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Another week has passed with roughly one-sixteenth of the progress that I had anticipated and hoped for. Heavy rain for much of the weekend, and sickness in the distaff side of the family meant that the only major task achieved was cutting the grass - thank heaven for our sickle bar mower, which can cope with damp grass.

It's not all bad news of course - Oliver enjoys being out of town whatever the weather and is seemingly unfazed by rain. Rita went up mid week to check on our newest plants, and discovered that we had almost 100 percent survival. Less happily, she also discovered that our thieving friends had been in again. The house is now set up so that they can get in with brute force but without actually breaking anything - we have spent a fortune having window panes replaced. However, it seems that this is no longer enough of a challenge, so they also broke into our shed, which I thought was fairly secure. More work needed there. Little, if anything, of value is missing; although for reasons best known to themselves, they used my saw to cut off the handle of a garden fork, replacing the saw neatly on its hook. Rita called the police for what turned out to be the sixth time. The response was truly impressive - it seems that we must be affecting their ratings. The local PC turned up, then called for a scene-of-crime team, who came and lifted fingerprints, footprints, and even took cigarette butts for DNA analysis.
The only other event of interest was that four of the strawberry plants were under the plastic that they had previously been poking through. My first thought was that our friendly neighbourhood thieves had done it, but I swiftly realised this idea was quite paranoid - why would they do so little damage if that was on their minds. The strawberries are well sheltered from the wind, and I had trouble imagining what else could have happened. It was only as I was threading the plants back through their holes that the truth hit me. A mole had tried to stick its head up through the plastic - a move that must have confused the poor mole very much.

The same market also yielded some additions to our herb garden. Twenty-five basil plants will be used fresh through the summer and then turned into half a dozen jars of pesto for the winter. A marjoram plant - the most expensive at about 25 pence - will last until the winter comes, and four tiny rosemary plants will be shared between the garden here and the flat in Riga. When the two in Riga have grown a little, the mature plant that is currently on our windowsill will be planted out in the countryside and given a dose of fresh air and sunshine to recover from the hard use it underwent in the winter. These, in addition to our existing thyme, chive and burnett plants, will form the basis for this year's herbs, although I would also like to get a couple of sage plants growing and some dill in the vegetable garden.

Our main reason for visiting the market where we bought the strawberry plants was to get some seedlings for the vegetable garden, as a couple of trips overseas and generally poor organization had prevented us from starting any seeds indoors this year. Our local market is amazing at this time of year. It is full of old ladies, who appear to have grown seedlings on their living room window sills, selling them straight out of the seed trays at ridiculously low prices. A total outlay of about five lats (five pounds) bought us 20 each of leeks, two different varieties of cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, two varieties of lettuce and a couple of pumpkin plants. A few hours weeding and planting and our vegetable patch was looking rather overcrowded - more digging next week for peas and beans, which are still not in. Tomorrow, Rita will go up while I am at work to water them and check for continued life.

We picked the first batch of rhubarb at the weekend. Although we only have three plants, they are very old and desperately in need of lifting and splitting - a job that I keep on failing to get around to - and are very productive. We pulled a couple of kilos of stalks off the plants and gave most of it away immediately. What is left will go into a rhubarb crumble, which is still the best use I have found for it. I may be a little more adventurous with later pickings. When the season is over, the plants will get a good dose of compost and this year I will lift and split at least one of them.

We also planted some strawberries. We had not really intended to as it is a bit late in the year, but there were a few tail enders for sale on the market for practically no money and we picked them up just because they were there. No idea what variety they are - we were just told they are very sweet and not earlies! We were not really prepared for them, so there was no bed ready, very little compost and no plastic mulch. The good news is that we had at least thought about it and knew more or less where they were going to go, so Rita roughly dug over some ground and removed the worst of the bindweed roots, I put planks of wood on either side and then covered it with old compost bags before planting through slits in the plastic. The weather has cooperated - the ground was very wet when we planted, then it rained heavily and now the sun is shining. Now we will wait and see what happens.

Success! Oliver and I picked another few hundred dandelions over the weekend, and made another batch of dandelion honey.

Having picked and separated the petals twice, we were very cautious with this batch and the final result is runnier than we really wanted. But it is tasty, and in fact does taste like a kind of honey. It is hard to describe the taste - sweet, of course, but not cloyingly so; the flavour is almost musty, similar to the heavy heather honeys but not as sweet; and although it doesn't seem possible, it does taste like the countryside in early summer. I took a jar to school for the students to try and their verdict was incredibly positive - the staff also enjoyed it. Overall, I would recommend it - perfect for pancakes and toast and much cheaper than maple syrup.

which should, more properly, be called dandelion syrup, was mentioned to me by one of my Latvian colleagues last summer. Neither Rita nor I had ever heard of it, but a flick around the internet brought up three or four recipes. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready to go, the dandelions were past their best.
This year I was prepared, and yesterday noticed several thousand dandelions on a piece of lawn outside the school, so I took a group of second graders outside at breaktime, picked a few hundred and started separating the petals from the green bits. The petals were boiled, left to soak and then squeezed hard to get all the water out. We added a kilo of sugar and some lemon juice to each litre of liquid and then simmered for several hours. It all sounded so simple in the recipes I read online, but the crossover point from dandelion syrup to burnt sugar toffee seemed to happen much more quickly than expected. We jarred it, but it was too late - the syrup turned solid in the jars and tastes of nothing more than caramelised sugar. The worst of it is that I had promised the children a sampling session, so some part of this weekend is going to have to be spent on repeating the whole experiment without the benefits of child labour.

