Since the beginning of the year we have been working on the pond. It’s filled by a mill race – a constructed waterway which eventually connects to the stream at the bottom of the valley.  First we had to redam the stream, and then solve the problem of the water leaking out of the half mile long mill race so it actually reached the pond.

The use of concrete or plastic pipe would have been expensive and ugly. Cursory research would suggest that this is now the only possible way of waterproofing, however that’s not how the millrace was built originally, some hundreds of years ago.   After further research we took inspiration from pigs (and the gley technique for sealing ponds). Pigs can be used to seal ponds as they like to wallow in water. They compress the earth which stops the water leaking out. We don’t have pigs, and the millrace would be an awkward shape to try to pen in pigs, but we do have feet, and wellies. I have spend several hours down the valley in the water. The dog comes along out of curiosity and the sheep and goat follow to be part of the herd. I wallow around for a bit in the water – which means basically standing welly deep in mud and tramping it down until it stops feeling sticky underfoot.  It’s noticeably more difficult below trees that are right on the bank – these are probably spots where the water continues to leach out, however it’s made a marked difference in general. Areas of the valley are now dry even after heavy rain.  It’s important to remove wood and stones in the bed so that the layer can be compressed properly.  We had been thinking about digging out the dead leaves which had fallen in the water, however these, apparently, will add to the waterproofing layer.

The pond is now beginning to fill. It has a huge surface area so it’ll take some time. Also, there are several pipes coming out in various spots around the barns and garden.  The ends of these are currently hidden in the reeds and grasses at the side of the pond so I’m spending some time searching around for them. Once the water is about a foot higher the sheep and goat can graze on the other side of our land, without hopping over into next door’s garden and eating their fruit trees. We can stock the pond with fish (the plan is to purchase rainbow trout fingerlings) and we can even think about putting in a turbine for electricity generation. For the time being, my ambition is to hold an Easter Monday duck race.

As the weather warms up, I hope that we can get out there and wallow in our bare feet. The water looks nice and clean, and will have a constant supply of fresh, oxygenated stream water going into it, so maybe this year we will be brave enough to use our natural swimming pond.

Spring is in the air, if not quite tangible – no green buds or spring flowers here yet. The only stirring of life so far has been the tiny nettle babies popping up. It’s now completely impossible to pull these little monsters out using the old growth. The base of the plants have rotted – so after little effort you’re left standing with a handfull of stalk – the lifeforce root still safely tucked up in the earth. I’m glad we removed so many while we had the chance in the autumn – it was easy to pull out the plant and quite an impressive amount of orange yellow tuber as well – I’m quite incensed by the fact that stinging nettle is said to be an annual weed when it’s so clearly a perennial. There is abundant nettle around and about, it doesn’t need to be such a dominant force in our garden too.

My experiments in producing nettle fibre for spinning produced a stinky mess which I eventually hoisted into the pond. The fibres did not free themselves as advertised – in future I will try bundles tied and submerged in running water. The other root and stalk materials pulled from the garden were not popular with the sheep and goat as winter food – so went untouched. The remnants show little sign of life now, however it would be a nightmare to assume they were dead and mix them in with the compost only for them to repropagate themselves across the garden.

I have cleared out the hen house – which is also where our ruminators slept over the winter – between them they created a stinky mess – undetectable for the winter while it was a frozen mass, however I had to haul all the bedding out the very moment it defrosted into the most offensive pile of muck. When it’s just the hens in there over the warmer months, it doesn’t smell, but with the sheep and goat urinating on their bedding it gets unpleasant quickly. We put a slope on the floor to channel out liquid, and topped up the bedding throughout the winter so the layer they slept on was always clean and dry, but it goes to show that solid and liquid waste needs to be kept seperate.

