Waiting over

Josefs and Aggie

The waiting game was over and done with very suddenly in one day and within two hours. Aggie, poor girl, was looking very tired and fed up one evening and the next day Ian noticed she was distinctly uncomfortable. She went into labour but struggled a bit and Ian helped her to give birth, by making sure the baby did not go back in and easing the head out so it could continue to breathe. At least this was a better scenario than last year when he was on his own and she lost the baby. The vet gave us an injection to give her to relax her muscles if she needed it and we decided that it was prudent to use it as it looked like she was having another big baby. Indeed when we weighed Josefs , he was massive at 8.3kg. Aggie bonded quickly with Josefs, licking him and fussing over him. We then left them alone to carry on and went for lunch.

Still a bit groggy

Mum and baby doing well as we went for lunch

As we were sat having lunch, I noticed Mari went into the alpaca house and I jokingly said to Ian that perhaps she was just waiting for us to get out of the way and so she could have her baby in peace. There were several times this last week we thought that Mari was going to go into labour and didn't. When we got back to the alpaca house though, there she was half way through labour. Ian just helped a bit as the baby was half in and half out and she was laid down. It seemed to take it's time to breathe and Ian held it upside down a bit to help it drain out any fluid. Mari bonded quickly with Jakobs and she had obviously learnt what to do from last year and was quickly in the swing of feeding, at least once the placenta was passed.

Jakobs arrives on the scene

Josefs doing well

Mari and Jakobs bonding

Meanwhile Aggie seemed to have unbonded with her baby. We are not sure what happened, although we have read of another case of two mothers giving birth at about the same time resulting in confusion for one of the mothers and I wonder if that happened here too. Who knows. We were concerned though as the baby needed feeding and Aggie was not impressed. All through the first night we would go in every two hours, pin Aggie up against the wall and let the baby feed. This was not doing Aggie's mood much good and she started to even get aggressive with Josefs. The next day we commenced bottle feeding. It was heartbreaking as the poor little fella seemed to be all on his own as if nobody loved him.

Josefs was up and about quite quickly

Feeling lonely and tired

We couldn't give hm a cuddle as we knew that if we did that, we were setting ourselves up for even greater heartbreak later on as it would probably result in an aggressive alpaca. We often wonder about the cute alpaca videos that show one alpaca becoming part of the family and even going upstairs to sleep. After two years these little alpacas are moody teenagers and can reach around 50kg and it is at this point they could quite likely start trying to throw their weight around and try to dominate. It is called Berserk Male Syndrome or Novice Handler Syndrome. It is not funny and not curable. It often results in the animal having to be put down. Not nice when you have spent so much time with the animal.

Jakobs is getting plenty of sustenance as he is putting on
plenty of weight

Sunbathing

We carried on feeding Josefs the next day, being careful to make sure we left him alone after feeding. Eventually though he started bonding with Veronica. It seems she is being super tolerant of the little ones again. It could also be because she isn't too bothered about anything at the moment as it is just far too hot for her. She is sitting around peacefully in the shade, just what a poor lonely little fella needed. She looked a bit stiff this evening as if she needed to move about more though. We were so pleased that Josefs started to be accepted in the herd and he started to play with Jakobs. Mind you, it seemed to freak Mari out and the two young ones would run after Mari as if it was a game.

Jakobs is doing well and running around. He has spent a lot
of time with his mother and she seems more concerned about
him than she was with George

Aggie running away from Josefs

Eventually a miracle occurred. Josefs was running around looking for someone to feed him when Aggie stood up and Josefs went up to her and started feeding. She just stood there. She had been spitting him off for two days and wouldn't let him anywhere near. As soon as he had finished though, she made it clear that he was to go away. This carried on for a bit, but gradually he is spending more and more time with her and not being sent packing. She is still not the most motherly of mothers, but at least he isn't on his own and he is getting alpaca milk. We will monitor his weight carefully to make sure he is getting enough food, but even if we have to supplement, he is still part of the alpaca herd now and not so dependent on us. The timing of the births was a bit inconvenient though, it was the weekend of the local festival and so we managed to miss all of that. Oh well! There is always another year.

