500th Post

Preparing our evening meal in the greenhouse kitchen. It has
been great to use this space at the front of the greenhouse this
year. Normally it is planted up with tomatoes but we decided
it was better to utilise the space for when we have groups and
the felting workshop. It was a good plan

A momentous occasion don't you think? Well I do! I am surprised I got this far, five hundred blog posts representing over eight years here in Latvia. As I mentioned last week it is hard to believe we are doing what we are doing now and wouldn't have envisaged life playing out in quite the way it has done over the years. Would we change anything? Not much! We love the life we are leading, even with its frustrations, but my one regret is not living closer to the grandchildren. Still won't be long before we get to see them again.

I went for a swim in our new pond. It was a nice warm day
so the water was not too cold, but I did find out that the distance
was just a tad short for a good swim. It needs more solid sides
when it is so short or I just end up muddying up the pond

One of the cut sections

So what's happened this week? It rained all night at the beginning of the week and I mean allllllll night - it was a bit noisy in the caravan. The ground that was nicely drying out was once again saturated and the beginnings of the well which was due to be dug out this week was once again very nearly a spring. Despite the soggy ground we decided that we had to go ahead with cutting for hay.

Hay stacked in the barn now under cover

Ian has been mowing the grass around the ponds and where
the well will be, otherwise by the time they come it will be
too long and get in the way.

There is such a difference between cutting hay in June and now. In June the days are very much longer in our northerly latitudes. The sun is often starting to peek up about 4am and doesn't go down until around 10pm, which means plenty of drying time and not much dew on the ground. This time of year is a different matter with much wetter mornings that don't dry out until mid-morning at the earliest. One day we woke to thick fog that meant the ground did not dry until early afternoon. Instead of at the most two days for hay to dry and only maybe needing to turn once, the grass was turned twice and took three days to dry and even then the bales were heavy.

A butterfly on our echinacea plants

Four fleeces all ready for next years
felting course. Lots of long locks, mainly
because they were so late being sheared

My friend and supervisor, who is the son of a sheep farmer came at the weekend and helped us with shearing the sheep, since they were dry enough to do that finally. He managed to do all four thankfully and Ian just trimmed toe nails. After a late lunch, he took off back to his summer home and we got on with collecting the bales of hay. We collected about half of them and stacked them, but Ian was tired because they were so heavy. We wondered about leaving them, as the forecast had been good, but he decided to check to see if they had changed their mind - sure enough they had. So we summoned up some energy and went and collected the rest of the bales, stacked them and collected up some loose hay that had taken too long to dry to be baled and put that in the boys alpaca house. It was a good job we did as we had quite a downpour in the late evening.

The Jerusalem artichokes are flowering too. The chickens will
be happy as they make great winter food for them

500kg each and now sat outside the girl's paddock. Hope it is
not too long before they get moved to their final resting place

During the week we had progress on the well. We had a delivery of four concrete rings for the construction. Unfortunately the driver managed to get his lorry stuck on the grass as he was trying to turn it around to back it up and drop the rings off. Each ring weighs a half a tonne and so you can imagine what that did to the ground. Ian felt bad enough with our little tractor as he was leaving tread marks in the soft ground everywhere, not something he likes to do because it is damaging to the soil. At one point we got pieces of waste wood and the guy jacked up the lorry on the lorry supports to get the wheels clear, they then put more wood underneath those. Ian then pulled it out with his little tractor. Good job the tractor is actually quite a powerful little machine.

A stack of waste wood and some deep tyre treads in the ground

All set up for the arrival of the group

During the escapade we noticed the guy who was due to dig the well had a bandaged finger that he was struggling with. He doesn't speak English and I think he decided it was too complicated to explain to me, so later on in the day his colleague turned up to tell us that the well digging itself was going to have to be postponed. It was probably a good job as we also had another coach group in at the weekend. Another 29 folks to show around; a group of kindergarten teachers and their families. Just about every group we have ever shown around are fascinated by our greenhouse, especially the grapes and there were a few folks who were taking pictures of friends with the grapes. We had one lady also explain that she had heard about our felting workshops and was determined to come to one next year. That's a great start and a great encouragement too for us.

Items for sale

Our own items for demonstration purposes or waiting to be
finished off

I mentioned last week the storks left and so Ian has had a lonely time cutting the hay. Normally he has a group of them who follow his tractor looking for frogs, mice, moles and the occasional corncrake. There were no storks or thankfully corncrakes either. All have left for their winter lodgings. I have heard the cranes around still and I was surprised as I thought they would have gone - they are noisy birds. Most of the swallows have gone too, hundreds of them turned up one day to say goodbye and then they were off. Ian did see a couple of them around today, but they might be sick ones or too young to go yet.