I’ve moved this material over to the spiral beds and will use it as a mulch to surrond the cans in which we will plant seeds. The mulch is, apparently, too strong at present to be used to plant into, so we’ll see how the system works. The hens are pretty intent on scratching under the mulch so I need to see if I can find a way of preventing them scratching up and covering the seedlings as it would be better not to have to exclude them from the vegetable garden completely. The babies were voracious slug hunters last year. Into the hen house I’ve now put down the old dead nettle stalks and roots – 12 months in the dry dark should kill them, especially as we bury them under layers of chicken poo, grass cuttings in the summer and bedding hay in the winter. They’ll be the base layer for next year’s mulch.

Grass cuttings – they are useful it’s true. The soil around our vegetables was kept nicely moist by them in the height of the summer heat. I have friends who throw them away by the bagfull – I’d take these if it wasn’t for the nasty chemicals they also rely on for their beautiful lawn. I was over the aesthetic of a cut grass lawn even before I acquiesced to the purchase of the machine. The terms of the agreement have not been kept, so therefore this year I will not be a slave to this beast. I will cut only around the edges to give a semblance of order, and maybe a little more if I should need the mulch, but apart from that, it can be topsoil-building meadow – cut with a scythe, not that noisy, polluting and energy hungry anachronism.

The snow has melted back to reveal earthy citadels all over. I love the potential of mole hills – the very place for seeds to sprout – and they are also useful to let me inspect the shocking state of the ground beneath our healthy layer of topsoil – there’s a lot of broken brick and slate from old buildings which were destroyed and buried. Ploughing this land would be a big, rubbly mistake.

The snow is falling in clusters. It’s got into all the corners of the back porch, blown around by the wind to settle on my conscience – I should have put those tools away yesterday, but the job was left, rather than finished – the idea was trays on which to put the cans of seedlings in the windows – but my measurements were off and I was having a rethink. It’s the first in weeks that we’ve experienced any kind of weather other than biting cold, for which the consolation is day-long bright sunshine. Even though beautiful, it’s difficult to stay chipper when you’re constantly checking the thermometer to see if this year’s record of minus twenty five has been broken.

Every morning I take out a big plastic bottle of hot water and a bag of grain for the chickens to scratch for. The sheep and goat get an armful of golden hay – which was cut with a scythe during the growing season – they look around hopeful of a treat – some kitchen scraps or half an apple from the winter store.

This morning, George II, our ginger tom, accompanied me to the let out the animals – he likes to patrol for mice in the hen house. He delicately bounded through the snow – half a foot has fallen overnight and it’s light and fluffy. I managed to get the gates open without a shovel, but I know I’ll have to go back and dig it out later… just not now already. There is surely time to drink a coffee and reflect.

It was Valentine’s yesterday, and we’re two weeks away from being away from the UK for five years. Still, I’m being foreign rather than becoming foreign. The day we arrived, it was raining, and a month after warm weather arrived and stayed with us till late into the autumn. Now we know this was an oddity.

The phrase ‘see, it’s 13 degrees in here – it’s not cold” only makes sense in context. A context that consists of many layers. We have become observers of temperatures and read weather forecasts with religious dedication. It’s not life or death, however it could mean success or failure of our lifestyle. There is a balance to be struck between the amazing quality of life we enjoy during the rest of the year, for which I am profoundly grateful, with enduring the short months of living in dark and cold – which go hand in hand.

Though the snow has been with us for over a month this year – and could stay for another two – my reactions to it are still those of a Briton. I catch myself humming Christmas carols, and subconsciously I’m gladdened by the thought that school may be closed for the day. On a more practical note – the car is starting only intermittently, and the Internet, our lifeline to the outside world of paid work (we’re a long way from self-sufficient just yet) has packed up.

Today I can be mindful of the quiet. There is no Radio 4 – which is my normal backing track – constantly reinforcing my Britishness. Mike is working in his office upstairs, and by the sound of it, more successfully than yesterday – much of which was spent in battle with the multinational which supplies our web connection. We also have no volunteer visitors during the winter season. We discovered early on that while there is snow on the ground, there is little to be done. The garden and fields are completely hidden – giving us a break from the constant tending necessary during the growing season, and it’s too cold for natural plaster to dry or for any indoor job which needs fresh air. So, it’s somewhat frustrating for any visitors wanting to get on with big projects, though plenty enough for me alone – with uninterrupted stretches of time to concentrate. That said, I know that soon I will grow tired of the solitude and wish again for the influences, stories, problems and cheer that our visitors will bring.

