Starter Smallholders

On Friday it was still bleak house out in the countryside. Maybe Monday will be better. On the subject of bleakness, good lighting is incredibly important in a Latvian winter when the sun is only out for a few hours a day, and there are literally weeks between sunny days. Although a large proportion of Latvia's electricity is hydro-electric, the amount of power we use just on keeping our home lit has often bothered me. So I was particularly pleased to read this article, Natural light 'to reinvent bulbs', about 100% efficient lighting. Until I started reading it. "The new material can also be printed onto glass or plastic and so in theory could create large areas of lighting, relatively cheaply." This sounded eerily familiar, and several hours later I worked out where I had come across the idea before. "Bulkheads and ceilings were constructed of the new glowboy panelling, making the long room look as though it were carved in the interior of a glacier." The quote is from Ken Kesey's 'other' novel, Sailor Song (1992), a manic romp through Alaska in a near future approaching environmental apocalypse. The world that Kesey imagines is a deeply unpleasant place, and one of the things that makes it so unpleasant is the distance that technology puts between people and their surroundings. For a dental surgery, I can see that a fully lit, 100% efficient, daylight producing ceiling is a good thing. For our house? Well, I hope that if the choice becomes available I will choose the most efficient option. On the other hand, the failings in our artificial lighting are what make real daylight, when it finally reappears, so well worth waiting for - I would rather my artificial lights remain exactly that.

My recent sick leave and a number of projects left me with a weekend that had to be spent at work, so Rita and Oliver went to the country without me. They had a wonderful time. The weather was great, the skies were blue and they explored the property to find what signs of spring they could. They even took pictures to show me what they found. I am green with envy, but my envy is tempered with relief that I have not missed the best part of the spring. The grass is, literally, not green. After two months under snow, it has not yet had enough sun to find its natural colour. Last year, with less snow coverage and a slower thaw, it all happened at the same time. The grass was green while there was still ice on the pond and snow in the hollows. Rita tells me that this year, despite the snowdrops and some little purple flowers being out, it still looks fairly bleak.
Perhaps by Friday, when I can get out there again, spring will have waved its paintbrush, loaded with green, and we will be able to toast its arrival together.

I recently spent a few days sick leave re-reading Adam Nicolson's Perch Hill. It is a book that I enjoy reading with the intensity that only comes when you feel that the author is relating to me, me, me, despite the fact that I see many things that very definitely do not relate to me. Not least of which is that he had enough money to buy a farm in Southeast England, complete with all buildings and a good sized piece of land. The assertion I found most objectionable, and that was repeated many times throughout the early parts of the book, was the idea that the value of the countryside as an area of food production could be replaced by the monetary value put on it by people seeking houses in beautiful areas. It reminded me of something I had read on the BBC several months ago, Who needs farmers anyway? Adam Nicolson soon discovered that it is precisely those people who buy the beauty that need responsible country workers - farmers to tend the land and to look after the animals, and all the people who maintain the hedges, walls and small woodlands that have made the fields of England the green patchwork they are. By the end of the book, he is sitting in a farmer's meeting, discussing the impending sale of the local livestock auction, and arguing quite strongly that country areas need to be working, vibrant and liveable, and it is his honesty about the changes that he went through over the years that help make the book as attractive as it is.
In the last few pages of the book he makes the point that the real pleasure does not lie in the management of the land, but "in the ability to roam in your mind across the surface of a place which is so well known to you that it has become in a sense indistinguishable from who you are."
These, more than anything else, are the feelings that lead me to read the book again and again. This feeling of knowing has had a profound effect on our lives, not least of which is that we are still in Latvia long after we expected to move on. And it is this familiarity with the land, this recognition and burgeoning knowledge of the work of nature around the house that forges a connection between our lives and our land, not our plans for a new house, the vegetable garden or ideas for the future development of the property. We know that the wild boar and deer have had a hard winter, because they have left trails right up to our front door; far closer than they have ever been before. We know what the land will look like as we step through the woods, where it drops away into the neighbours property, and where the deer come to drink. We are starting to know how the various parts of our property and the land around us will look as they go through the year, and it is this knowledge, or the gaps in it, that makes us feel we are missing something when we are away.

Signs of spring at last! Although most of the property is still under a spotty covering of wet snow, the south-facing slope around the house is clear, and we have snowdrops up and ready to go. Not flowering yet, but they will be within a couple of days.
More than that, we managed to get the house fairly warm within a few hours of lighting the fire, so we can look forward to staying overnight in the house for the first time since late October. Oliver seemed happy to be there; despite heavy rain and temperatures only a couple of degrees above freezing he played outside for nearly three hours. When we eventually forced him to go inside - kicking and screaming the whole way - he was wet through to his nappy, but healthily tired and ready for a snooze. Something in the environment must have affected his mood - when we got back to Riga he demanded the television (not unusual), but instead of Bob the Builder, his usual choice, he opted for Bambi!

Unfortunately, the disappearing snow also revealed all the things that we did not do at the end of last year, most notably clearing the autumn leaves. The vegetable garden now has layers. Somewhere, way down at the bottom and out of sight there is, I hope, some fertile soil waiting to spring into action. Above this is a far thicker layer of weeds than I remember from the autumn, then rotting leaves (sadly, not enough for an effective mulch) and then snow. The snow is all that stops the area looking like untended wasteland. Ironically, the snow is the only layer that will disappear without any input from us. The herb garden is showing some signs of life. The thyme survived the winter, and will, I think, look fine when I clear the ubiquitous oak leaves and birch twigs from it. Unsurprisingly, with temperatures of nearly thirty degrees below, the oregano did not live. I am hoping that the chives will spring back to life over the next month, and will report further as more of the garden reappears. In the meantime, I must think about starting some seedlings at home.