A buzzard

Getting stronger

It wasn't the only excitement. A little bit earlier in the week Ian was flail mowing with the two wheel tractor  and managed to get it stuck in the mud at the edge of the pond. If it hadn't been such a dry year, it would have been in the pond itself. I wished I'd taken a photograph, but I was too busy doing what I could to help or just observe. I was also thinking that I was pleased it was him and not me. I think he would have been a touch upset with me if I'd done it. The grass had got a bit long and he was trying to avoid some stones that he knew were there and got too close to the pond edge. The flail mower is very heavy and once it started to slide away, there was no stopping it. In the end he used the big tractor to lift it out after failing to be able to winch it out.

Playing games

Night time trips to the greenhouse kitchen

With baby feeding every two hours day and night the first night, four hours on the second, a couple of times on the third, we are both rather tired. The heat isn't helping. It is a good job I haven't too much academic work to do, especially as the waiting game is kind of coming to the end with one paper. In a rather peculiar way I have heard that it has been accepted, although it still says under review on the system. That will have to do for now, but then I have to get something more official I think for the thesis. At least it is a step nearer. I also have had word back from my supervisor to say that another paper is good enough to be submitted, so it will just need proofreading now. Two more papers need finishing off soon too, but first I need to get the felting course and English workshops out of the way. Then it is sit down in earnest to write, write, write.

Lady V our hero for her acceptance of the little ones

Jakobs gets fluffier by the day

We did have another surprise as a friend of ours alerted us to an article about ten places to see animals in Latvia and we were there as number 10. There was a picture of an alpaca, but it wasn't one of ours. I think we shall send them a few of the new ones, just to make it more relevant.

Mari looking good

Jakobs resting in the shade, although I did find him out on his own
in the sun earlier on today and had to reunite him with his mum,
who had sensibly gone in the alpaca house

Although it is still hot in the alpaca house too. It is strange to
think that we have seen -32C one winter and here it is +32C

Escapades

A contrite cat? Not!

Our cats are working animals with jobs to do and to a great extent they do their job well, they are often seen with mice, voles and even moles sometimes. They also manage not to bring too many live ones into the greenhouse and never into the caravan. However, they have not had such a good hunting season around my garlic. It would seem that over three quarters of it have simply disappeared and I wonder about the carrots, as there were times that water would just run away down a hole. The voles must have also had some of broad beans, as one patch seems to have only a few that seem to have germinated.

Brencis is getting big now. It is hard to think that he is one today.

A nuzzle from Mum

I don't make matters easy for the cats in some ways I guess because there are times they follow me into the garden and I am not entirely pleased with them when they wander across my seed beds or worse use them as a toilet. Not helpful, so maybe my vegetable plot is not their most favourite place to be. Sometimes when Eyre, our youngest cat, follows us it does not lead to a good outcome in other ways too. From the swallows that dive bombed her causing her to crawl along the ground to avoid them, to the time that she decided that near us was the perfect place to pee (sounds familiar) and so she scraped away at a convenient scrap of soil amongst the grasses. The next thing we saw was one cat hairing up a tree at a rate of knots, because of course there are only two sources for convenient soil patches in amongst the grass, mole hills and ant hills - she chose the latter. We laughed!

Resting under the trees under Mum's
watchful eye.

Eyre seems to have a special sense of where not to sleep and she has been shooed off my pepper plants, she got too close to tomato plants that were under fleece that she loves to sleep on. I have found her on top of the chick heater - fortunately they are safe under wire that they cannot pop their heads through. I also found her recently sat on my squash seedling tray. I wish cats had a sense of what to sleep on and what NOT to sleep on. It would be useful. It is one of the reasons for having catmint under a basket to keep it safe from cats until it has established itself properly to handle an invasion from them.

These little fellas have been safe and sound in the
boys alpaca house. They are getting big though so we thought
it probably won't be long before they take flight and join their
parents eating the insects. I love watching swallows
in flight.

One of the worst features of the cats is the fact they find small birds make a great delicacy. We had noticed a bird going in and out of the old alpaca house and were quite excited that a pair of birds had made it their home. Unfortunately we were responsible in part for their sad demise. The last sheep to give birth had to be put in the shed so that we could milk her to try and save the lambs, which if you read last week we were unable to do, but our cats thought it was a great adventure to follow us down to the shed each time we went. They seem to be less afraid of the sheep than the alpacas, as the sheep by and large ignore them, where as the alpacas are liable to investigate, which frightens the cats off.

