Almost there

Our young helper in the tractor

We have passed several milestones in this last week both on the land and some personal ones too. We managed to get the baling almost finished at our neighbour's place. There is still some hay left to cut but they are in awkward places and so were not cut with the majority of it. Our young helper came and she helped Ian by rolling the bales together for collection while I prepared our greenhouse for the felting course that happened this weekend. She was tired when we took her back home, but she did work hard. She even got to ride in the tractor and bale some hay. All good training.

Practising baling, slowly of course.

An oven in a greenhouse! Doesn't everyone have one?

Collecting leaves ready for the following days dyeing

We had to rush to get the hay under cover though. It meant unstacking the bales that were in the trailers and re-stacking those ones under plastic. We then had to get the bales from the field and stack them before getting a second load. We finished off in the rain but at least the bales weren't soaked. Our young helper thought I was very strong, but this is the third round of collecting bales and my muscles have grown in the process. If it had been the first round, maybe not so much. I still love the fact I can clamber around on our tractor trailer when putting on the tarpaulin, I hope I can still do that in years to come. I maybe have to take up some form of exercise over the winter to keep up my strength. Hahaha! We have around 350 bales of hay or more, so about 50 more than we need, which at least means we should have some left over to see us into next year if hay season is late or for any other reason we need more.

Chilled out alpacas.

Sofie, ace mouse catcher.

The roadworks around us are still continuing. They have made some improvements to a bad corner and put in culverts where the road often floods, so at least that is progress. The road also dries out quicker, which is another improvement. We are still hoping they improve the camber of the road though, so we don't go sliding off into the ditches in the winter. Not sure how much further they have to go; they certainly have still got to repair the collapsed section of the road that fell into the river a while back. Apparently after a chat with the foreman today, the collapsed road is another project but we might get some better access to the land and our fields, just maybe not yet. We have a phone number anyway. We also found out why they hadn't contacted us beforehand. Apparently this is just road maintenance and not full roadworks. To them, it's just a little job, to us a major work. A matter of perspective really.

We had to move the spades and forks
further down the greenhouse to put
the oven in

Mr. P. now often spends time longingly gazing in the direction
of the females.

Ian is still continuing to take the male alpacas for mating with the females, although these are more checks to see if they are pregnant. As I have mentioned before, it is generally accepted that females will spit off the males if they are. We suspect that Vanessa is pregnant, or at least we hope so. It is difficult to tell with her, as she is so feisty and doesn't seem to like Mr. P. anyway. She seems more adamant though that he's not coming anywhere near and so that is an encouraging sign, not for poor Mr. P. though who gets covered in green spit. The others may also be pregnant, but some are more compliant and so we have the other problem of there not being a definite sign of a "spit off". We will be more certain when we have a scan done by a vet around November time. Once that is finished that will be it for the year and that could be as early as next week.

A very cheeky George.

Galina explaining to the participants.

We had our only felting course this year at the weekend. There were a multitude of reasons for not running two this year and my recent employment for an EU project is one of them. It was good to welcome our tutor Galina back for her fourth year and she brought her friend along as well again. Galina always feels like it is a holiday for her. Her friend made me some fabulous slippers using some of Herkules' and Freddies' fleece. She used the template I used to make some slippers earlier on in the year, but made some slip ones this time. Great for the morning when clambering out of bed. 

Preparing the fleece for felting my slippers

The slippers I made are on the right and my new slip on
ones on the left.

Galina giving me a telling off and telling me on the first day,
no experiments. Do what I'm supposed to do. She was only
joking, we had a good laugh afterwards.

Preparing a t-shirt for the dyeing process.

The weather was surprisingly good this year. Last year we baked in the greenhouse, this year, it was warm enough to work in and not as much rain as forecast. In fact, we had just about enough rain water to do all the dyeing and felting without having to bring it in from our apartment. We just needed to bring in drinking water. It is good to use the rain water for dyeing as there is too much iron in our apartment water and it affects the results of the dyeing process.

Preparing a pre-felt for adding to the dyed silk shawls. A
pre-felt is a piece of felt that is not fully felted but enough
to cut up into shapes to add to a felting project.

A salad made by Ian from the flowers and leaves I had
collected from our garden.

I organised the food again this year and everyone was welcome to join us. I do not provide food for the participants exactly, it is up to them if they bring their own or contribute something to the meal. In previous years we have used the hotel to provide food but it was more stressful and far too expensive. This way we use food from our own garden and freezer with the addition of some local cheese from our friend, cakes from the local bakery and some sausages from the local butcher. Of course with potatoes, eggs and my own home-made bread the food goes a long way and there is plenty to share. 

Bread fresh from the oven.

