Busy Season: Etseri, Svaneti

We believe we’ve seen the last snowfall of spring; certainly we hope so, fervently. Already the cows’ grazing in nearby fields has been interrupted by a new dump of white, which in turn has dissolved back into the sky whence it came. Please, no more for now?

The ground is softening up now as it thaws out. Although I checked my underground water pipe today, and its depth is still frozen along with its water, soon it will be time to repair or replace fence posts. One must get the timing right, because once the ground hardens, such work involving extensive digging will become much harder. The pipe will soon be running, at which time I’ll roll up the overland one and hope to solve my winter water problem once and for all, so as not to need it again. I wish.

Those of us who were too busy, or too lazy, to distribute our barn manure over our potato fields last fall must now do so. First we shovel it into its transport vehicle: in my small-scale case a wheelbarrow, in all others a wooden sled-box drawn by a hefty oxen pair for the larger coverage needed. Then we rake it out to enrich the soil, before plowing and planting potatoes and other vegetables, especially corn, beans and pumpkins.

My wife and I, however, might either switch the hay and veggie portions of our land or let it lie fallow this year. In any case, we really should do something to stop the virulent spread of the nasty hogweed invasion. If we plow once the plants have come up but long before they can flower, and then again soon after that to catch any late-rising seeds, we might just kill them dead for the year. At least, inexperienced farmer that I am, this is my fond hope. I hate the stuff; cows will graze on it alive or dried, but its sap is bad news for human skin and eyes, and we can’t eat it at all. It’s really moving in aggressively, and needs to be prosecuted “with extreme prejudice”, as the saying goes.

We need to pour the garage’s cement floor, seal around its windows, and I must tidy up all the tools and materials therein. At least I’ve been able to pay an all too obliging fellow villager to chainsaw all our current logs, ready for me to split and store to dry through summer for the winter, when we need the wood most. (We’re an exception here in that we use our massive Svan stove far less than most, with several electric heaters taking advantage of the 20 years’ free electricity of the region and cooking using electricity or bottled gas as much as possible, too. So we need a lot less wood than most households). Dry wood is a must, both to cut down in creosote buildup in the chimney pipes and to get a burn of maximum heat and efficiency.

Rumors abound of the imminent arrival of some dumpsters, at a thousand Lari a pop, along with an emptying service and dumping location for them. We need fifteen, apparently, for all hamlets of the village. Without the truck visits and dump site, this will fail; but one can hope. More rumors, too, that the half-finished new water pipe system for the village will be done this summer. Another thing we are desperate for is that the new setup will not be worse than the current one: not a given at all!

Such are the new activities we find ourselves involved with, similarly to all over Georgia but a bit later at these altitudes, and spring digs in.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer

06 April 2017 20:44