Today they flew their nest. It was obviously getting a little
cramped in there

I always shooed the cats out of the alpaca shed, especially when they started climbing. One of the biggest problems for birds is the fact that Sofie is an excellent climber. One day we spotted her as she was starting to climb up the outside of the alpaca house, she was obviously after the nest. We shooed her off and she scampered away, but we knew it was likely to be only a matter of time. That night she hung around while we put the animals and chickens away, she was unusually attentive. Maybe I am reading too much into her behaviour, but it was as if she was making sure we went in and were out of the way, before she returned to an uninterrupted feast of baby birds. The evidence of torn and shredded fleece that was stapled to the side of the alpaca house to stop the snow in winter and help warm up the interior of that particular shed was enough to let us know what had happened.

We are quite relieved to see these two spending time with their
mother. We were worried at first that they still hadn't bonded 
well enough and she didn't seem especially attentive to them,
unlike the other mum.

The season has been tough on the plants. We finally got the rain we desperately needed and we were surprised that it appears it might have just arrived in time to save some of the shrivelled buckwheat, but it is still not as good as we would hope. Potatoes are finally starting to poke through and some other plants are finally beginning to put in an appearance after their winter sleep and so are the weeds now. It looks like we might have a grape cutting that overwintered successfully, but it has taken until now to show any signs of life. The rain might not have been in time for some of our blackberries. They were flowering away well and then suddenly started dying off. Most of my sage plants don't seem to have even bothered to appear, there are still no signs of life. One small sage plant fortunately is already in leaf and flowering but the large bushes - nothing!

Fortunately our solar dryer only blew over without any
significant damage. 

The unsettled weather unfortunately also brought a storm with it. One night the caravan was shaking with the wind and the next morning several trees were down, along with the branches in the middle of one of our cherry trees. Our new small greenhouse collapsed, but fortunately that was due to poles coming apart rather than breaking them. Connectors broke and there was already a small tear in the plastic and that got a bit worse, but it has been repaired and put back up. We are still not sure how well it will fare in another storm. Our old one is still going, despite the fact the plastic is getting brittle in places and seams tearing. That one though is well anchored into the ground by burying about 10cm or so of it into the ground and that seems to be the trick to keeping it safe. We are glad that our Christiania bike went to its new home though before the greenhouse collapsed as it was being stored there.

Fortunately this was not as bad as it looked and Ian has been
able to repair it

What I don't understand is how this shelter is still standing. It
has definitely got more and more of a lean on it, but the storm
didn't finish it off. It will be going soon though as it needs to
be taken down to make room for an office for me.

Ian has had his fair share of escapades this week. He managed to get the tractor stuck digging more holes to encourage water to stay on the land rather than run off elsewhere. We are trying to strike a balance between having somewhere for water to go when there is too much, which happens frequently and somewhere to store it for when we do not get enough rain, that also happens too frequently. He dug some larger holes in a ditch but it wasn't quite as dry as he hoped and whilst digging hadn't realised that the big wheels were sinking deeper. He spent a fruitless afternoon trying to get himself out before admitting defeat and calling for reinforcements from one of our neighbours (unfortunately no photos, as I wasn't there, I was at our apartment doing some sorting out). I saw our neighbour afterwards and he said it was easy, like plucking a carrot out of the ground. Amusing! The good news is that the holes in the ditches are full with water after the rain and the big pond that Ian dug last week is slowly beginning to fill up. The ground around is still likely to be boggy around there and so we are going to plant that area up with cranberries and blueberries. Hopefully we can take some cuttings from our other plants.

Mother and son are doing well. He is a little photogenic lamb

I often wonder what we have done over the years here, especially when considering how precarious our residence is with such things as the EU referendum in the UK. If we left tomorrow would we leave a legacy? I then think of the times that people have looked again at the rural area around them and realised how rich they are, if not in monetary terms, but in natural resources. We may not have been successful farmers or business people, but hopefully we have encouraged some to re-evaluate what they have here in Latvia and value their natural environment that is in a better state than some of the land in the UK with its over-intensified farming. Where in the UK can you hear a cuckoo on a regular basis? Where can you regularly see ospreys and eagles circling over head? Where do you see the flower rich meadows? Where can you see so many stars on a clear night that it takes your breath away?