These chickens have a bit more outside space than the others,
but the little ones keep escaping. We have been gradually adding
to the reinforcements, but still they are getting out. One day
Ian found three of them sat on top of the gate and that is despite
the fact they have had one of their wings clipped to stop them
flying out.

The main culprits are the white one at the front and one of the
small grey ones, not sure from this photo which one. Our two
older chickens the brown one at the top and the black and white
speckled one on the right are still our best layers, despite their age.

My garden is getting a little wild with the squash plants allowed
to ramble where they will and the self-seeded hemp plants which
have grown incredibly tall this year. 

The girls have a long walk down to their field at the moment,
but they seem to be enjoying it, as they make the trip down
there quite often. 

At last!

Taking hay to put in the chicken arks for bedding

At last we had a few days sunshine in a row without rain. This has meant a lot of feverish activity as farmers were out in the fields cutting hay while they could. We have hung back to let the ground dry as we are not in a backlog of folks relying on others to cut and bale, we have our own equipment. It is forecast to rain tomorrow and then after that it should be dry again for a longer period of time. Instead we have got other jobs done that are on the list of to-do when it is dry enough.

The finished new herb bed. So far it has garden mint, hyssop
winter savory, thyme, golden thyme, chocolate mint, garlic
chives, sage, tarragon, variegated sage and some
lavender cuttings. 

Ian wanted to get the old wood chippings up off the road, as they have been down a few years now and starting to rot, which means it gets wet rather than giving us a good road to drive on. The aim is to add a new deep layer of chippings since it has worked so well up until recently, but before we did that the old chippings had to go somewhere. Since they are well rotted now, it was decided to use them for a herb bed and cranberry bed that I intended to make, which in turn meant I needed old logs to construct them with. The logs had got covered with bracken and other vegetation and so Ian had to strim the areas, find the logs and then move them with the tractor - now that the ground was dry enough. Some smaller rotten logs were also cut with a chainsaw to provide the main base of the herb bed and give the herb bed some water retaining content that should rot down over time. I was rather pleased with the result and it now means the herbs which are not so vigorous don't get swamped by the marjoram or the autumn raspberries that are now taking over the old herb plot.

The cranberry bed is on the other side of the pond, by the
forest. It is in a raised bed just to keep the weeds at bay, so
we hope it won't dry out too much for them. At least the
wood should hold quite a bit of moisture.

The rain has caused us a lot of problems, as I mentioned before. Our friends from America have not been able to help around the place, as much as they would like. They have cooked us meals and frozen lots of berries, which is really helpful and time consuming but many of the jobs we had anticipated doing, have just not got done. They did manage to get some posts in for our fencing this last week, so all we need to do is put the wire on when we get the chance, but that was all they managed to get done one day before the rain set in again.

I think this is a damselfly rather than a dragonfly. A pretty
colour anyway

We have still been busy of course, picking mushrooms (I really must take the camera with me sometime, as there are so many different sorts this year and unusual ones I haven't seen before), weeding the garden, mowing grass and running for cover from the rain. Yesterday was a lovely day and so we uncovered some sawdust in bags that were a bit damp and needed to dry out for our composting toilet. There was no forecast of rain and so we left them uncovered overnight. During the night though I heard the rain starting and so I quickly got up and ran outside, barefoot over the grass. It was a good job the rain was warm and we live in the heart of the countryside.

This is my favourite part of the bed. I managed to divide the
golden thyme into three and planted it with the chocolate
mint. I think they look great together or will do when they
grow a little more

Ian made table for helping with the cleaning of the wool. It is a wire mesh on a wooden frame, so it can be used for laying out the fleece and getting rid of particularly dirty bits - that is for the sheep fleece mainly though as they have much dirtier fleeces and is called a skirting table. Sounds a silly name really but refers to the outer bits of the fleece, which is where the dirtiest bits are and comes from the same word we get outskirts from. Being a mesh means we can also lay out wet fleeces that have been through a cleaning process to dry. Now we can start to process some of the fleeces for dyeing more easily. Little by little we are making progress.

The amaranth in the greenhouse is growing really well. We
were worried at first that they would shade out the chillis,
peppers and tomatoes, but the tomatoes don't seem to
mind and the chillis and peppers seem to be even thriving in
the shade, which surprised us.

