Broken Promises

Almost one month on, and we still have snow!

The early burst of snow in October now leaves us in retrospect with the enduring impression that our winter is close to being six months long!! This is of course not strictly true. The snow has melted in between times for a few days here and there and once (about ten days ago) you could smell spring tangibly in the air.

These last few days have brought more fresh snowfall – a steady white drizzle restoring immaculate order and dashing fledgling promises of life and abundance.

The birds are going crazy, not knowing whether to come or go, clustering in conference on the larch tree then wildly cackling off to alight elsewhere for a moment, filling snow-filled crevices with echoing song pleading for life, for green, for something to change...

The chickens have also been getting rather confused, taking it upon themselves to lay in any comfortable corner they come across on the days that they have ventured out. It took a while for me to realise (thinking the changeable weather had reduced their urge to lay) until I came across twelve eggs in the corner of the sheep shed, three in a plant pot and a handful in a pile of sand.

Inside, with all our beds crowded into the big room for warmth, I have now been able to strip Saskia's room, seal off the hatch and the channels we had chiselled out to accommodate the new electrical system, repaint and soon to take up the floor boards and insulate against the cold air from the cellar steps directly below.

In the coldest months this room suffered the most from damp, having no wood burner within reach of it. It is clear that by next winter we must have some kind of integrated heating system to include this room and the bathroom that will replace our temporary kitchen.

A distraction came my way last week in the form of a day as an Extra for a film being shot in Görlitz. Thirteen hours I spent there, eleven of which just sitting around in costume in cold, draughty rooms drinking coffee and eating white rolls with sliced ham and cheese. Crew received crusty brown bread with salmon and salad and rumour has it the stars were fully catered for with fresh, organic food in their heated dressing rooms!

It was certainly an experience to get a sense of what it is like behind the scenes of a film and to watch with awe the skill of the costume-makers and make-up artists: they are truly the backbone of any film production, dressing up their models to then perform as puppets at the beck and call of the Director... 15 times we had to simulate a busy kitchen, me slicing bread over and over with a blunt knife the first shoot and washing up in a dry sink for the other! It was impossible to really get into character and stay in it with the continuous stopping and starting.

I came away feeling very grateful that my life is my own.

Incubating

At last I am beginning to feel the urge once again to write. Our Siberian winter has eradicated the notion of linear time and feels just like an endless experience that has neither beginning nor end, no particular direction nor impulse to change.

We are well and truly decked from all sides by glistening white snow, frozen beyond all hope of making snowballs, the roads compacted by intrepid cars undeterred by English winter angst and hardly distinguishable from the endless frozen landscape that holds us in her timeless grip.

Life goes on here, regardless. Schools and shops stoically remain open and the short days hold few goals beyond keeping home warm and bellies full.

Once our big girl is packed off to school by moonlight, the next two hours are taken up with stoking fires, forcing open the door to the chicken shed to defrost their water and vainly hunt for one or two eggs, throwing a heap of hay out for the sheep, checking the rabbit is still alive and feeding the cats to keep them from scouting anywhere for leftovers and scuffling through our precious trays of fragile seedlings.

The rabbit is now well and truly a house pet with her hutch permanently open and her favourite hideout under the guest bed in the office. She startled the chimney sweep on his last visit, sitting bright eyed under the car and prompting a slightly bemused enquiry as to whether she really belonged...

Chillies, peppers and onions are coming up nicely on our window sills, much faster than they did last year in our town flat. They are the only reminder of life outdoors that will someday return. The compost heap is frozen solid and our outdoor loo (we still bravely visit it shivering under -15° before rushing back into the warmth upstairs) can no longer withstand any liquid...

Our tiled oven upstairs is our saving grace, running continuously on coal for this year, enabling us to shut it down over night and keep the living space above zero. With the woodburner fired up in the main room (where we now all sleep) we can certainly keep life indoors pretty cosy.

Sledging, skiing, ice skating and brisk walking keep our spirits up. When the sun is out - it finally returned after two weeks of continuous grey – the snowscape is truly stunning.

Needless to say, progress on anything is painfully slow. A set of shelves and curved cupboard doors for the small arches are the latest development. They set off the paintwork beautifully and hint at how gorgeous the final combination of wooden floorboards and worktops with the Moroccan-style walls, ceramic sink and double doors into the yard, will eventually be...