A rather large visitor of the feathered kind. It is still amazing
after all these years to see so many storks. Not a common
sight in the UK

Many people who come are amazed at what we have managed to do over time, as they don't have the vision to see something like this happening in rural Latvia. Okay we are not turning a profit and sometimes there is a lot of work to do so we get tired, but we are eating the sort of fresh food that you pay a fortune for in the supermarkets, we are enjoying the outdoor life and the companionship of our alpacas. We have people come and visit who have heard about our alpacas and Ian never tires of telling people about them. Occasionally we also have visitors where a real connection is made and it turns into an opportunity to have a chat about lots of other topics and sometimes those chats help them to think that there is something more to hope in and there is something in the path we have tread. I am sure there are those that can tread a similar path and make more of a success of it than we have and I'm fine with that, in fact I'm more than fine with that.

Ouch!

Time for a cup of tea!

Not too good a week for me. My tooth or rather, where my tooth once was, started to heal nicely and the first few days were great but then it started to hurt. It was like having a mouthful of ulcers (canker for my American friends), it wasn't pleasant and kind of wearing. If I could get out and about it took my mind off it but if I sat at home feeling sorry for myself with the various noises that comes with living in our apartment then I didn't feel well at all. One activity I used to take my mind off it was to go and take photographs of the orchids on our land and catalogue where they were. A friend of ours is an avid orchid enthusiast and so I sent the photos off to him to see what kinds we have, as I wasn't sure whether we had a few different species or different variants of the same species. Our friend reckons we may have at least three species of orchids with some hybrids too, which to me is rather exciting as it confirms what a varied piece of land we have, one that is worth preserving and taking care of.

Scabious! I spent ages trying to grow these flowers in the UK
when we lived there and now they are growing wild on the land

My potting table removed to outside where it is a little
cooler and the view rather pleasant.

I was a bit down on Saturday as the time came around to the time when our youngest would have been due to land in Riga, if he hadn't got a job and decided he couldn't really come. I was sad that he wouldn't be around to see what we were doing and have some chats around the meal table about what he was doing. Ian and I had been looking forward to it as we haven't had much chance to see him since we have moved to Latvia. It wasn't meant to be obviously but at least being out on the land was restoring, it is so pretty there. A throw away comment by a friend about our overflowing pond from the heavy rain we had earlier on in the week set us thinking, I also loved the waterfall effect but it seemed such a waste just flowing away making everything below it very boggy and not useful and so we started on planning another two ponds in series below our first one.  This will vastly increase our water storage capacity and maybe we could also have some fish in there too. Well it took my mind off toothaches and mother aches.

These look like purple and yellow
flowers but the purple are bracts not
flowers. 

Our orchard surrounded by the electric fence. Hard to see
but there is a yellow warning sign on it - only its in Polish!
Hope the deer can read Polish.

Saturday Ian connected up our new electric fence to keep our orchard safe from a wandering deer that seemed to think our orchard was a new delicacy to be enjoyed. It totally changes the look of the place from an open orchard area to enclosed space - amazing what a few wires and fence posts can do. This will be a temporary option until we have a hedge that is high enough and thick enough to keep out the deer but that will be a while yet as we still have to take the cuttings for it. We half expected to arrive on Sunday with a frightened deer stuck in the middle and were quite relieved when we didn't but we were amazed to see a hare make its way delicately through the fence and so we wonder if it is working properly or not and I am not testing it, as I don't think it will cure my aches.

A stunning group of thistle like flowers. They are not thistles
wrong type of leaves - will look up the name soon!

It started so well!

