Home again!

It almost looks like the alps with snow covered mountains
in the background. 

Well it's been a hard couple of weeks with a lot of intensive work. I managed to get a some chapters finished on my thesis, which is a start at least, but there is still a way to go. There are also plenty of tasks to do on the EU project I'm working on, so it is going to be pretty tricky fitting it all in. It was kind of odd this week meeting my colleagues who all congratulated me on finishing. I know that it is now a formality to complete my PhD because I have got the required number of published papers, but I still have to write my thesis and defend it before I am given the title of doctor, so it all feels a bit premature.

Early morning wake up call. I know the feeling

It's too early!

I daren't even think about the garden, especially after the wind and rain yesterday and today. My garden is pretty battered with pole beans, sweetcorn and Jerusalem artichokes all either on the floor or at crazy angles. It is going to need some intensive care and attention to get it straight in time for winter. Before I left for a trip up to Estonia last week, I had to get started on collecting some beans and get them in the freezer, as well as start on digging up the potatoes. It is annoying that the beans have only just really got into production. Still at least there are some packs of beans for the freezer with more to come if I can get them up off the floor. We also have some squashes and pumpkins that have suddenly started appearing, just in time for a forecast of a frost. Sigh!

Nice to see the mud pack the other week has washed off.
Seems to have done the trick, Herk is looking pretty youthful
here

Herk even looks like he has a smile on his face and a spring
in his step. Nice to see him up and about instead of slumped
on the ground avoiding the flies like he does over summer

I also managed to get to see the visiting gynaecologist before my Estonian trip. I thought it would just be a routine appointment but she said she wanted to send me for an ultrasound. No idea what for but my local doctor made an appointment at the hospital and then had to unmake it because I was going to be in Estonia. I wish she had asked first. I did hear today though that I have an appointment for next Monday so we will see what they have to say after that. I have been feeling really good just lately, especially since the menopausal brain fog has lifted and so I have no intention of doing anything unnecessary.

Sunrise on the farm

Rain on its way!

Visitors have still been popping along to our farm and I might hang around for some of it, but most of the time I leave it to Ian, so I can get on with my work. I shall be so pleased when I finally do finish my PhD. Maybe I will have more time, at least for the garden and maybe the visitors from time to time, or maybe I won't! I guess that all depends on whether I get more work with uni or not when my contract runs out.

Mr. P. I don't know why, but her reminds me of Guy Martin.
I think its the sideburns and dark hair.

Hello you down there!

This last week marked the start of travelling season. I started with a face to face meeting in Tartu for the EU project I'm working on. Our Estonian team were hosting our colleagues from Finland, Sweden and Germany. Because I joined the project part way through, I hadn't met any of the others before, so it was nice to be able to meet them in person and not just on Skype. The idea was to have a couple of intensive days and get a lot of work done which we did and each evening we went to a different restaurant to eat. The weather was so warm that we sat outside. That might not sound remarkable to many folks, since this is only September but we have known frosts on the first of September before.

Heads down eating. A serious business at this time of year

Jakobs is looking very fluffy already

One of my Estonian colleagues guided some of the our international colleagues on the bus and I guided those who wanted to walk to our evening meal. Tartu is such a walkable city (or large town really, it is smaller than the population of Chesterfield, which was the nearest town to where I used to live in the UK). It is also a very green city, which reminds me a bit of Sheffield, where I did my bachelor degree many moons ago. I found the Tartu Struve Geodetic point as we trundled about, it is the next point to the north of a point situated near our farm here in Latvia. It is weird to think there are two points that connect my life here in the Baltics that were marked in the 1800s to measure the meridian of the earth.

Freddie looking his usual sweet self

Just too much! It's a hard life being an
alpaca. At least it is for Josefs.