Ready for lunch.

Giving instructions on baking bread and scones.

Preparing food was even easier this year as the daughter of our friend who makes the cheese came to help, so brought the cheeses with her (she is the same one who helped us bale the hay earlier in the week). I love the fact that as soon as she had put her bags into the caravan, she went into the greenhouse and started washing up. I didn't even have to tell her, she just knew it would need doing. In fact she was so good we asked if she would help again next year. I do hope she can. It did mean I got to do some felting myself this year

Boiling potatoes.

Local goats cheese.

Lunchtime. A lovely view!

Looking the other way at lunchtime and you can see the
grapes ripening

The wind was from the south this year, which meant we
could leave the doors open and not risk our fleece flying
everywhere. It was also a little overcast most of the time
which meant it was cooler. 

The other milestone was hearing that the final academic article that I needed to go towards my PhD was accepted. I found out on Friday lunchtime and my ecstatic reaction surprised everyone. I am not usually one for enthusiastic outbursts but I was surprised there was no further work to be done on it, apart from a very few editing issues or clarifications before publication. We clinked tea and coffee cups in celebration together. I also heard that the costs for this open access publication will be met too, Yay! I was half expecting to have to pay for it, so rather pleased I'm not, as it amounts to nearly a month's wages and this was one of the cheaper ones. I've seen some astronomical costs for open access papers. It does mean you read it though - if you want to that is (link here).

Wetting the fleece and starting the felting process.

Nooo! Don't go. The storks gathered to leave as we were
eating lunch.

Once the fleece is wet, tables were moved outside to work on.

A shawl with pre-felt leaves being added

Monday meant dealing with the aftermath of washing. Five washing loads were done, albeit in a 4.5kg washing machine and not a big one. Some of it may seem bizarre, such as bubble wrap. My neighbours at the apartment must have wondered why I was washing plastic when they saw it hanging on the line, but it means it is ready for use again. Some of it was catching up with clothes washing. One load a week is our usual, two at the most but I hadn't had the chance to get that done for over a week, so that had mounted up too. There was also bedding from two lots of guests. Still it is nearly all done and the rain held off to get most of it dried. The rest of the wet washing is hanging up in our greenhouse. Sitting around waiting for the washing machine to do the washing meant that I had time to get the final amendments to the paper ready for publication. So a productive end to the week.

Rolling, rolling rolling.

The finished shawl and bubble wrap drying.

Dyed t-shirts and pillow case.

Galina with her sample scarf, a piece of cotton fabric she
dyed for me while I was busy and a participant's t-shirt
dress that was dyed with the leaves from our land.

Carefully felting

Felted bookcover in the process

Galina and participant working together.

My finished shawl, or is it? I haven't decided yet. I think I
might work some more on it.

Two rather well fed pussy cats.

Another shawl made by one of the participants.

Feeding Brencis.

A little chat with Brencis.

Wearing our garments.

Always the way, too many things to hold
onto and finding it difficult to sort it out.

Showing off our garments to the boys, not sure if they were that
impressed but they did like the dandelion leaves.

I was given the shawl a long while ago
but didn't like the colour. Will have to work
out what to do with the dyed material that
goes quite nicely with it.

The boys.

I look so small 😂

End of the course!

A Gentle Day

Josefs and Jakobs charging around. A little different to last
week when we were so worried about Josefs. We are not
feeding him at all now, so Aggie's milk must be good stuff

Well it was kind of a gentle day, if you discount the group of 15, 5 adults and 10 children who joined us today. Before they came we had to spend some time trying to get the greenhouse in some sort of order after our felting course at the weekend. We only managed half our lunch before they turned up, but thanks to our friend who stayed on after the felting course it was packed away from our marauding cats, while we greeted the visitors.

Josefs feeding from Aggie

Our regular evening visitor

The group today were mainly Russian speaking children on an an upmarket sports camp with extra activities. They were superbly organised and even had people turn up beforehand to make sure everything was in order. They also made sure the children were listening, which was really nice. At one point they let one of the youngsters do the translating because he wanted to have a go. He did quite well. We took them on the usual tour and then all the children had a go at making a felt ball from the alpaca wool. Sometimes groups can be a bit of a nightmare to handle, especially when they keep trying to feed the little cria (alpaca babies) - who are not up to eating the grain and really do not interact much with people yet, but this group weren't too bad at all. To be honest, Josefs seems to be a very inquisitive kind of alpaca anyway, so he maybe okay. We are still wary of over socialising male cria with humans though to prevent problems in the future.