When I awoke this morning I was in a rush to get outside, I quickly ran to the bathroom and noticed that there were pretty swirls of ice on the inside of the outer window, and not so happy looking pepper plants stuck to it. It had gone down to minus six last night, but this week the days have been sunny with bright blue skies, and though the ground does not thaw in the shade, everyone seems okay with it, well, apart from the plants.  We need a change of strategy for them as I’d like to keep at least a few of the perennials – peppers, aubergines and one tomato, alive over the winter – just to see what happens with them. Poor things.
I was in a hurry because I had put the ducks in their house for the first time. Now the lake is frozen, there is nowhere for them to go to escape from predators. Dijon goat and the sheep are likewise now kept inside overnight. During the summer, once they were big enough, they chose where to sleep, but now I need the sheep to help keep other animals warm. They’re going to be fine with their two inch coats of merino wool. Dijon goat has fluffed up considerably over the last month, and although Mike keeps reminding me that she’s a hardy mountain animal, I can’t quite believe that she’d be happy outside when it can get to minus twenty five. And what if they got lost in deep snow? – they are white, after all.  And will there be enough hay? – seeing as they were so determined to eat it all as soon as we cut it.  So many worries for our first winter with the sheeple (our solution to pluralising one goat and two sheep).

For my birthday Mike bought me an incubator, and of several dozen eggs, we managed to hatch a few.  We will have no problems with egg fertilisation next year.  So, alongside some beautiful random specimens hatched from eggs from the farmer’s market in Prague, we have four Aruacana and a La Fleche (devil chicken) female.  All the hope wrapped up in those packages of eggs from the UK – and we’ve actually got one bird from hundreds of pounds of investment in pure-bred eggs and equipment.  The reason we’d had to buy eggs in was that we wanted some interesting varieties, and we didn’t have a male to fertilise the eggs.

We also believed that our Universal Brown Chickens – ex-stock from a factory farm – would not go broody. This proved not to be the case and we put some pure-bred eggs under her. She is now a busy mother to three – a male Legbar and two Lavender Araucana. One of these is runty and about a third of the size of the other birds.  It’s about time that I let them out free-ranging – while the mum is still interested enough to protect them… but what if they’re immediately eaten?

The Countess of Chester is developing saddle feathers. This is not good as it means that she is a boy.  We were confident that we had mainly hens because nobody started to crow at six weeks, we fanned their tail feathers – which proved they were girls, and there has been no fighting meaning they were female. Now we know why our new flock has not started laying. Of the eleven chickens who hatched and survived (RIP Splady the runty Vorwerk who disappeared in mysterious circumstances – the same day as a beheaded duck, and poor Dundonald), we are now certain that eight of them are boys.  It just goes to show that so much of what you read on the net is excellent fertiliser when dug into the ground.

We did not provide artificial light, so nobody is laying right now. We didn’t buy eggs for a long time because factory farming of animals is such a monstrous, shameful thing. I did some research and, apparently, the local term for free range is ‘hens kept on hay’.  The price of these eggs is something close to three times the price of eggs from caged birds – I’m hoping this indicates that the birds have better living conditions, rather than the ‘wild west’ nature of business in these parts. Life without eggs is such a drag, and to think I was under the impression that we’d have excess to sell before the year was out.

At least next year the eggs we have will be fertilised.

