Are we nearly there yet?

"We are going on holiday" but what does that mean to a
two year old? Hahaha

We are on holiday! We being me, my daughter, her husband and two young children. Being on holiday though is quite a difficult concept for a two year old - the baby is oblivious to this anyway, all he knows is he has the attention of three adults in rotation. My two year old granddaughter, however, hasn't quite grasped that we are on holiday, all day, every day while we are away from her home. She has somehow managed to mix up being on holiday with the holiday cottage and so she thinks we are going on holiday every time we set off to go back to the cottage.

A tad damp don't you think? This is Lake Windermere

The weather has not been particularly good. In fact it took us an hour and a half yesterday to do a thirty minute journey due to the number of floods. This meant there were several places with only single file traffic. There was also a lorry stuck at one place it meant the cars had to drive on the pavement to get passed. If you take a look at the video on this link, you can see the lorry and the cars trying to get by. It is a good job we came up in the Land Rover.

Painting a picture on the touch screen

We decided to go to the Beatrix Potter Attraction in Bowness on Windermere, since it was indoors out of the rain and might entertain a two year old. The place is only small but they do pack in a lot of little scenes and my granddaughter was quite happy to see them all. A more boisterous, active child might not, but she is into books and has a good level of conversation for her age and so we had quite a chat as we went round. Her favourite part though was a touch screen table where she "painted" a picture. It was amusing to watch her use her finger to pick up the paint and then dot it onto the picture. She kept looking at her finger as if she really had paint on there before daubing the picture with it. Being out of season it was also nice and quiet and she had no competition for the activity. I dread to think what it would have been like in high season. Since she is getting quite bossy just lately (over tired we think) she would have probably told everyone that they would just have to wait. She tells people this with an over exaggerated shrug of her shoulders and by flapping her hands to lend her full weight of authority to the matter, as only a two year old can do.

No pictures this time of the Duddon. It is a bit difficult from
the back of a car and the roads are too narrow to keep
stopping and I think it would have tried the patience of a
certain little lady. Anyway typical stonework from the
Lake District

Today we went to the Duddon Valley. It is one of the prettiest and yet under visited valleys of The Lake District. At one end it has two passes that are some of the hairiest roads in the country with so many tight hairpin bends, both of them are also pretty steep. Hardknott into Eskdale, which we didn't take is the steepest. Coming over Wrynose, the other pass, at the top end of the valley it is fairly bleak and open, with many of the traditional hardy Herdwick sheep determined to make life difficult for drivers by sauntering along the road or trying to dart out in front of them. We had to crawl slowly towards a cattle grid before they cleared out of our way at one point. I am very familiar with the Duddon (you can see pictures from an earlier trip here, including the Herdwick sheep), as my Godmother used to own a hill farm in the area and we would pay regular visits as a family during my childhood. I often wondered if I would have been able to cope with life as a hill farmer in The Lake District and would loved to have given it a go and I guess it is one of the reasons for having our land and alpacas now. Just need to spend more time there at some point.

The weather might be dreary, but I still
love the Lakeland scenes, this is
Grasmere near where we are staying

Despite coming in from a different road to the one I was familiar with as a child, I still managed to find the track to the farm where my Godmother lived when I first knew her. I say when I first knew her, I arrived as a little baby to see her for the first time. I took my little granddaughter for a little walk while her baby brother was being fed and showed her the beck (brook) where I would fall in on a regular basis whilst trying to "fish" - I never caught anything, except perhaps a cold, but I don't think it really did me any harm. It was too cold and wet to go on a hike with a toddler and a baby today, perhaps another time, so I couldn't show them the isolated farmhouse that my Godmother retired to, up the very steep track. We had a picnic in the car though further along the valley at Ulpha bridge, a popular spot for those in-the-know and then headed to Broughton where we had a drink and a piece of cake (I am on holiday and it is back to the cake free diet later).

She wanted her photo taken, but all I
got was this serious look. Those are
her paintings in her rucksack. All 4 of
them

Before we came up to The Lakes it has been filled with a similar routine to last week, with an activity in the morning such as toddlers, messy play or pre-school and then my daughter doing some more renovation work while I baby sat in the afternoon and the evenings. All of us, including my son-in-law who was working on the house in the evenings, were pretty tired by the time we stopped to come on holiday and although they have a lot of work still to do, it has been nice to sleep in a bit and not have to be up late in the evening trying to get things done. I did try and help my daughter whilst the two year old was at pre-school but of course the baby had other plans. At least I moved a pile of tiles and picked up the loose plastic spacers, the sum total of my physical work on the renovations to their home.