Not much to report at the moment - I have just returned from England. It was surprisingly hard to leave the UK this time. In ten years overseas I have only been to England in high summer or deepest winter, and had forgotten just how beautiful the countryside can be in this season. I walked along the cliffs of Cornwall through the smell of coconut coming from the gorse flowers, and wandered through woods paved with bluebells. To keep things in perspective I also photographed the brown flow from a sewage outfall pipe and a hideous caravan park along the cliffs.
While I was gone, Rita went up to look after the vegetables and reports that the weeds just keep on coming. She removed another few thousand and watered the vegetable beds. It is still very dry here but unfortunately we will not be able to go and water our thirsty seedlings until Friday. For now, I am hoping for rain, rain and more rain.

Yet another phalanx of weeds had stuck their heads through the ground over the last week, sending up aggressive little shoots from whatever pieces of root I had missed. However, their very growth was to be their downfall - as I dug in the compost yesterday, the contrast between the colour of the dark earth and the white shoots enabled me to remove another good collection of root pieces. After such a satisfying killing spree, I was ready for something that felt more like creation than its opposite, and starting preparing some seed beds. The beds have actually ended up about 10cm higher than the paths between them. I am not sure of this is a good or a bad thing, but I am worried about water retention, particularly at the moment, when it has not rained for over two weeks. Assuming it does not all dry to dust and blow away, the seeds in one of those beds are an early and a late leek, some red onions with a short growing length promised on the back of the packet and two varieties of spring onion. The other bed has only one variety of broccoli at the moment.

A couple of weeks ago, soon after the snow had melted from it, I dug through our compost pile to see what had happened during the winter. The short answer is nothing. The oldest part was still half composted and the newer pile was basically unchanged from its autumn state. I suppose that this should not have been a surprise considering that I actually found a lump of frozen composty ice in the centre of the pile - it's obviously a good insulator. I split the pile into two - the almost complete part for use around the fruit bushes this year, and the rest to continue composting. Last week I stopped at the garden centre to buy some commercial compost to add to our soil immediately. As I was returning the trolley, I overheard an enquiry from a customer about whether the compost was suitable for organic vegetable growth. The organic movement here in Latvia has made a slow start despite some devoted and high profile advocates, so it is always a pleasure to see evidence that it is gaining a grassroots following. I later checked the compost that I had bought and was amazed to discover that it comes with added minerals and fertilisers. Compost seems to be such a simple thing, but it appears that even that needs to have extras added by the manufacturers - is this for our convenience? I checked the ingredients, discovered that my Latvian is not up to scientific terms, and then used it anyway. We are not after certification and I did not add a huge amount so I am not going to worry about it until the next time I go to buy some. Then I will read the small print more carefully and check with Rita before buying.

Nothing has acted as such a potent reminder of how far I am from home as the death of my grandmother. I was surprised, not by her passing, which, at 93, was inevitable at some point, but by the depth of my own grief. A large part of the picture that is England, my home country, has gone, and left a space that is unlikely to be filled when I am overseas. This event is probably the largest single change to the landscape that is my England, and a harsh reminder that I am increasingly a stranger in my own country, as well as a foreigner here in Latvia where I live. Here, I play the foreigner well, enjoy it even, and have been told by readers of my column that they enjoy this unusual viewpoint. At the same time, each visit to the UK leaves me feeling more discombobulated, as the country that I knew changes and grows. We have a good life here, with many satisfactions that we may not have achieved in the UK, and I feel at home both in the anonymous city and in our sparsely populated area of the countryside. But I cannot help wondering if I will ever feel that I belong anywhere again.