The meetings went well and I think everyone went home happy that we had made progress. After that meeting I got to see some of my Landscape Architect colleagues as we had a PhD seminar. This is where one of the students presents their work. I don't go to many of them, but since I was at the university all week and those meetings had finished I managed to slot it in. I was invited back to one of their homes for a quick cup of tea and a catch up, which was nice. I also got offered a room to stay in when I go up to Helsinki as my colleague's wife was at home who actually lives there, so that works. I have another place to stay on the way back too, so a time for meeting lots of people.

George finds it amusing though

Josefs demonstrating delinquent behaviour. Escaping, yet
again through the fence. 

We've been in Latvia now for nearly 12 years and in all that time we've not really had any issues with crime. We did have a wheelbarrow go missing one winter. We wondered if it had got buried in the snow because it was outside, but when the snow melted it was nowhere to be seen. Still it was not a major catastrophe. This last week though we found out that someone must have got into our woodstore and stole the two bikes we had in there. The door was still locked but Ian noticed that the window was not as secure as he thought it was and only held in by a bent nail. I wouldn't mind so much but I was just thinking of getting my bike out to get the milk in the mornings rather than taking the car to our neighbours. It's a bit awkward to carry back 4 litres of milk in glass jars and a bit awkward to get to our neighbours now they have dug ditches on the side of the road, so my bike would have been ideal and it had a basket on the front. Neither of the bikes were exactly expensive bikes, just Walmart specials but irritating to lose them nonetheless. Let's hope that is the last of the issues we have.

Little Ilvija is growing well and looking like her Mum
more and more each day

Chanel is keeping her condition pretty well so far. The new
food is obviously helping.

Aggie scratching her ear

Now chewing her toes

And she can still walk away nonchalantly. I wouldn't be able
to walk after such contortions.

Amanda! What is amazing is that Ian got this close. Slowly,
slowly he is gaining their trust.

Vanessa looking more and more like
her mother, Lady V. We'll have to start
calling Veronica, Dame V as she strikes
a regal pose.

Ilvija chewing on grass. A bit big that piece!

Lady V trying to hide in the long grass. Hasn't she read the
books? Alpacas do not like long grass

Oooh! I've been discovered!

No! No! No!

Our oat field wasn't very big. This damage just about
obliterated it. The barley is still okay and so is the
buckwheat

It looks like the wild boar thought that since we had cut down their sleeping place in the hay, then they would go and sleep in the oats instead. Not just once but twice at least. Now much of our oat crop is on the floor. Our hunter assured us he had been a few times to take a look but they are animals that migrate and so it is hard to find them. We do wonder though if he is looking in the right place, but since he doesn’t speak any English, just German as a second language, it is a bit of a problem communicating effectively with him.

There always has to be time for tea though. Here is Ian's
solution to my insulated cup always falling over. It didn't
last though, as a tea cup holder that is, as it was stacked
away with the other bales later

So hot that the little swallow chicks were all flopped over
the side of the nest

It has been one of those weeks when it is hard to know what has actually been accomplished. I seem to have spent an inordinately long time on little jobs that add up and steal time. A few minutes here and a few minutes there. Everything taking longer than I think it will and before I know it another week has gone by. I don’t think the weather is helping, it is very hot in the 30s during the day and mid-20s at night. We have been sleeping out in the caravan sometimes because at least it cools down quicker than our apartment building.

Some commenters on my blog wonder
how I manage to get everything done.
I guess you might imagine my allotment
plots looking like this

The reality is more like this. It isn't quite
a before and after picture. The first
picture is one I did manage to clear and
the second one is one I haven't got around
to yet

Improved storm drain

It hasn’t helped that we can’t leave windows open at night to let the cool night air in. In our caravan it would just fill with mosquitoes and we haven’t worked out a way of being able to put up a flyscreen and yet still be able to open the windows. In our apartment we now get mosquitoes in there too, we didn’t use to, but I think we do now because the trees have got bigger and closer to the building. Even if we put screens on the windows there, it won’t stop the local dog from barking though. It is no wonder then that one afternoon I had a nap that lasted 2 1/2 hours. I don’t often have naps, but I think I needed that one. It didn’t help the productivity output for that day though.