Sunday we had to empty the water out from the boreholes that had filled them up after the heavy rain we had had so that the guys can get on and build our barn. We had a brilliant idea, why not start on the pond that we were going to build and empty the water from the boreholes into it, it will only take a couple of hours!!!! Hmmph! Well that was the idea and it was going quite well for a couple of hours and then Ian managed to get the tractor stuck in a really boggy area that had got churned up as he was working. We spent the rest of our Sunday digging it out. Took us about 6 hours! It was not fun, it took rocks, twigs, branches, straw and finally digging with our bare hands and a winch attached to our car to get it out. The mud was so sticky that it was like a very effective glue keeping our tractor in or rather digging itself deeper and deeper in. It is a good job the nights are light till very late here as we finished still in the light just after 10pm at night but we were pretty tired - we even slept in the next morning. Our last pond will now have a feature island in the middle, because there is no way we are going anywhere near it to move the soil as we are as likely to get bogged down in it as the tractor was. Even as we were digging the pond it was filling up with water from a spring that we uncovered and that was also one of the reasons we didn't dare leave the tractor until the morning as we had visions of it being in the middle of the pond by then. Heh ho! We know how to spend our Sundays, a day of relaxation!!!

Okay another orchid but they are
rather stunning plants

Free at last at just after 10pm

At least it all ended happily and instead of using the borehole water to fill a pond it was used to clean the off the mud that had caked the tractor. Waste not! Want not! Ian is happy with his nice shiny tractor now, as he had wanted to clean it for awhile, something our middle son and his fiancée obviously understand as Ian got a father's day present from them that arrived later in the day, a book called "That's not my tractor" and it finishes with "That's my tractor. Its headlights are so shiny." Impeccable timing especially as it is amazing he got a father's day present at all, even if it was late.

Those ruts were up to my mid-thighs,
okay I may be short but not that short,
those ruts were still deep!

Blue butterfly

Orange butterfly. If anyone knows what they are then please
let me know, saves me a job!

Sun and the big freeze

We saw the sun today, it was gorgeous. There was enough snow to cover everything with a fluffy white blanket and the sun softly glinting off everything was enough to lift the spirits after the long dark autumn we have had (sorry no photos yet though as I wasn't at home and didn't have the camera with me but maybe tomorrow I shall take some). Be rest assured that the snow is not going to disappear in the meantime, that has something to do with the fact it was down to -16C (3F) at sunset, and what a sunset it was, just a few clouds in the sky and the sky darkening down into that wonderful winter golden orange. One of the things we have learnt since moving away from the UK is that below freezing is okay, it is often dry, not that damp just above freezing weather that chills you to the bone that you get in the UK. There are no heroics though, when it comes to what you wear. Layers have to be chosen with care, enough to keep warm but not enough to sweat as you don't want the sweat freezing. I hate hats but I wear one all the same, I wouldn't go out without one at those sorts of temperatures, a big difference to the UK where it was rare that I ever wore a hat. I was actually working at a flat we own nearby, trying to get some extra heat into the place since the temperatures have dipped so drastically and we don't want burst pipes and it was nice to have a change of scenery while I studied, but the walk back home for lunch was chilly as there was a breeze, but bundled up in my layers I was fine. 

I got my exam results back from the OU course this week from an exam that I took in October and I was very pleased with myself as I did a lot better than I expected. I knew I had passed but wasn't sure how well I had actually done, so was very relieved to get a very good result. It does now mean that I should get a Postgraduate Certificate in Development Management as I have passed the two units required which means I can put PG Cert Dev Mgmt after my name - that is if I ever remember and if I ever really need to. Having said that I do now have to wait for all the usual verification which means waiting a few more months before it is all confirmed.

I was also pleased to get some very good results back from my two assignments on my new course and so I set off to start my next assignment with confidence; unfortunately my confidence did not last and I got bogged down in it - it just would not flow. I got quite a way into the assignment and decided that as a good student I should have a look at the question and make sure that I am actually answering the question and the answer to that was "No! I wasn't" I really felt I had been wasting my time and could see time slipping away as I have another assignment still to do before December 18th. I was so tired that night as I was explaining to Ian but then I had a flash of inspiration, I could include what I had written but I did need to lead into it differently, justifying my approach - Phew! Saved! Amazing what a bit of waffle will do but why is it that flashes of inspiration strike you at rather inconvenient times? I had another inspiring moment just as I was dropping off to sleep and it was no good hoping I would remember in the morning, I had to get up and write it down there and then.