We are still awaiting action on replacing the two windows after dithering about costs and materials and gathering quotes to help us clarify the course of action. PVC is by far the cheapest option for made-to-measure windows. Yet we cannot bring ourselves to stoop so low. Quotes for any wood other than pine are at least three times the price... yet we are still holding out for our local carpenter to give us a sympathetic quote. Although a man of few words he has shown a willingness to negotiate and seems open to consider how much we can do ourselves to keep the finances within our reach.

It feels like this is the time when everything is paired down to its' absolute essentials. Rarely a visitor, no unnecessary driving, lots of eating, resting and simply surviving. Next week the winter holidays begin. Two weeks in the middle of February - the natural reaction would be to run off somewhere hot! But for us (with animals to tend and no cash to spare) it is simply a case of sitting it out, making the most of winter sports and nestling down to long evenings by the fire with a good movie.

Ice Sculptures & Signs of Life

Snow Dunes & Silence

October’s snow lasted just a short while and was followed by a good run of crisp autumnal days and chilly nights. But now, the snow has arrived for good.

Time has taken on that same endless, uniform blankness. Everything just is, warmth and food are the main priorities, and days emerge only briefly, just to tease us with a glimmer of life before plunging back into deep, icy cold darkness. Temperatures have danced between -8°and -15°, even reputedly reaching -20° at night.

Time schedules and project plans just cannot be adhered to. Even the daily school run is hardly a certainty, with the open flat plane at the highest point of the journey often decked with thick fog or simply covered so completely with snow that the road is hardly discernible.

The farm has lost all its contours and distinguishing features. From the moment you step out of the door, a sea of white dominates the view with only larger objects like the greenhouse or the linden trees retaining their shape, standing lost and forlorn like barren rocks offshore.

Just as the cold front really began to settle in, two intrepid travellers arrived full of energy and laughter, seeking adventure and work on our desolate farm.

Needless to say, outdoor work was hardly on the cards, bar hauling in wood and tending the animals. So for three whole days they tackled the knackered window frames upstairs that we had stripped way back in the summer and never quite found the time to complete. With a protective layer of paint the old wooden frames can be encouraged to last out just another year (or two if we're lucky).

Having the extra pairs of eyes to keep Maia out of trouble has also meant progress on the kitchen. The electrician has connected all the wires that we have laid and we can still hardly believe the magic of flicking a switch to receive immediate light. The arched doorway is now almost completely plastered smooth, enabling the final paintwork to happen later this week.

The best surprise has been our brand new, wood-fired cooking stove – a belated wedding gift from my mother-in-law! It fits like a glove in the bricked-in doorway that we have prepared for it, and we have been able to install it with minimal flue pipe directly into the chimney in the office. It looks like it was made for the space! With a glass-fronted fire chamber, generous baking oven, warming oven and full surface area of hotplate, it is a food enthusiast’s dream come true.

Replacing the window on the north side and installing a door through to the yard will now have to wait until the spring (along with the floorboards, being the last in line to avoid trashing them ahead of time). Yet the thought that our Christmas roast can be made in our new kitchen - albeit with a concrete floor, no units and draughty windows - is an absolute triumph!

Snow, Seeds & Paint

A View to Play With

On the 10^th of November, two of our chickens finally laid their first eggs! They are smaller than average, with very hard white shells. Perhaps our birds need some extra protein, or maybe it is just a matter of time whilst they practice the art...

The milder weather has certainly given them some encouragement, along with the rest of us. No signs of snow now, just glorious autumnal wind.

Suddenly everything is so much more visible. Without the leaves to hide behind, we now feel quite exposed to both the elements and our nearest neighbours. So we buy in a few young conifers to plant at the top of the drive in an attempt to shield us just a little when everything else is stripped bare.

Landscaping has now become so much easier: the dry stone wall encircling the three linden trees now clearly shapes a terrace for spring time pauses whilst also forming a sturdy dam to encourage any excess water away from the dwellings and plantations. Stacked dry branches and old logs demarcate compost piles and leaf mulch to become nourishing soil for next season’s crops. And the flow from the drive to the house and on to the gardens is so much easier to tweak.

We have spent much of this last week collecting horse and cow manure in a borrowed trailer from a friend’s small holding and nearby plots of the local farming cooperative. We have discovered that our car is pitifully weak for such trips (another argument to save for a small tractor - I am slowly learning to accept that it will be a very necessary addition to the family!).