This year we have had an extended Autumn. Though a hard frost had us rushing to bring inside the rest of the courgettes and hang the pumpkin harvest a month ago, since then it’s been above freezing. Maybe it’s our Australians bringing the weather with them. They’re from near Proserpine, a place where the coldest it gets is fifteen degrees above freezing. At times, our hallway goes down to zero – fifteen is, if not warm, at least comfortable – experienced through several layers of clothing. We’d told them they’re welcome to stay for as long as they can bear the cold – they were a bit shocked about the outside composting toilet and tales of twenty five below. He’s not taken his hat off since he arrived.
The snow is really late this year, and the ground hasn’t yet frozen, which has meant that we’ve had bonus time in the garden. We’ve planted a new bed of strawberries from runners, mulched the spiral and other beds with fallen leaves and generally tidied up.  I made an interesting discovery in the battle against the nettles…

We’ve been using nettle as a spinach alternative and making it into a liquid fertiliser, but it’s been gradually taking over more and more ground.  During the growing season there is just sooo much to do that, apart from having an occasional hack with the scythe, we’ve pretty much ignored it.  The animals ignore it too, so bigger and bigger patches are getting established in the back field. Interestingly, they’ll eat it once it’s wilted, but nettle is a bugger – I’ve seen bowls of young cut stalks waiting in the kitchen turn towards the sunlight instead of die. It needs to be drowned or suffocated or it’ll just keep on growing.  It is an admirable species.

Now though, the other vegetation has died back making the nettle more apparent.  We could feed a lot of people on a nettle diet.  We are really never going to need that much, so it’s time to think about where the wild garden will be, and what we’ll want to plant as an alternative to nettle.  It has a two year growing cycle, and flowers during the second year. It spreads by root and by seed. The roots grow close to the surface of the soil and are a turmeric yellow.  At this time of year, if you pull the dead stalk out of the ground carefully, so that the roots come too, you’ll see the beginnings of next year’s growth – an inch or two of compact nettle baby nestled onto the plant.    The eureka moment – if we can uproot these, there will be significantly less next year. Of course, this’ll be impossible once the ground is frozen.  All we need is a little more time…

So… these are some projects for which we need money, solutions or expertise:

1. Glassing in the front porch (which will provide a solar gain to the house in winter months).
2. Purchasing solar water heating panels and attaching to the boiler.
3. Solar photo voltaic panels for electric (we’re in a valley so not enough wind).
4. Insulation of walls – internal insulation will mean we can do this ourselves, and also not alter the façade of the building.
5. Taking down the derelict barns- it would be amazing to be able to convert some of these collapsed buildings into greenhouse space.
6. Disposing of the grey tiles.
7. Finishing the utility room floor.
8. Rewiring the electrics in the utility room.
9. Repair of ceilings in corridors where collapsed.
10. Shellac of beams in attic.
11. Renovation of windows in attic.
12. Stripping and polishing wooden floor in lounge.
13. Fixing the hole in the pond so we can put rainbow trout in.
14. Re-flooring the attic with layer of insulation underneath.
15. Bathroom tap stand.
16. Completing repaint of radiators we bought from the scrap yard.
17. Hand-washing sink for composting toilet (not just tap on wall).
18. Putting up fence for the sheeple so that they can graze on the other side of the pond (so giving the trees more of a chance in 2012).
19. The swimming pond.
20. A yurt.

It’s hard to believe that autumn is almost here, but I’ve noticed the sun is very definitely lower in the sky – mists and mellow fruitfulness to follow.

One thing I loved about my previous life as a city girl was libraries. I would regularly go and draw out as many books as I was permitted, and then start reading them all at once, finishing first the one that held my attention the most.  Though we have a book swap shelf at Nový Mlýn, and there are swap shelves in hostels and restaurants in Prague, this really hasn’t given me the range of reading material I needed.  Mike recently bought me a Kindle – and this, combined with Project Gutenberg has been my literary saviour.

Previously my genre of choice had been travel writers, however on Gutenberg I am beginning to explore authors who can help me here and now.  Gutenberg contains thousands of books which are out of copyright – meaning that the author died more than seventy years ago.   So far, I’ve found several books by people who have, like us, moved from city to countryside. To hear these voices ring out clear and true is a strange experience – they are long dead, but I am so grateful they wrote about their lives. We have so much in common, and I have so much to learn.

“The best things to scrub the churn and all wooden articles with, are wood ashes and plenty of soap.”