Josefs and Jakobs have bonded well together. We had a surprise
message via Facebook asking if we would ever think of
selling Josefs

Our visitors even brought flowers

We've had other visitors as well. There was a group who were a mix of our apartment neighbours, their children and their grandchildren. The children speak very good English as one works as a translator in Luxembourg and the other works in Sweden. The couple from Luxembourg were some of the first visitors we had to see our alpacas, shortly after we got them over six years ago (link here). It was nice to be able to show them the changes we have made over the years. Slowly but surely we are getting more organised. We still have a long way to go though.

Listening to Galina talking about dyeing in the shade
of the barn (Photo by Edith Chenault)

It has been quite an international week really, as our visitors have been Latvian (of course), French, Swedish, an American living in Estonia, Belarusian and Polish . The last few were the participants and tutor on the dyeing and felting course that we held over the weekend. We didn't have as many participants as we would like, but it didn't stop us enjoying ourselves. It was Galina's, the tutor, third visit and she always loves coming as she likes the atmosphere at our workshops on the farm. Even though it was hot we were able to sit in the cool shade of the barn to eat and watch the cria racing around. It is always good to see her friend who she brings with her too.

Picking leaves  (Photo by Edith Chenault)

Our wonderful helper modelling some
flowers made during the weekend course

Her friend helped us sort through some wool to remove the vegetable matter, as well as helping Galina collect leaves for the dyeing process. If an extra pair of hands were needed, she was there. Even though we couldn't communicate directly as she only spoke Russian, that didn't matter so much. She understood what was needed and helped. She has certainly been a big blessing to us and we are pleased that she also enjoys coming to visit us, as this is her second visit.

Preparing the table for the laying out of the silk and leaves
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

Leaves on silk
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

People have been popping in all week really. Another group made a return visit after two years to see what had changed over the time. This was mainly a group of young men and women in their twenties or early thirties. One guy with a hipster beard turned up with his wife and two children and finally two ladies who were looking to see if we were suitable as a visit for schoolchildren later on in the year. One lady remembered me from a meeting a few years ago - I thought she looked familiar but I have met so many people in very different circumstances I forget where or who people are, especially if they are in a different context when I meet them again. I do wonder if the rating on the Latvian news site has anything to do with the upsurge of visitors. Although I think August does tend to be a more popular month.

Laying on the dye cloths
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

Dyed t-shirt
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

We still haven't had much rain, although we did get a much needed shower yesterday that at least freshened the garden. I was rather despondent at one point though as I could just see my garden dying. Plants that had hung on in through the heat were really beginning to struggle and wilt, the caterpillars were having a field day eating anything remotely cabbagey and what the caterpillars didn't eat the woolly aphids were starting on. I have been tied up with preparing food for the participants and so the garden has been quite neglected as usual. Normally though, the plants are fending for themselves amongst the weeds, this time even the weeds are sometimes giving up. I had planned quite a few salad type plants to be growing during the course and although I have managed to produce some different types of salads, particularly pickled cucumbers, there hasn't been much in the way of salad leaves. Many lettuces just didn't bother to germinate and the early crops were a bit strong. The potatoes though! Oh my gosh! They are huge already - well at least those that have grown where they shouldn't have. We will see what the main crops look like later on in the year.

The great reveal. Dyed silk
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

Hanging on my line in the forest
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

There was five reasonable sized carp in there. Now relocated

Another issue we've had is the ponds have almost disappeared and we got quite worried about the fish in the small pond. Ian caught them and relocated them to one of our other ponds that at least still has a reasonable amount of water in. We laughed though at finally using the net for actually catching fish. We usually use it to catch escaped chickens and had to do that one day this week. One of the chickens had managed to dig its way out underneath the fence.

Ian was showing one of our visitors the
poo sample under the microscope, as
you do
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

Sewing silk pieces together

It has been a bit of a busy week for Ian too. besides relocating fish, helping where necessary on the course, he has also been baling hay, having to move it by himself and attending to an emergency call out. We had a call from our neighbour's daughter to ask if Ian could take them to a repair place for their new milking machine. As you can imagine it was necessary to get it done as fast as possible so the cows could be milked that evening. Glad to say it was all done in time and we got our milk the next morning too.

When an alpaca comes for tea
 (Photo by Edith Chenault)

It got a tad hot. A heatwave is not helpful

Rolling outside in the shade of the greenhouse is much better

Always helpful

Hanging quilts for some shade and t-shirts drying in the
greenhouse

Sewing felted flowers

Rolling felt

Nuno felted jacket with dyed silk made from leaves from our land

Mittens made with merino wool and Aggie's fleece

Eco-printed silk scarf on my new display
stand that Ian made from hazel with some
home-made bread that I made.

Taking photos of the photographer taking a photo.

Group photo with Brencis