A walk home from pre-school on one
of the few sunny days

Back home in Latvia Ian has been trying to do some more sorting of the third alpaca house. He has bought fence posts and on a particularly rainy day went to Jekabpils the big town to get some U-nails to attach the fence and a hole borer to make putting fence posts in easier. The weather hasn't been kind to him either and so the top pond is full and he hasn't got the fence in yet. He has wired in some lights and sockets into the alpaca house - next will be the kitchen and bathroom - only joking. Our plan will be to have an area where we can support any pregnant female should we need to and so already having lights and sockets means we can connect up an extension cable from the greenhouse without a problem if necessary.

Looking backwards down the hill towards the town

The leaves are still on the hedges here,
but I am guessing back home they
won't be

Ian has also being helping some neighbours to transport a couple of wild horses. These must have been a little wilder than the ones I saw recently and one did not want to cooperate and go in. It did eventually but a rear triangle got damaged and our neighbours have taken the broken one away to get another. I do hope they do and don't forget about it.

I love the colours of autumn

A house nestled in the valley with the stone walls

He has also been having some minor issues with the newbies, which is only to be expected as they settle in. One issue though is not so minor and that is our largest female alpaca, Veronica, is still taking exception to one of the newbies. Ian has been locking Veronica away in the training pen or separately in the paddock while the others are out in the field until we find out a way of dealing with the behaviour. At least the rest of the herd have accepted the new ones though. Hopefully we will get a reply from someone who deals with alpaca behaviour fairly soon with some suggestions as to what we can do.

A fern growing naturally in the moss covered stone walls

As you maybe able to tell from the title of the blog, my little granddaughter was not terribly patient in the car on the way up. We were hoping she would sleep a little longer than she did. The refrain "Are we nearly there yet", uttered by so many children on long journeys could equally be uttered by many on their life journeys. For some the refrain refers to the idea that the world will get worse and worse and worse and then Jesus will come back and sort it all out. I confess I believed that once, but I don't now. I believe that Jesus wants to sort it out through people, just like he has always done, as far as I am concerned. According to statistics the world is not getting worse, it is actually getting better in terms of crime rates and poverty. The world has always been a dangerous place to some degree somewhere. Catastrophe, as we have unfortunately seen in Paris but also elsewhere in this world has been just around the corner, but so has goodness, so has mercy, so has love. There are real hurting humans out there of many colours, who need other loving humans to give them homes, food but above all dignity. If we stop seeing others as barbarous backward heathens, or some variation of that and try to see the humanity and the needs, maybe we will stop thinking that all we need to do is bomb the life out of each other.

Not sure how much longer the iconic telephone boxes will
be around and so I thought I had better take a picture

A house on a grander scale

When I was younger we were afraid that the Soviets would set off a nuclear bomb and obliterate us in our English homes. What I didn't realise was that the same fear existed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Different groups of people expecting annihilation from the other, separated by fear and a lack of knowledge of who the others were. If I could say anything that might make a difference, I would say go into the highways and byways and invite someone from a totally different background to eat with you. Talk about hopes and dreams and aspirations and see how similar they are. One by one around the table discovering how human nature longs for safety, hope and like I've already said, dignity.

Reflecting

No not a volcano and mountains, but
a rather large black cloud moving in

A comment by Karen last week on this blog made me think. She said our preparation is like a military exercise, which in some ways it is and in some ways it isn't. We know there is a specific sequence of events that has to happen before we can do a job and that gets refined each year - well sometimes it does, sometimes we forget what we did and have to relearn every year. As far as the alpaca clean out is concerned we work on the principle that we need a clean house at this time of year for several reasons, firstly it is close to the time of the birth of the cria and we need a clean place for them to be born in; secondly we shear the alpacas in their respective sheds, as it is a familiar environment, and there is nothing worse than kneeling down somewhere that is not too clean; thirdly to keep the pest numbers down - over winter heat is generated by the rotting manure, which is supposed to be good for the animals and once it freezes there is no shifting it anyway and neither does it create a problem of smell, this time of the year it is different though; fourthly if the bedding layer got much higher we wouldn't be able to get in there comfortably. So as soon as we get a dry enough day to use the tractor and trailer we move into cleaning mode and get in there and get the job done.

