Cry Wolf!

Here what are you doing?

There is one thing you can say for definite about living in Latvia, it is varied and not often boring. The biodiversity of the place is also rich and diverse, and getting more diverse by the year around here. This week we heard the news that a local farm has lost some sheep and the culprits are probably a wolf family. Now this is a farm that I have walked to to investigate whilst I was doing my wild boar study, so not terribly far. We had heard of wolves close by, as in 20km away and so have had it in the back of our minds that a wolf attack was always a possibility, now it is more real and we have to seriously look again at the safety of our animals. The sheep were not housed in a barn like most of the animals around here at night, as the days are still quite mild for November and the grass still reasonable, even if it has taken a hit with a few hard frosts and so that might explain why they were attacked, even with their electric fence protection. Recent logging near us might also explain why the wolves were in the area as they may have been disturbed, however, that still means they were probably close anyway.

Now why did the cat cross the river?
To get to the other side? And why?
No idea, she moaned about it all the
way across

The only good thing to come out of this news is that we got a tasty meal out of it, as we were invited around to eat as one of the guys working on the farm was cooking some of the lamb and the rest of his family don't like it. We even got some ribs to take home. Waste not! Want not! The meal out was a last minute invitation and one that Ian accepted with relish, even though we had only eaten an hour before. Once again it is like trying to feed a teenager around here i.e. Ian is a bottomless bucket at the moment and I can't fill him up, so the thought of some supper was enough for him to consider going back out in the dark and cold, even if it meant waiting ages for car windows to defrost.

The ocean we are waiting to recede.
Doesn't look so bad from here, but
believe me that is wide and deep

The rest of the week was spent battling the rain again for Ian. Oceans abound for sure, but at least by the end of the week we finally got some sun, fleeting though it was. It has been that bad that even when the rain stops there are still rivers of water running down the hill from goodness knows where. It does mean that Ian hasn't been able to finish laying the cable as the ocean (no longer a lake) has just got bigger instead of receding as he had hoped. Instead he has managed to get the rest of the cable buried in places despite the collapsing sides of the trenches and so all that needs to happen now is for that ocean to recede to a lake and he can carry on and finish the job. Fortunately the weather forecast is looking better but we could do with more sun forecast to dry it all up.

This is the river feeding the lake, where
there should be no river

Being new to this farming lark is one of wonder at times, often wondering what on earth we are doing but loving it all the same. One of the things we have wondered about is the gender of our chickens. We hoped we had sorted them out into one ark with one male and five hens, one ark with one male and four hens, one ark with four males for dispatching to other homes or to our freezer. Well maybe! Errr possibly! And then again maybe not! Some of the little darlings appear to be late starters and we were wondering if one of the chickens in the male ark maybe female after all, but we are still not sure yet. One of the chickens in the 1+4 ark is definitely turning out to be male and one we still have a question mark over. I guess we didn't do too badly then, because apparently even seasoned chicken owners are never 100% sure until the chicken either crows or lays an egg and none of them has done either of those things yet.

So far and no further. Here Ian was
digging the trench and immediately
burying the cable before it collapsed
but the route after this was far too wet
to dig with our tractor

I mentioned last week that I was frustrated that there didn't seem to be much in the way of small scale farm equipment and this week I found the ideal product, only problem is that it is a protype made in Africa, wonder how long it would take for someone to make one in Europe? Probably no time soon. As far as agriculture here in Europe is concerned, the only agriculture worth investing in is big agriculture and not the small scale farming. So the search continues for engineers who love a challenge and to see what they can produce.

Not too bad! Err we hope!

I'm glad the US Presidential campaign is over, now we can get back to some news as if there is a world that exists outside of America. It is not that I don't want to know what is going on, but the large amount of coverage gets tiresome in the end. It is also galling to see so much money spent on things like advertising etc. Spending in the order of $2bn, that would pay for three years interest payments on the Latvian national debt, it is 20x the losses of Haiti to the storm, despite the devastating loss of crops there (remember Hurricane Sandy and the fact it hit the Caribbean islands first?), and it would buy 100m mosquito nets, saving lots of lives in the process. So what would you have spent $2bn on?

Trenches full of water

Ruts full of water and this is on top of
the hill

But here comes the sun on a beautiful frosty morning

A quick update on the article for which I was interviewed: I came out of it quite well by all accounts. It seems to be a fair representation of what is in my report and what I said, we won't quibble on a few details as something could have been lost in the translation anyway. So all in all, quite a relief.

Plodge, plodge

The wraps are finally coming off the accommodation block
for the school

There has been some excitement in our household this week, we got to see baby pictures of grandchild number two. This little mite is not as chilled as the first one, as it wouldn't lie quietly to have its picture taken, so not so clear, but still it is there and appears healthy and that's the main thing. It is lovely being able to see the pictures and see them despite our family being scattered across the globe.  It all feels a little surreal at times knowing the events are really happening, but not being there in person, but it is comforting to know that we are only a Skype call away and can still be involved in the process, albeit in a more limited way than if any of them lived down the street from us. 

Bit of a difference to when they started. No balconies now,
no crumbling brick work and all clad with an outer skin
of eco-friendly products - well that is theory. Hope it is
well done and it lasts. 

