Starter Smallholders

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking forward to seeing the green grass and first flowers about now. As I sit here with snow falling heavily outside the window, it is evident that I was premature. However, I enjoyed reading in this article, via the infrequent farmer that the weather is getting warmer, and that Britons should be prepared to plant more Mediterranean plants in their gardens. If that is the case, then by the time I am seventy I can expect the weather in Latvia to be roughly equivalent to my early childhood in Yorkshire. I could be so attuned to Latvian expectations by then that I will not believe the evidence around me and will put the feeling down to the onset of senility, doggedly planting nothing before May and wondering why the soil is so warm. I hope that the irony will not be lost on an older me - I currently plan on planting things around a mental timetable that is based more closely on British weather than local conditions, and have lost far more plants to frost than anyone would be prepared to admit to.
I hate to be a pessimist, but I would put my money on those doom-and-gloom scientists who say that everything will become more extreme - and then Latvian winters will just get even colder, and the summers, which are currently pleasant, will become undesirably hot and dry.

We have finally received a quote for building the house that seems reasonable. In fact, we got two at the same time, one for building the entire house, including pretty much everything, and another for building a pre-fabricated carcass, leaving us to subcontract the foundations, chimney, and roof, while completing the finishing work ourselves. There is no cost advantage to either, so we are looking more favourably at the full build, which has come in at the same price as any other combination we have considered over the past eight months. The bad news is that the bank is very cautious about this project (no 95% mortgages here!), and I reckon we are going to be about five thousand lats short. Five thousand is a dangerous amount; it seems small enough to make it tempting to go ahead - surely we can raise that much; but is also large enough that it could leave us with a real problem in three or four months time. Sensibly, we would leave it for another year. Or stick to plan a and do it a bit at a time. Property prices are rising faster than building costs, so we should be able to borrow a little more in a year's time, and we could easily save an extra few thousand within a year. But the process has already been going on for a full year, the thought of another twelve months of camping in the existing rathole is hard to take, and having just one builder to deal with instead of a selection sounds great. More importantly, this builder came highly recommended and made a wonderful job of a friend's house. Meanwhile negotiations with the bank continue, and I spend many hours looking at the plans.

On Saturday, we drove up to the country for the first time in about three weeks. Heavy snow meant that we had to leave the car by the neighbours house 400 metres away and struggle up the hill with food, water and a fairly heavy child. I went ahead and forged a path through snow that was often above my knees, and headed striaght to our shed to collect the sled for Oliver to ride on. As I approached it I noticed that the door did not look right. With a sinking heart, I looked to the right and saw that the kitchen window was broken. The sled was gone, presumably to carry away the thieves' loot, so I went to take over carrying Oliver up the hill while Rita called the police.
A policeman turned up about twenty minutes later, had a good look around and started filling out a variety of forms. This was the fourth time we have called the police to the house over the last two years, and it was far and away the least unpleasant of the visits. Unlike his predecessors, this policeman did not say, or even imply, that we should expect nothing else when we do not live in the house or invest in noise polluting burglar alarms. Nor did he suggest that we were wasting his time by calling him out for a few tools, a sled and two petrol cans with twenty litres of last year's fuel. Instead he was very polite, very thorough (what is the make and value of your claw hammer, sir?), and seemed to take the theft seriously. He left with a newspaper wrapped package containing a note written by the thieves and the pen they had used, for analysis, and left us feeling that perhaps it was not our fault, after all. Unfortunately, his last words were that he would pass all the details on to our local policeman, who is strongly of the opinion that it is our fault, and who will probably file the papers in the drawer entitled, "stupid city people screwing up my crime figures".
There were a couple of positive points about the day, fortunately. We did not light the fire as there is little point with a wide open window, so Oliver and I played outside in deep white snow, and bright sunshine. As the sun reached its zenith, the snow on the roof of the house started melting and provided a musical reminder that winter will not last for ever. Another week or so and the grass will start showing on the south facing slopes. Three weeks and we will have some flowers out, although there may still be snow in the shaded areas, and then nature will burst into life amazingly quickly. And the other good thing? The thieves have solved the problem of disposing of last years petrol!