Eggs are a wonderful food – how I miss them.  In our part of the world free range eggs are not sold in supermarkets, so unless you know someone with hens, or keep them yourself, you will be eating the eggs of living creatures which have been kept in a small cage under artificial lighting for their entire short life – torture rather than simple murder.  We have four chickens which came from such a factory, and they arrived in such a sorry state – anaemic looking and with few feathers – I committed to not supporting that industry any longer.  However- now we are a household of ten, with just three hens laying at the moment.  Just enough with which to make pasta and the odd brioche, but ommellete or an eggy breakfast are are a rare treat.

Last year was different – we had four rescued generic brown hens and four Partridge coloured Leghorns. They were terribly flighty and aloof so we called them collectively “The Models” who had mistakenly come to live on a common farm, in inappropriate footwear and the latest fashion in featherage.  They did, however, lay.  With plenty of eggs we could make delicious treats such as chocolate mousse, hollandaise sauce and entirely eggy breakfasts.   Though attractive, they were not as canny as the common hens, and so when a hawk struck – it was these creatures who were the victims, likewise when a fox visited.  The remaining model – Martha – decamped when next door got a rooster and has not been back since. And now, one of the remaining four has gone broody, so no more eggs from her for a while.

This spring we began experimenting with an incubator. With no broody breeds, this was our only option.  Hakin was our first success -  A La Fleche* (devil chicken) -  the only one to hatch from the batch. As a result she bonded with me, as her clan. A lone chick does not have a great survival rate, so she was somewhat molly-coddled and would make a distress call if I went out of the room.  She was happy in the house and would sometimes sit with us on the sofa in the lounge.  The adult hens were unwelcoming – Edna even cornered her and pulled feathers out.

We tried again with the incubator, but the second batch of eggs was lost for weeks in the post, and broken air pockets meant that they didn’t hatch, and a third time, when Mike picked up some eggs when he went by plane to the UK – but yet again they arrived damaged – they’d been put in the hold and only one hatched. We had some success with locally bought Auracana eggs – though only two of those made it. The best were some we bought at the farmers market in Prague. From these we have six mystery chickens – we’ve no idea what type, but they have beautiful colouring.   Hakin was recruited to become the teenage foster mum,  and was perfectly behaved with the babies. These are now her clan.  She has stopped following me around the garden and now will sit close to where her babies are located instead. I’m glad she is no longer a loner.

While in the UK I visited my grandfather in Cornwall. The journey took us within a few miles of South Yeo Farm – where we’d been ordering our purebreed hatching eggs. I decided to visit and ended up buying a few more Lavender Araucana hatching eggs to see if they would fare better travelling across Europe by road.  By happy chance we arrived home to find that one of the red hens had gone broody, so now she’s sitting on a mound of the blue-green Araucana eggs.  I don’t have high hopes for the hatching rate as the eggs are now at least two weeks old and did not travel in optimum conditions, but it would be lovely to have chicks with a real mother hen.

* We visited the town of La Fleche in France last week, partly  in search of more hatching eggs. In the tourist office there were t-shirts and tea towels decorated with La Fleche chickens, but disappointingly they said that this breed is no longer farmed in the area from which  it originates.

One strong motivation for moving to South Bohemia was the spirit of enviro-entrepreneurship*.  Back home I had been working on a design for an accessible bathroom – to meet the needs of carers and those with profound disabilities, and organisations which want to be able to cater for them.  The design was to be based on a shipping container and fully independent – so not needing mains water and sewage – by harvesting rainwater and composting waste.  It could go anywhere on a temporary or permanent basis.  I had done a lot of research, and wanted to experiment with the various component parts of the system. Luckily…

When we first arrived at Nový Mlýn, we were surprised to discover that our 130 year old house did not have a water treatment system or water supply… unlike our fully serviced neighbour who had built his new home downhill of the house.

Life was hard for the eighteen months it took us to get permission to pump water from a new well to the house, but it gave us ample opportunity to radically reduce the amount of water we use, and many of these good habits have stuck.

