are such pretty flowers

We won't shear the girls until after the pensioners have been
at least. They need to be able to see some fluffy looking
animals