I recieved my copy of Country Smallholding a couple of days ago and have flipped through most of it and read a couple of articles. I was particularly attracted to a front cover article for people starting out in smallholding, You've got the land, what next? I eagerly turned to it and read "Once the house is in reasonable condition and a certain amount of disposable income is available..." That neatly cuts us out. Without a decent house on the land we are, it seems, not even ready to begin thinking about next steps. I feel a great relief. No need to clean our pasture this year, or beat the hazel brush into submission on the edge of the orchard. Instead I can sit around in shorts and drink beer while sorting out only those problems associated with house-building in the Latvian countryside. I jest, of course, but the sheer homely practicality of Country Smallholding is sometimes overwhelming, as is the insistence of various authors that one simply must have lambs, goats, alpacas, cows, pigs, bees, apples, leeks, heritage beans or whatever else is that author's obsession of the moment.
A far more readable magazine is Mother Earth News, all the way from the USA. Although they cannot seem to get their overseas subscriptions correct with any degree of accuracy, there is a very charming lady who replies to all emails almost immediately. And the magazine is obviously written by writers who have a real enthusiasm for "organic, independent living" rather than by smallholders who are trying to write. To be fair, Mother Earth covers a wider range of issues than Country Smallholder and is obviously aimed as much at the dreamer (i.e. me) as at practical issues, but the fact remains that Mother Earth can be a real pleasure to read, while Country Smallholding feels more like a textbook.
In the meantime, while waiting for Mother Earth to correct my delivery details again, I have little better to do than go and prematurely complete some of the tasks outlined in Country Smallholding.

We have just recieved our annual land tax bill for the property. The grand total? Eleven Lats and 78 santimes - roughly 12 pounds. The last time I paid council tax in the UK was more than ten years ago and it was several hundred pounds. The question that follows is, of course, how our local council pays for itself. Obviously it does not get all its income from the land taxes. I know that a proportion of the income tax from all residents goes to the local council, but it must be a small proportion, with all the other demands made on taxes. Our local administrative body, a parish-sized council, overseeing a district with 2005 residents, of whom quite a lot are not paying taxes, employs at least four people, including a land surveyor and some kind of administrator, and works out of a well-restored converted barn in the centre of the village. Even with my limited information the economics do not seem to add up, but they manage somehow. In the meantime, the government is trying to induce councils to join together into larger and presumably more efficient administrative bodies. There may be some sense in that, but a village that can offer a wide range of services on the tax income of 2005 people appears to be doing pretty well on the efficiency front.

We took Oliver to the zoo at the weekend. Purportedly, this was to show him all the pretty animals, but I had an ulterior motive - I wanted to introduce him to the collection of farm animals in the petting zoo. As the photo shows, he decided that sheep were OK, and we can have a couple of those. What the picture fails to show is his first reaction. When the foolish sheep stuck his head through the bars, Oliver put his nose within a couple of inches of the sheep's nose, stared at it for a few seconds and then swung his arm in an impressive roundhouse punch and smacked the sheep on the cheek. He has also become more violent with our cats recently. I am waiting for one of them to lose patience with him, and we will see how well he learns. Oliver gave a resounding thumbs-down to the pigs, was uninterested in the horse, not overly bothered by goats, but did approve of the Maran chickens. But the sheep was a hit, in more ways than one.
When it comes to the practicalities of putting ourselves in a position where we can actually live in the country, Rita and I are no closer now than we were four months ago. However, we have solved one problem this week: Lattelekom, who previously said that they would not put a telephone (internet) line out to the house, have admitted that perhaps they would if:
a. we convinced all the neighbours (three other houses) on the way to ours to sign up as well, or
b. we paid to have the trench for the cable dug by a private company.
We will speak to the neighbours this weekend and find out if they are interested, but even if they are not, one of the advantages of living in relatively cheap Eastern Europe is that bills for digging are unlikely to be terrifyingly high. Of course, that advantage has to be offset against our salaries, but we are hopeful...