Mike immediately constructed a toilet – an inglorious outhouse that at first didn’t even have a door.  We were clear that we wanted to actually use the compost which was generated, so we would dig a new poo hole and move the structure onto it every few months.  This was not a one person job, and gave us the inspiration for the Teepoo (more later).

The use of drinking water for toilet flushing is extremely inefficient because then contaminants then need to be removed from the water.  Urine is a sterile, ph neutral  fluid which contains nitrogen, phosphates and potassium – the main macronutrients required by plants. It therefore makes sense to operate waste separation at source – something people soon get used to.

There is a university in Austria working on a urine only toilet – and it would be nice to have a bespoke design (a wiidet) , however, instead we installed ‘rock bogs’ inside the house, by filling the water in the bottom of the toilets with pebbles. This greatly reduced the amount of water needed for flushing (a single litre for a completely clean flush), and provided people with a very visual reminder not to use the toilet for anything other than liquid.  We then installed our WWUK reed bed – a plant based system of cleaning waste water, and connected the bathroom plumbing to that.

Any household with more than one toilet could instigate a rock bog (urine only toilet) and therefore massively reduce the amount of water needed for flushing. It’s really, really simple. It would be nice to have a toilet insert designed to take the place of the stones, but stones are simple,  freely available and aesthetically pleasing.

As well as rock bogs inside the house, we now have a more sophisticated composting toilet system attached to the house.  Composting toilets will smell bad if they get wet for any reason (urine or rain water) or if waste is not adequately covered.  We purchased an insert to catch urine – as well as the box and a supply of cornstarch biodegradable bags. We think this beats even Moule’s Earth Closet – though an earth ‘flush’ would be great.

We have hosted 75 volunteers over the last two years. They have all but one been able to operate the composting toilet without leaving any unpleasant surprises.  We would recommend leaving a vinegar spray in the cubicle to clean the plastic as you would need to with any other toilet.

While the job of emptying the soil box is not pleasant, waste is always dry and covered with a cup of ash or earth, you tie the bag shut and put the lid on the box before moving the box to a ready prepared hole. You tip in the bag, then cover it with earth by digging the next hole.  We don’t bury compost directly in the vegetable garden, but instead under the paths through it. This trench system means that we are efficiently closing the loop and returning nutrients to the earth.

*My very first unsuccessful business was the Vermenathon Forest project which I worked on obsessively during the last few years of the millennium. This was, in short, a tree sponsorship scheme which people could visit physically and virtually – I’m happy that more successful business people had the same idea.

Tipis are structures designed to be easily movable.  Our number one problem with the old outhouse had been how difficult it was to reposition when inevitably necessary.

The composting toilet attached to the house is a bagged system which must be manually emptied on a regular basis. This is fine when we are a household of two to twelve people, however we had been asked to host Global Agents for Change on their annual fund-raising ride though Europe. This would mean twenty four people, plus our current household.

Our solution was the beautiful, elegant Teepoo.  We did our online research, harvested wood for poles and found a canvas. For the internal structure we used a stack of old tyres, lined with a disposable cornstarch bag (bottom removed), and this was put over the hole in the ground.

We’d had little contact from the group since the initial request to host them – and no response to information we sent about Prague Vienna Greenways and the best route by bike to reach us – in fact they emailed to confirm they were on their way at 2.30 in the morning of the day they were supposed to arrive!

Anyhow, we taught them about the fruit, edible wild greens and mushrooms which grew in the area and together made a splendid hunter-gathered curry (though they did hunter-gather several ingredients from their car). In the end, because of the (inevitable) rain, sleeping bags were rolled out on every surface and everyone camped inside.

Despite the weird food and toileting arrangements they left a note to say:

“On behalf of the entire group, Thank You! 22 days into our journey, your home has been the most unique experience we have encountered thus far… aside from sheer kindness you and the others in the commune displayed, the sustainable living philosophies are (in short) completely admirable. The practices you implement every day are acts the entire world needs to consider much more and it is totally refreshing to witness individuals becoming the change we all wish to see… Thank You!”