There was more excitement when I read the front page of the magazine that had an interview of me in. The front page headline read "Mežacūka. Draugs vai iednaidnieks?" which means Wild boar: Friend or Foe? My masters thesis title! I wasn't quite sure whether to be upset or not, but the reason for picking the title for my thesis was to capture people's attention and it looks like it worked from that point of view. I was credited with the title in the main body of the interview so that's okay. The article came complete with silly photo, although I did look very earnest, as if I had something very important to say. It was a good job though that I had changed for the interview just in case and didn't see the journalist in my usual scruffy clothes. From what I could tell the article looked fairly well written and a neighbour agreed with that assessment, but I still need to get a more accurate translation of it. Hopefully I shall let you know if I fully approve next week.

Before the dig

In Denmark we had a tv for three months when we lived in a rented flat there and one of the programmes we used to watch was "Time Team," but we used to nickname it "Dig a trench." As many of you know whenever they wanted to find something out about the history of a place they would dig a trench as an exploratory first step to see what was there. Well Ian has been doing his own "Dig a trench" for our electric cable and it is proving to be a fascinating cross section of our land as far as the make up of the soil is concerned. We have everything from sand to clay to rich loam, all within a 500m transect. He started off in good but cold weather while the snow was still on the ground and everything went well, but then it melted and the rain started again. Now it is no longer squelch, squelch in the mud, it is more like plodge, plodge in the water (Verb plodge (Geordie) To wade or splash around in puddles, mud, clarts or mire.). Our lake has reappeared as it seems to do every time it rains now and we have rivers of water running across the fields. It is not making life easy at the moment. The lake is right where Ian wants to dig for the electric cable and he can't really skirt around it as it is onto neighbouring land. It is so frustrating. The trench has also collapsed in places as the rain washes some of the soil back in, and some of the soil is just being washed back into field. The trench is 70cm deep and in places it is filled to the brim with water. So what should have been a fairly tidy neat scar across the land, may turn out to be a much wider scar with a depression in it. Not what we wanted to do.

After the dig. It kind of looks like we have a
rather large mole problem

I finally got all the fodder beet in to feed the chickens, the remaining few beetroot, hamburg parsley and some parsnips. I had commented this week on one blog that we don't seem to be troubled with voles nibbling our vegetables, unfortunately I discovered that we do have a problem in one of our allotment plots after all. It could be because I was the last to dig up a root crop and so the only one with anything worth eating in the area, but there was a whole row where the leaves looked fresh and green but when I pulled them there was nothing but a hole left in the soil where a root once was with a tunnel onto the next one. Not a good sign. At least it was our allotment plot and not out on the land, there they would have been dug up by the wild boar if it hadn't been for the electric fencing around the plot. Shame electric fences are a bit useless against voles. On the land the parsnips were of varying sizes, some a decent size and some small but they were all good and long, which is a good sign as it means the soil is deep at that spot anyway. It was also the first time we had actually managed to grow parsnips reasonably well out here in Latvia and maybe warming the soil first before putting the seed in paid off

Looking back up the hill

One of the frustrations with trying to do something a bit different is trying to get appropriate equipment. So much money is spent on big agricultural machinery that there is not much available for the small diverse farmer, there might be in India or China but not here in Europe, or if there is we haven't found it. Sometimes we find something if there is a market elsewhere like in landscaping or vineyards which require the smaller equipment but where would you find a small scale thresher? Or a small scale seed separator? I feel there is a real need for engineers to work on small scale machinery that mimics some of the jobs that were done in the days of yore and yet reflect the engineering possible in this day and age, a real fusion of old and new thinking. This hopefully would make entry level farming cheaper, instead of relying on equipment with a huge outlay, which severely restricts the opportunities for young farmers unless they take over a family business. Another idea would be for engineers who were capable of restoring old equipment which are lying around in many barns, no longer used but still capable of doing a valuable job if only people could get them to work again. Oh well! If you know of anyone who fits the bill, then do let me know, won't you?

Bella in the chicken box. Neither Bella nor
the chickens seemed bothered by the company.
I think she was after the parsnip flavoured with
some fat poured off some sausages I had done
in the oven - either that or she has developed
a liking for parsnips!!!!

Small farms are efficient, believe it or not! They can produce more per acre with smaller outside inputs but it does require a lot of manpower. It is not efficient as economists might measure efficiency, but it is kinder to the environment to have more people producing food with fewer fossil fuel inputs. One of the reasons for introducing animals to the mix is to improve the efficiency of the vegetable garden by producing onsite fertiliser, instead of shipping it in. We are still experimenting with working out what we need to raise to support the livestock we have (sounds grand for three alpacas and 15 chickens, but it's a start), so that when we scale up we will have some idea of how much we need to grow to keep them in food year round. So hopefully as we grow the vegetables to feed ourselves and the animals, the cycling of nutrients will be good enough to keep everything healthy. Well that's the general idea anyway

The chickens with their new cobbled together roof aka
Frankenroof. The low roof was fine outside for the
chickens with the good throughput of air but inside
the greenhouse it meant that the ground was always damp
so we thought it would be best to have a net cover instead

After a flurry of anonymous comments which are only spam, I have taken the decision to remove the permission to post anonymously. It certainly won't affect my regular posters, but I am sorry if you had intended to comment but don't want to post with a profile, only it was getting too time consuming dealing with the anonymous comments that had nothing to say apart from that which already been said all over the internet, word for word. 

I said it had been wet. This is Ian's new walk in wardrobe
or where he hangs his wet stuff and just lately there
has been a lot of that.