If you look carefully, there is smoke coming from the
greenhouse in the foreground. It was 6C this evening

Seed and potato planting is another of those jobs and is also very weather dependent. We know there are usually dry spells in the spring followed by wet and showery weather, so we have to move fast to get the seeds in while we can and in so doing also taking advantage of the wet weather to water in our seeds. We also know from experience that there can be quite a prolonged dry spell in May or June and so getting the seeds in and growing well before then is quite crucial. A lot of the time it actually feels more instinctive than planned, but when we see our neighbours doing the same thing then we know we have really just attuned ourselves to the natural cycle of things around here. It took a little time to get used to, as the season is longer in the UK where we learnt the craft of growing vegetables. Having to wait until late April, May or even early June seems far too long, but the longer days and warmer summers usually make up for the shorter season.

Yey! Cherry blossom

There was a bit of excitement this week, I heard a commotion one day as I sat in the greenhouse sifting compost. It was severe enough to make me run outside to find out what was causing it. What I saw was our rather elderly and portly big white chicken, we aptly call Big Bird, flying across the pond - no mean feat for a bird of her size and age, especially when she spends most of her time very slowly sauntering along with a distinct limp these days. A fox was also heading in her direction. With nothing I could immediately find to throw at the fox I just ran and hoped it would see me and scarper - which fortunately it did.

A rather ragged looking tail now. He looks a bit bedraggled
here as it has been a miserably wet day

The poor scared chickens were all gathered around one cockerel regardless of which batch it was from, meanwhile the other cockerel was trying to be brave and warn everyone. I couldn't get hold of Ian as he was strimming and couldn't hear his phone and so I spent the next half hour trying to coax the chickens from the chicken house back into their place to shut them in safe and sound. Unfortunately one of the chickens was really freaked out and I didn't dare pick her up as I knew the cockerel would not be happy.  The other batch of chickens went into their ark no problem, but I had to go and get Ian to coax the cockerel in as he wasn't going anywhere near me and my attempt to catch him with the net, whilst successful was not fruitful in the end as he escaped from it, before I could get hold of him. Ian found a few of his tail feathers a couple of days later and so we think the fox must have nearly got him – no wonder he was a bit freaked out.

Asparagus is starting to come through, but only one plant
is showing signs, which is a bit worrying

On our way home we saw that fox again, a fallow deer and a stork in a field and it made us think - how many other places would you see those within a short space of time on our way home from “work”? The variety of small birds is not huge around us, probably due to the harsh winters but we definitely do have swallows, siskins, wagtails, blackbird, chaffinches, bullfinches and I think some type of warbler. What we do see on a regular basis, which is a bit more unusal are ospreys, eagles, storks and cranes. Today we saw some white egrets on our way home from town after a visit to the dentist.

I tried taking a picture of the baby chicks but they weren't
cooperating. You can see the two black ones can't you?
From left to right, grey, black, mottled white, black, white.
No? I can't see them very well either. Maybe another day

Whilst on the subject of dentists, as you may have gathered we have finally found a dentist that speaks English and works within a reasonable distance. She isn’t the cheapest dentist around (either that or the prices have gone up recently), but at least I can call her myself and make an appointment. The other good news is that it only took one injection and it didn’t hurt whilst she administered it from some weird gadget that counted down to us in English. She laughed and said it was an English-speaking machine and could translate for us. I wish! The bad news is that one tooth will have to be extracted at a later date, one tooth had a hole that was so deep she had to do root canal treatment and I still have one tooth that needs a filling. So that means two more trips to see her and she booked us in for the hygienist the next time.

Mr. Tellus has been enjoying his yearly
outing to see the ladies. Well one in
particular. We are fairly certain the
younger alpaca we tried to mate last
year is not pregnant and so trying
again this year. We will only mate her,
the older ladies can have a rest from
producing. Tellus and Estelle though
only seemed interested for two days, so
 will try again in a few days time.

Ian had a late evening phone call this week with a request to transport a horse for a friend. It is the first time that our horsebox, has actually been used to transport a horse. It has been used to transport a cow, sheep and alpacas in terms of animals; it has also been used to transport furniture, hay, the two wheel tractor, rotavator and wood, so it is quite a novelty to use it for what it has been intended to for. Ian was quite pleased that the horse even left us with a present of some manure, but it did stink the greenhouse out when he put it on one of the beds. It has now been dug in and so doesn’t smell so much.