Our chicks this week have been proving adept at becoming escape artists. Chicken wire is expensive and so we only use it to make a small enclosure for the chickens rather than use it to fence the whole garden. I tried to extend the area for them since there are now seven of them in a small area but didn't have any more chicken wire and so I attached net bags to the outer fence. They can just walk through the outer fence as the holes are too big to keep chickens in and only to keep sheep in and wild boar out. At first I found out they were getting out by walking up the corner support post and then just jumping out, so I put net bags over that to stop them walking out. They had had their wings clipped or rather half of one wing, to stop them flying over the fence, but they have been flapping and clawing their way up the net bags so I re-clipped their wings to see if that would help and found it isn't. I feel like the farmer in Chicken Run, those chickens are up to something.

A close up of the cranberry bed

Ian has been able to get on with flail mowing in between the showers. Normally it is just to keep the grass down in areas where we live at the moment, so around the caravan and greenhouse and part of the field. This keeps the insects down to a more manageable level. Ian also occasionally flail mows areas where the animals will be moved do, as they don't eat long grass. If we had cattle, they would be put on first and then followed by the sheep or alpacas to eat the grass down before resting the area. He also mows after the animals have been on it to cut down the type of weeds they don't eat, such as ground elder and docks, so they don't dominate the grass afterwards. We aim for animals to eat in the same area around twice in one year, to give the grass plenty of time to recover.

Having a bad hair day

This week though Ian managed to clip the boys paddock fence with the mower and broke some fence posts. They were already on the list of jobs to do because they were ready for replacing fortunately. He also flail mowed the oats and clover. The clover was planned as it is being used as a cover crop at the moment, but the oats were because they had been flattened in the rain and there was no point in collecting them. So we have plenty of mulch, just nothing much in the way of grain crops and something we need to re-evaluate in the years ahead.

A nearly full moon

Normally at weekends we make sure we are on site to welcome visitors but this week we went to our friend's celebration on her farm. It is such a privilege to see how far she has come, as we knew her before she had even bought the farm and watched the first few painful years as she adjusted to the life there. She had helped run a sheep farm and camp before, but her farm is now more isolated in winter and the first few winters had a lot of snow which proved a headache. Slowly though she built up a flock of goats from a few - I think - donated ones to the point she now has about 70 including kids. She has also built up a reputation for her cheese and people come from all over to buy some and visit the farm. It made a nice change to be part of the party wishing her success in the future.

Lady V getting comfortable in the shade

We had a test drill for a well just before the rains started but not seen anything of the guy recently, so we asked a friend to make some enquiries to see what was happening and finally he turned up this weekend with another guy who speaks English and helped us with our electric supply a few years ago. They did another test drill to check out the exact layering of the area where they think there's a good water supply and it was looking good. Apparently we have soil first, then a layer of clay, then a layer of water bearing sand, followed by clay again. They are going to start to dig the well on Saturday so hopefully that is another step forward for us.

You have to look hard but the specks in the distance are the
storks flying way up high, just before they went

It was a bit sad today as we said good bye to our American friends as they set off home after their two month stay. They have been in our apartment most of the time and we have only been back to do the washing and have showers, so it will seem a bit odd now for them not to be there, when we go. We don't intend to move back yet though, we will stay out on the land until it is too cold for us in the caravan. The signs that winter is approaching are all around though, from the occasional tree turning autumnal to the storks gathering and leaving. It is an odd feeling when the storks do that. They start gathering a few weeks or days before and then one day you may see a whole flock of them circling higher and higher, then the next thing you see is they suddenly veer off and they are gone. The swallows are still around, but one day they will just disappear off too and we won't see them until they return in the spring.

Four hung around just a few minutes more

Our boys

As we were in our village to say goodbye to our friends we decided to eat at the bakery for lunch, as we haven't done that in ages. We used to go for a walk every Sunday and have a pastry at the bakery, but now we are out on our land doing tasks or welcoming visitors. Things have changed such a lot for our friend, but also for us over the last few years. None of us really envisaged doing what we are doing now about ten years ago. Maybe we dreamt of doing something similar but not exactly and certainly for us, we never imagined it would be possible to be farming alpacas, in fact we wouldn't have even been sure what an alpaca looked like exactly and we would have been like most of our visitors who get mixed up between alpacas and llamas.