Finally the squashes are starting to take off, well some of
them are anyway

Some of the jobs I managed this week was to complete another lesson plan, some more gardening, tackling the tomato forest in our greenhouse and travelling backwards and forwards to get milk for Agnese. I suppose that is unusual in itself, I’ve actually been driving quite a bit this week.

The buckwheat is ripening

Ian has completed another ark for the baby chicks to go in (picture for that next week). They are growing fast and getting a bit big for the big upturned basket I put them in during the day. I do move the basket around and so they get plenty of fresh greens to eat. Talking of chickens, we swapped cockerels around again. The small cockerel was absolutely and utterly useless at keeping the girls together and so we swapped him for the one we think might be a bit aggressive - he is being given his last chance. So far he has surprised us, he has kept the girls in-line and hasn’t gone for me at all, even when I accidently got between him and the girls. He hopped out of the chicken house when I was feeding them and checking for eggs, but I stepped out and out of the way and he hopped right in again. James would have gone for me in that circumstance. So he has now been named Major Fowler in honour of the “Chicken Run” cockerel, as he reminds us of him.

The barley is ripening too

The storks are gathering, they'll be off soon. Doesn't seem
long since we were expecting their arrival

Ian has also been cutting more grass on our neighbours field. Much of it will just be left as it is no good for collecting, but we hope will improve the grass by doing so. While he was cutting he saw about 10 corncrakes, some of them quite young. One was unfortunately eaten by a stork and so Ian leapt out of the tractor and frightened the stork off, to give the others chance to escape. He also walked through the last swathe to make sure there were none in there, only to have a couple of them fly out when he did make the final cut. The corncrakes got away anyway and into the long grass at the end of the field, where they will be much safer.

The swallow chicks are so funny to see

Ian the Saviour of Corncrakes, has also had other jobs to do that were unexpected. The first one was a puncture on the car that our neighbour kindly told us about. That meant a trip out to the land to let the animals out and then a trip back into our village to get the wheel repaired. Extra fuel, extra time and a job he could have done without.

Feeding the girls

The next unexpected job was due to our errant sheep. We came onto the land one morning to see our sheep asleep in the middle of the field between the caravan and the alpaca enclosure, in other words they were not where they were supposed to be. We were grateful at least that they hadn’t wandered far. Ian went to take a look at how they had got out and found a place with a lot of wool wrapped against the wire, so we are not sure if they got spooked or had just had enough of being where they were. He thought they needed moving anyway and so set up a place in a nice shady spot for them. Where they have been set to work cropping the grass in an area that is difficult to cut due to the pig damage.

Posing with Agnese and no he doesn't cuddle her all the
time. Too much handling is not good for alpacas, but
Agnese knows she is an alpaca and that's good.

Herk (short for Herkules) is giving us some worry again. His skin still hasn’t quite recovered from the mite infestation and putting on oil in this heat, won’t be pleasant and he is already suffering with the heat. To cap it all his eye is watering again, just after we thought we had sorted it out the last time. It could be that with the heat they guys have been arguing again and he has either got something in his eye or bumped it. At least it doesn’t look infected though.

Laughing over the posing for the camera

Our neighbour’s daughter writes for the school magazine and so asked us a little while ago if she could interview us. We said yes and this week we had the interview. We got asked all sorts of questions on alpacas and also our view of farming in Latvia, as well as our views on Latvia itself. It was great to be able to say some positive things about living in Latvia, especially as she said, so many are leaving. Now she has to write all of that into a 600 word article - should be interesting. She set off on her way home and then a few minutes later returned, she had found a four leaf clover on her travels and so gave it to us. I don’t believe in luck exactly, but I’m willing to think of it as a sign of some good things coming along.

Of course this is what I do every day! Not! Only for spectators

Estelle is usually so cooperative