One we didn't part with

We said goodbye to twenty of our chicks this week, nine of the little ones and eleven of the bigger ones. We kept all the pretty looking ones – so much for selecting for meat birds or good laying birds. We thought it would be interesting though to see how they turn out, as some of them are so black I wasn’t able to take a photo of them in the dim light of home. Oddly enough there weren’t any brown ones, even though we do have about three good brown layers. Another twenty are on to incubate for another request for new stock.

Various salad type leaves in the greenhouse

Bill a regular commenter on here recently listed all the seeds he has sown on his farm on his blog, so I thought I would have a go at my list. I haven't put all the varieties, because some are seed we have kept or been given and I cannot be 100% certain of the variety. Ian is much better at keeping records than I am but he doesn't do much in the way of seed planting - unless it is en masse.

Vegetables
Carrots, Leeks,, Parsnip Kale, Short beans x 4 (red, stripey, spotted, black), Climbing beans x3, Turnip, Broad beans, Swede - 3 (rutabaga for my American friends), Beetroot, Cabbage x3,  Chinese cabbage,  Scorzonera, Carrots x2 (more later), Kohlrabi, Chicory x2, Celtuce, Onions -at least 3 varieties, Rainbow chard, Garlic, Welsh onion, Calabrese, Chenopodium giganteum



For the Greenhouse
Spinach, Peppers x3, Chick peas, Spring onion, Sweetcorn, Cape gooseberry, Rocket, Lettuce (outside too), Radish (outside too), Tokoyo Bekana, Peas, Tomatoes x 20, Mizuna, Sesame


Herbs and Flowers
Sage, Coriander (cilantro), Basil, Marigolds, Dill, Basil x6, Fenugreek, Cress, Mustard, Winter purslane, Spicy shrub, Parsley x2, Bergamot, Peppermint, Lavender, Marshmallow, Nigella

Field types

Wheat - April awned (small bed of these), Oats - hulless (again  a small bed of these), Buckwheat, Clover, Beans (brown and beige), Sunflowers

Estelle, Tellus' lady friend. She badly needs her teeth
cutting, but hopefully the remedy the
tooth-a-matic (what a name!) is on its way.

The twenty varieties of tomatoes does not necessarily mean many of each, honest, it is just people give us the odd one and we add them to the varieties grown. Some are even named by the people who gave us them because we lost the names along the way. I think we will start to drop some of the varieties this next year though. The clover will be in for a few years to improve the soil in a particularly sandy area, so it will be cut to mulch it into the ground. At home I have also started on the squashes and cucumbers – there is no point in starting them too early because of the risk of frosts if they are planted out too early.

Snowdrop has been showing signs of discomfort just lately
and so we hope those are signs of an imminent arrival

On a positive note Ian's mother's house has now had an offer put on it that has been accepted. Not sure how long the process will take now though before it is finally sold. I know it always seems to take an inordinately long time in the UK.

Surprises

Never seen this before, a rainbow in the
morning fog

I haven't been doing so well with jars just lately, thankfully this time the jars I managed to smash weren't full, unlike the full jar of tomatoes that I smashed not so long ago. This time one was at home, but embarrassingly one was in a shop. I picked up a pack of 8 bottles and at the bottom was a hole that I didn't know about until I picked it up. Oh boy! I am feeling rather clumsy at the moment, especially as I have also managed to walk into the handle of the chicken ark and have a wonderful bruise on my leg now. Must be my age! Anyway all I could do was gesture at a lady that there was a bottle on the floor and leave her to it, felt more like running off and leaving it. Today I managed to redistribute rather a lot of grape puree, leftover from making grape juice and put through the vegetable strainer. I'm not sure what happened really, but bits flew in different directions and the bowl tipped onto the counter. Thank goodness not much went anywhere else. I decided to freeze the puree since I didn't trust myself to make jam out of it just yet. Good job we went today to go and get a large chest freezer because our upright freezer is full to overflowing, as is the section under our fridge and I have hardly even started freezing things like broccoli, which is just starting to get going and beans.

"How's your children, errr I mean alpacas" said my friend
last week! Haha

It has been a smashing time from other angles too, but this time in a nice way. I got to see the 20 week scan of our first grandchild which was really exciting. It is a little difficult at times to remember that our daughter-in-law is pregnant, as we are not in constant contact or get to see them often - just one of the downsides of living far from family (although that depends on the family I guess, I am sure sometimes it could be a blessing). Planning to see them will be a challenge, especially as we are aware that our animals need to be looked after too, but I'm sure we will manage it. The scan pictures though are fascinating, especially the one where we could see the spine curving around so beautifully of the little one all curled up in Mum's tummy.

