Colourful tomatoes!

Did you know that tomatoes come not only in red colour but also in yellow, pinkish and even green (yes, ripe!)? Take a look at all the varieties.

Fog

August is the month of beautiful fogs in Latvia. Nearly every morning, we could see it out of our window. Sometimes, it was really thick!

We searched the Internet to see, what fog actually is. It turned out that fog is water droplets that have condensed from the air. The same as clouds! When air has been warm and humid during the day, evaporated water molecules are spread thoughout it. Then, when the temperature drops, the cooling air causes the water molecules to turn from a vapour (a gas) into liquid droplets. These droplets are so small they can hang in the air. But they are heavy enough to lie low near the ground. Sometimes they attach to the grass forming dew.

In August, our Vecmamma takes special care of her tomatoes in the greenhouse - even though the nights are warm, she has to make sure that the doors of the greenhouse are always shut. If the fog manages to come into the greenhouse and settle on the unripe tomatoes, then they will not get ripe any more - without turning red, they will turn black and start decaying instead.

These pictures of fog we took from our balcony early in the morning.

We made pizzas!

Just like last time, when we visited Latvia, also this time we enjoy baking pizzas in Vecmamma's oven. Mamma made the dough, Uzair and Hafsa shredded the cheese and made their own toppings for pizzas. This time, we had vegetarian ones. (You can see our earlier pizza making session here: http://welive-welearn.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-baked-our-very-own-pizzas.html)

Wall decorations

Vecmamma gave us a crafts-kit for making decorations. Look what we made for her living-room wall!

Picking apples

We have opened the season for harvesting apples! Some apple trees are ripe earlier, others later - it depends on their variety. Vecmamma is always careful about picking the apples on time, because she has a huge cellar in the garden, where she keeps the fresh apples all winter long. How do you know, when the apples are ready to be picked? You have to cut them open to see the seeds - if the seeds are not white any more but are starting to turn brown, they are ready to be picked. When the seeds turn completely brown, they are full ripe - such apples can't be preserved for long any more.

Great care has to be taken also when picking the apples from the tree. The apples will be preserved best, if they don't have any worms in them and don't get damaged in any way - for example, by falling to the ground and getting hit. In the places, where apples get hit, they start to rot very soon.

Uzair was happy this year to be able to pick the apples by climbing on the ladder all by himself. He put up the ladder, climbed it with a bucket in his hand, and was picking the apples directly from the tree, placing them carefully one by one into the bucket, taking care not to damage them. When the bucket was full, he was passing it to Vecmamma, who emptied it into the plastic boxes, where they will be stored for several months, placed in the cellar.

Mamma and Hafsa were working on the very high branches of the tree, which Uzair could not reach with his ladder. Mamma had a special long stick (about 2 m long) with a small basket on the top, in which she gathered the apples from high up branches. Then, she lowered it to Hafsa, who took the apples out and placed them carefully into the bucket.

Picking apples was so much fun! And this was only the first of Vecmamma's eight apples trees to be picked. We cannot wait to work on the others! :)

Asma is sitting!

Asma has learned to sit all by herself! :) She's just a few days short of six months.

Bird-watching

We went to Cesis, the nearby town, to have some fun there in playgrounds. After enjoying our time in the playground, we rested at the nearby pond and observed the birds there: a black swan family, some seagulls, some ducks and lots of pigeons that kept coming so close to us we could almost touch them with our hands.

The black swans family is living in a special shelter built for them by the caretakers of the park, because their nest was being troubled too much by curious observers. It was interesting to see that the kids of black swans are not black - they are light gray and so cutely fluffy! :)

Ducks have lived in this pond forever! Sometimes we take some bread along with us for feeding them. But seagulls were new visitors we hadn't seen there before. Probably they have flown in from the seashore, which is some 50 km away. This makes us wonder - why have they flown in so far away from the sea?