Saturday morning. We were sitting inside the house eating breakfast and planning the day ahead, when Rita tried to attract my attention. When it became clear that she was not choking, I followed the line of her finger and caught sight of a mature roe deer buck walking through the orchard just over the pond. Roe deer are not an unusual sight in Latvia - there is a resident population of about 80,000 - but whenever we have seen them in the past, they have been running away from us. What was fascinating was watching this old man, still in his winter grey coat, move calmly and steadily around his territory, stopping now and then to browse the ground for food and to rub his antlers against a tree. We did not have the digital camera that weekend, and the film camera was hanging on a fence post outside, but I sneaked out, picked it up, changed the lens and moved into position to take a shot as he came out from behind a hazel thicket on the edge of our territory. I was too slow - he spotted me and took off. We did not expect to see him again.
Saturday afternoon. Sitting inside and eating a snack. Back he came for another check of his land. This time I did manage to get a shot, although a very bad one through the branches of some willow. We just retrieved the film from the developers and found that they developed every picture apart from that one. Looking at the index print, it does look like an out of focus shot of a willow bush, but we will ask them to print it anyway to see if our old man is visible.
As if that were not enough excitement, that evening I went outside for a cigarette just as it was getting dark. Sitting on the bench under the birch tree, I spotted movement out of the corner of my eye as an owl landed on the top of the woodshed. I thought little of it - we have been picking up large owl pellets from the woodshed for over a year, and there are thirteen varieties of owl in Latvia so I did not fancy my chances of identifying this particular one. On Friday, a man from the zoo came to school with some local animals as part of our work on Earth Day. He brought an owl, whose size and silhouette exactly matched ours - the owl shaped head accented by two lowered 'ears', and is apparently distinctive of only one variety. It turned out that our friend is an eagle owl - an endangered species in Latvia with just fifty breeding pairs. This, of course, is exciting news, but it also puts us in a quandary. The old woodshed is increasingly unsafe and we were going to demolish it early this summer. We are not sure how closely attached the owl is to the shed, although it is always plentifully scattered with pellets. Before we demolish it one of us will have to brave the risk and go in to check out the corners and sheltered spots of the shed to ensure that he or she is not nesting there.

Last year we dug three small vegetable beds, each about ten feet by four, and a couple of smaller ones. We also rejuvenated an old flower bed of about 20 feet by five and turned half of it into a herb bed, rescued the rhubarb bed, and performed some essential maintenance on the existing redcurrant, blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes and the apple trees. Aptly demonstrating our incompetence, all the rejuvenated beds and plants need little maintenance this year. Our vegetable beds reverted to the wild almost as soon as we had dug them. We believe that it had been five or six years since the kitchen garden had last been used, and in that time, it had been taken over by a particularly agressive form of grass, and a nasty perennial weed, which I think we identified as some kind of wild parsnip. Both of these happily stuck roots in from the paths between the beds and sent up new shoots that shrunk our beds rapidly. Additionally, any left over half-inch of parsnip root in the beds sent up half a dozen shots a week, which grew three times faster than anything else.
This year I am determined to do better, so last weekend completed digging over a twenty foot square with great care, and made some thin earth paths to split it into four long thin beds. To reduce shrinkage, the whole square was edged with six inch planks, dug into the earth to stop any adventurous roots travelling where they are not wanted. Yesterday, I dug over the whole lot again and removed any weeds that were making an appearance. Next weekend is for adding compost and then we will think about planting some seeds.
I wish that I had taken more care with my garden journal last year, for although I recorded what was planted when, and whether from seedlings or seeds, I did not record the success rate, and cannot remember it as well as I expected. However, I do know that I started planting outside in the first week of May last year and lost quite a lot to frost. I also know that some seeds, broad beans spring to mind, need some cold. My task is to discover, by Saturday, which seeds need to be planted immediately, and will not suffer from going in at the same time as the compost. Most of the information will come from books written for a different climate, with some help from local sources, but I will also use this website, which although based in the UK, with milder winters, is full of information from an allotment holder who is far enough North that frost in May is no great surprise.

Of course, I knew that beavers really did cut down trees. It's just that if I had ever thought about it all, it was to assume they were small trees. When I saw this tree stump, driving back to Riga last weekend, I first noted that it was very oddly cut, as though someone had gone round and round it with an axe. Several hundred yards down the road, I realise that it looked like images of trees cut down by beavers in our son's animated films. This weekend, we stopped on the way to the countryside to take a photograph and investigate further. It really is the work of a beaver, and in fact this tree, which was about eight inches across and probably 35 years old, was not the biggest one. It is covered in some sort of slimy coating, which I first thought was beaver-spit, but have now concluded was probably the tree continuing to circulate sap in a doomed attempt to encourage its leaves to unfurl.

About 30 yards beyond the stump, which was only ten yards from the road, I spotted the beaver's lodge, and started to look for a dry passage to somewhere where I could get a clear view of it. A rustling at my feet instantly froze me. The snake moved a couple of yards away, hid his front half behind a convenient tuft of grass, and put his head out far enough to inspect me with eye and flickering tongue. He evidently liked neither my look nor my scent and disappeared into the undergrowth a few seconds later. Although his inspection had given me time to identify the trademark yellow ears of the harmless grass snake, anyone who knows my deep seated, and totally irrational, phobia of snakes will be impressed that not only did I not scream, or freeze into a panicked statue, but I even went in search of it - all for this picture.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I will not bore you with the reasons that I have been silent for so long apart from one, which falls into the category of showing off - I was busy acting in and producing a high school performance of Much Ado About Nothing, staged last week. When a colleague and I hatched the idea to undertake a serious play with our high school students, we had absolutely no idea what was really involved, and there has not been much space for anything else in my life over the past few weeks!