Prepping

The roadsides are looking gorgeous this year with the mix of
meadowsweet and rosebay willowherb. I got permission to
cut some rosebay willowherb from a neighbours field away
from the road, as it makes a great tea. That has now been dried
in the solar dryer

Our youngest son surprised us recently, he rang out of the blue and asked us if we would like to go to the UK paid for by him. I was a bit flabbergasted really. He explained that the grandchildren were growing and they rarely saw us together and could we therefore spare a long weekend to come. He realised that longer would be more difficult to arrange since we have to get someone to look after the alpacas. We have been to the UK for longer periods of time, but not at the same time, as one of us - usually Ian - stays behind to look after the animals and the land. So it is all organised for later on in the year, the flights are booked and he has already arranged the Friday and Monday off, so that he can pick us up from the airport and take us back. He is even organising a get together with other members of the family. So I'm looking forward to being pampered for the weekend, I am assuming of course that we will be well looked after.

A rather sweet looking strawberry. The strawberries are coming
to the end but our red and yellow gooseberries, redcurrants
and raspberries are all maturing nicely now. 

It's play, spot Ian time

Besides all the regular jobs we have been prepping the place for our felting course that starts this week. We want the place to look as neat and tidy as possible and so Ian has been strimming round the garden and mowing the lawn. I say lawn, but really it is a rather large lawn and he still bears a grudge that I didn't let him buy the motor driven lawnmower. In my defence we only had a small lawn in the US when we bought it and a driven motor was not really necessary for that. I have to admit it would make his job easier now for those areas we want looking neat and tidy. It isn't necessary to use it all the time though, often he will use the flail mower but that doesn't give as neat a finish, but I can almost hear his regrets for not buying the more expensive lawnmower as he works hard pushing the mower up the hill.

One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow

That was a lot of work! And just in case you thought I was only
taking photos, I tied up our beans and weeded the garden, a mega
task in itself

Chanel having a roll in the dirt

Visitors are still turning up to the land to have a tour to see the alpacas and although they are not coming in droves, they are coming on a regular basis and quite willing to pay too. We even had our first contact through our website this week to book a visit. We have been talking about what we feel will be an acceptable level of visits, as we hear from friends of ours the huge numbers people they have visiting and we have nowhere near the same numbers. We don't have the infrastructure for large numbers of visitors and we are not sure we would want to totally go that route, we like the peace and quiet of the countryside and we think we would lose the joy of talking about our alpacas if we had group, after group, after group. We would want enough visitors to make it worthwhile and to run some workshops through the warmer months. We don't need much and so balancing our needs with what we can provide will be our goal.

He mowed beside the greenhouse so we can hold our course
outside on nice days

Test drilling for the well at 7am. We are pleased that he
decided to drive down where we take the tractor and
didn't mess up the area that Ian has spent all day mowing

We had a visit on Sunday evening from a guy who was recently recommended to us for digging wells. He came by and did the tour of the land with the hazel sticks and decided there was a spot close to where the last guy said. At least they agree! He also came early the next morning and brought a drill to do a test dig. It was encouraging because he had a great deal of difficulty getting the drill out at one point due to the suction from the wet ground. We do indeed seem to have a very wet layer, not exactly gushing at this point but promising anyway and only about 3 metres down, low enough to be below freezing level and not too deep that it will be difficult to dig. We presume he will be back before long to see what he thinks and then we can talk about actually getting the well dug.

The paths to the garden look neat and tidy too

Lady V the indomitable old lady

I mentioned last week that we have started the process of mating our alpaca girls. Our original idea was to put our black male, Mr. P. with our white females, Lady V and Aggie and our white male, Tellus with our coloured females, Chanel and Marie. We had to rapidly change our mind though about Lady V and Mr. P. because she will not let him anywhere near her and has completely intimidated him. She only has to look in his direction and he backs off. At least Tellus is not so easily intimidated, but Lady V. despite her age is giving him the run around. We hope she gives in soon, because we only plan to mate her this year, before retiring her. We think Chanel might be pregnant already though, as Tellus is suddenly not interested in her and she won't let him near now, although she was flirting heavily with him at first, so that is promising at least.

Yes it has rained a lot this week and so we have more rainbow
photos. Our ponds are also still continuing to fill

This fabulous looking spider was not cooperating in having
its photo taken. It crawled along the wire, upside down and
so this the best I could do. I shall try again another day

Last week a friend of ours set off on her travels and so she arranged for us to have the keys to her car. It was a good job she did as Ian suddenly discovered that we had forgotten to insure our car and it had run out the day before he found out, by which time it was too late to get it insured at the office in the village. We discovered later we could have rung and got it insured over the phone and paid today, so we will know if we ever have the same problem again. At least while I had the use of the other car, I could get on with the jobs I needed to do and Ian got the chance to change the brakes and fix the fog light on our car that was damaged by the deer we hit on our Estonian trip.