We have a squash plant. Last year we had a whole load by
this time in the year as you can see here

This week hasn't been the sort of week where we get done what we planned. The forecasts have been completely useless for us this year. The weather has been just far to unpredictable and that makes planning jobs a nightmare and that includes this week. For instance today the weather said light showers, which was the case out on the land apparently but over the apartment it was a torrential downpour for at least half an hour and some showers on and off. At least we did get one side of our land cleared of hay bales earlier this week and now they are all stacked or dumped as the case maybe. The stacked ones might be useful for bedding but we won't know until we open them but they seem like they maybe okay. The rubbish ones are stacked in a line for growing pumpkins over next year or dumped in a pile while we decide what we are going to do with the one particular part of the land. We are now debating whether to put another pond in and see if that helps to drain a field, as well as use the spare soil to raise the level of the rest of the area. We were completely whacked after clearing the bales, even though they are small there is a lot of them and by the time we had cleared around a hundred of them we could barely lift them, so we finished the job off working together, at least that way we could lift them. Awww! Sweet heh?

Not the best photo in the world but as you
can see, autumn has arrived here with this
glorious maple

I mentioned last week that our friend said autumn is the time of year for escaping animals, well it appears she's right. Not only have our alpacas been stretching the limit a little, but our neighbours cows escaped. Ian was working in the barn and I was in the greenhouse when we both heard voices and we looked out to see the neighbours cows and two of our neighbours looking rather flustered and frustrated. All of their cows had found a hole in the fence that some wild boar had made and decided that we had better grass than they had and came for a visit, or maybe as Ian said they had heard about the alpacas and fancied a visit. Our alpacas weren't impressed and disappeared off to the workshop where they live (I know we still call it the workshop, even if now it is the stable really) and one or two of the cows decided to try a closer inspection, but fortunately Ian got to the gate first and shut it before they could get in. There is no telling what sort of a job it would have been if they had got in there as they trampled over the fencing that keeps the alpacas in their extended area. We then helped our neighbours to herd the cows back to their land and then they kindly took us back in the car as we had tramped over quite a few fields to get them back to where they belong. It gave us a chance to show the husband around as he had not seen our land, or the alpacas.

Some better behaved cows on our way back from getting the
freezer. If you look hard you can see the lady in the horse and
cart who is driving them

Arriving at their new destination (photo by Ieva)

The other change of plan was due to helping out some friends with transport. We found out that they are moving and there wasn't much notice, but they needed to do something with their sheep as they weren't taking them with them to their new place. Another of our friends decided they could take them and we ended up moving them from one friend to another at short notice, i.e. we only found out in the morning and we moved them that afternoon, but at least we got a nice meal out of it - the mushrooms picked from the forest were heavenly.

Ian trying his hand again at herding, this time sheep not cows
(photo by Ieva)

Enjoying the sunshine in their new home (photo by Ieva)

Our combination microwave is quite old
now but still works well, if you can get
the tiny microswitch to work that is. It
is frustrating that for the sake of a small
switch the microwave might have to be
thrown away. We've tried looking for
parts but it is so old it is not helpful.

It was back to school today for the children and it was fun seeing so many of them in their smart clothes and carrying flowers. One of our neighbours is a teacher and he came back carrying some flowers even though he is male, it is quite normal here to give flowers regardless of gender. It wasn't a full day back at school, just a sort of celebration of the beginning of the year, classes should start tomorrow. It did mean though that our neighbour turned up just as we were trying to manoeuvre the freezer down the stairs and he offered to help. Although I managed to help get it down the stairs the wrapping started to disintegrate badly and it was more difficult to hold and so I was really pleased when our neighbour reappeared having changed to help get it into the basement room itself.

Herkules

It is interesting on a day when children go back to school after the summer break that we had been talking recently of the difference between work and toil. Physically we both work harder than we have ever done, but some people wouldn't class it as work, because no one employs us and no one pays us. So many people though go to work and it is a burdensome thing to do - is that toil? Were we toiling when we were putting bales of hay away? It was work and it was hard work, but it was a warm day and we were out in the fields and not stuck in an office. We even had time for discussions to try and work out the best way to deal with the bales so they are useful for next year, even if that means only useful for compost. So what do you think? Is there a difference between toil and work? Or are we just nitpicking?

Updated photos to properly credit the photographer, our young friend Ieva