Yet we have succeeded in bringing in enough well-rotted manure to support the restructuring of the polytunnel as well as a couple of fresh heaps lower down, settling to decompose. The tunnel is now free of all this season’s plants, even though many green tomatoes were still hanging, bitten by frost and rendered inedible by these last few weeks of decidedly un-southern temperatures.

Inside, our new kitchen is entering into its first lease of life as a space to concoct experimental recipes whose function is aesthetic as opposed to edible: I am desperately trying to find the ultimate combination of ingredients to create the right paint for the kitchen walls.

One challenge is to manifest a washable surface of the right colour density for the space that will house our wood-fired oven.

My first experiment initially looked good, but has dried rather patchy and remains moist, even after two days. It is the basic milk paint recipe with added pigment and linseed oil. Through trial and error - by adding the oil first and then mixing in the rest of the liquid - I have rediscovered the importance of the mayonnaise principle. Needless to say, the oil never properly emulsified and the pigment came through in lumps.

Oil is purported to create a waterproof finish, bearing in mind that drying time is much extended. It is also possible to add a final oil-based finish on top of a basic emulsion. This is now my preferred route, as the quark and lime mixture that I made for the main walls has worked beautifully, resulting in a smoky, opaque finish that is subtly in tune with the organic texture of the walls. Using filler (in my case a fine plaster, but clay or chalk, or indeed any powdered stone or mineral will also do) has made a huge difference to the density of colour.

The experiments continue as our kitchen rapidly transforms into a proper looking room.

The cold spell proved to be a vital insight into the coming winter and triggered a new approach to curtains: the latest two for the living room are flat, heavy screens – made using woollen blankets lined against canvas – attached snugly to the top of the window space and hanging neatly into the edges, fixed along the bottom by a bamboo pole tucked beneath two screws. Without the air gap of the sill and the free hanging that facilitates draught, they have made a very noticeable difference to the temperature of the room at night.

Snow in October

This week brought a sudden and very surprising change.

We had all adjusted well to bright blue skies by day followed by fresh chilly evenings and cold nights. We had also tolerated a few days of rather English grey. But then, with very little warning (on the eve of the weekend) it snowed. It continued to snow for the whole day.

Bold autumn colours now lie hidden beneath soft white and every surface of any height is topped with a thick, white icing. The girls scoop it up like lollies and just can't seem to get enough of it.

For us, it has come rather earlier than expected. The vast stillness and peace is serene and beautiful yet also whispers of the imminent months ahead where temperatures will continue to drop and nothing more above ground will grow. Animals will need shelter and daily feeding as life on the farm contracts into winter hibernation.

On the first day of snow the chickens don't even venture out of their den. Wading almost a foot deep across the yard to feed them, along the way I scoop off the snow from the rabbit's hutch to find her huddling in the furthest corner, both her bowls hidden in a mass of white. She is simply cowering and staring wide eyed ahead of her.

The sheep also appear rather shell-shocked, even though they are the best equipped to deal with the cold. Two days on, there are at least enough tufts of grass beginning to re-emerge for them to munch on as no fresh snow fall allows the ground cover to begin to retreat. Yet to be on the safe side, we begin clearing out the old sheep barn designing the best combination for comfort and ease of access.

The rabbit will also need to come in, probably to the middle room where plastering has not yet begun. But we will hold off just a little while longer, as there is still a fair chance of some milder weather before winter properly takes hold. We have after all only just received the stunning palette of autumn colours, which are noticeably more intense at the mountainous borders of Czech where the season creeps on just a little ahead of us here in the 'low lands'.

This week also saw our first foray into the boisterous world of children's holiday camps! A rather short notice agreement to take three children (7, 9 and 11 from a family of eight!) for five days and engage them in farm life, resulted in nearly a week of constant activity. The boys – the two oldest – would wake on full steam, ready to tackle whatever came their way before we'd even had time to sip a coffee!

For all the management that comes with such a big family (so much more cleaning and tidying, extended meal preparations and regular herding away for moments of peace) we all thoroughly enjoyed our time together.

The boys were so keen to learn new skills and show off their strength: the electric fence was taken up and extended; the limbs of a birch to be felled in the coming weeks were stripped and dragged into the dry; stones were shifted for dry-stone landscaping; nettles were scythed and bonfires made of the debris beside the stream; and a good deal of plastering (with rather a lot of mess!) has made the vague hope of a finished kitchen by Christmas just a little bit more realistic...