One of my assignment topics is foodsheds - so what is a foodshed? And no it is not where you put the potatoes for the winter, it actually describes the places our food comes from. It is a term kind of pinched from geography "a watershed" which is the area that water drains from into a river. When our grandparents or even great-grandparents were little their food came from fairly local sources and so they would have had a small foodshed but as our world modernised our food came from further and further afield. Have you ever looked in your cupboard and found out what is produced locally and what is produced further afield? Have you ever thought which foods you are eating, that came all the way from Chile or Kenya, could actually be produced nearby? Okay you may have thought about that as it has a lot to do with foodmiles, but how big is your foodshed? On average in America food travels 1300 miles from source to plate (and that is not to knock Americans, those are the statistics I could find, I don't think Europe will be much better) that is a lot of travelling and we suffer for it as the choice of what we have to eat is decided not by taste but how well it handles and how well it stores. I love the comment made in one of the papers

"We live in a world in which we are ever more distant from each other and from the land, and so we are increasingly less responsible to each other and to the land. Where do we go from here? How can we come home again? "


So how do we come home again? Foodwise that is? What choices do we have to make in order to reduce our foodshed? What changes in our diet would we have to make? That doesn't mean that all our food has to come from nearby, but it should make us more thoughtful in what we do eat.

Some more momentous news this week - our little tractor finally made it back to us and complete with a front loader, only nearly two months to the day after we should have got it but who's counting? Doesn't it look sweet? Ian enjoyed playing about with it on Friday using it to pull some of the wood out of the forest instead of doing it all by hand. Only he didn't have long to enjoy having his tractor back, as now that the front loader is fitted it now needs to go to a little old man who is an apparent whizz with engineering and he is going to make a frame for the back hoe to be fitted to. Heh ho! Maybe soon it will have all its fittings ready for the Spring so that he can dig ditches with it - no chance of digging ditches now, we would need one of those machines that break up tarmac to get through the frozen ground.

Having Latvian lessons gives us the opportunity to find out a bit more about the place we live in and we found that the state of the economy in our village is not so good as you would expect at this time. There are around four or five factories making wood products and the workers are down to working around 10-15 days per month, the local hotel also has workers who work around 10 days a month and the staffing level in the restaurant is down to one waitress and the cook operating the whole hotel and restaurant with no one on reception. There is also rumour of the local orphanage possibly closing down, I wouldn't normally mention rumours but even if this isn't true it is unsettling for youngsters who have an unsettled way of life anyway and this is something they could well do with out. The orphanage is not a plush place, it is basic but the kids are well enough looked after and their life is less chaotic for being there and I worry about what the outcome for them will be, they are smashing kids who look out for each other and now the future looks uncertain.

Obviously part of the reason for these problems is the fact that Latvia has a colossal debt to repay to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which was taken out to stop the economy collapsing. There are those who believe that the IMF are solely acting as debt collectors, making sure the banks who leant far too much money don't lose it all (just search on IMF and you will see what has happened over the last year if you haven't been keeping up to date), which hardly seems fair on those who have most to lose - the poor. In return for the loan the Latvian Government have had strict conditions to accompany the credit packages, including slashing public sector expenditures, hence the closure of orphanages, some of which have already closed. At the same time the World Bank (which like the IMF is also part of the UN) has warned governments not to cut social welfare programmes as they try to limit expenditure. "They should not now make dramatic cuts across the board or stop paying pensions. Many countries have good welfare programmes in place and these should be protected," the World Bank’s Barbone said. - all I can say is will someone please make up their minds!!!!! 


Out of the blue this week we were told that the hotel where we had been meeting with other Christians was no longer available, not quite sure why but it does leave the dilemma of where to meet. The default option is to meet out at a camp which is a few miles outside of the village but this is not really the best to build a church embedded in the community in which it lives and working out Kingdom life in that community (oh and when I say build a church, I don't mean a church building). It will be interesting though to start looking at the possibilities. Houses? Community buildings? There are pros and cons to all of them but I know that personally I would hate to see a purpose built building that looked like the sort of thing that everyone thinks of when you mention the word church. I long to see more of church life expressing the life and vitality of a risen Christ, and how appropriate then that at this time of year our own church community is homeless - turned away from the Inn, I wonder what will be birthed from this?


Photos this week
Photo 1 - a desolate looking landscape just as the big freeze began to set in
Photos 2 & 3 -More ice creations - I am beginning to think that it is the ice that forms as it gradually opens up rotten wood as it freezes the contents. 
Photo 5 -Ian in his tractor
Photos 4, 6, 7 & 8 Tractor WITH front loader.