500 Year Vision » Elements

Nový Mlýn Garden Salad

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:03:02 +0000

This year, with the help of Joann and our other workawayers, we have the beginnings of a vegetable garden. I planted salad ingredients such as sorrel, wild rocket and spinach, and as they began to grow discovered that we had wild sorrel in the garden already, as well as lambsquarters which are very, very similar to baby leaf spinach in flavour and appeared everywhere in early June, just as nettle season ended. We also have abundant chickweed – which has popped up in any place where the ground has been cleared for planting, and of course, stinging nettles which we used as our spring green up until the time they started to flower, and the ground elder, which is still producing some young leaves we can use.

My acid test of any gathered food is my husband… if he is prepared to eat it then it’s fine. He would absolutely not consume something just because it was good for him.

We have many, many pea plants this year… partly because I threw onto the vegetable patch a bag of dried peas that I had soaked for sprouting. It’s ridiculous not to soak dried pulses for a day or two before you use them, and the nutritional content of a seed which is in the process of germinating is infinitely better than those long dead relatives you get in cans. However, the young leaves on garden peas, are tastier again than the sprouts, so I’m glad I had too many and had to scatter them around the place.

Chickweed is an interesting plant – it is sold as a health supplement to people who want to lose weight – and not because of it being such a tiny green plant. I’ve not read anything in the New Scientist about it, which is a shame, because my personal experience is that it does seem to help you feel full after a meal. My friend Sara says this could be because it’s so nutritious that your body isn’t looking for more vitamins and minerals – non-nutritious food starves our bodies of essentials and causes our appetites to remain unsatisfied. It would seem perverse to dry chickweed out and put it into tablets, though, when it’s so abundant and tasty thrown into a salad. Ironically, if you search for chickweed on google you get ‘how to kill chickweed’ – this terrible, invasive, nutritious & tasty salad ingredient…

And chive flowers! What a discovery. They are delicious. After you pick the whole flower head, just nip the stalk away and you will have a handful of delicate, little, blue, crunchy, chive flavoured bells to decorate your salad.

So, on to the recipe:

100 stems of flowering chickweed
100 stems of lambsquarters
50 sorrel leaves
10 chive flower heads
dressing of your choice – half balsamic vinegar, half olive oil & a dollop of mustard, for example.

Mix an serve.

Eating the weeds

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:40:14 +0000

Over the last few weeks since Joann left the house has seemed very quiet. We’ve been outnumbered by the animals. Jaakko has been concentrating on building the hen house, and I have been moving rubble out of the garden by the wheel barrow load. I’m really happy that reinforcements arrived yesterday in the form of American Chris and Hollander Michiel – it’s great to have the house busy again and hear interesting stories of other lives.

Slowly things are becoming green, but as yet there are no leaves on the trees. Some of the seeds that we planted inside have germinated – the broccoli, onions, wild rocket and sorrel have made an appearance, but none of the others… it’s possible that they didn’t react well to the cats climbing in the boxes. Today we’ve transplanted broccoli, and companion planted Nasturtiums with it (another edible plant). Michial has built a sturdy frame to protect the puny seedlings, and we’ve experimented with a few different techniques of plant protection using the cuttings from the apple trees and old net curtains.

This week, wet weather has necessitated a lot of indoor jobs – such as sorting out cupboards (I finally tackled the last cupboard left full of random things by the previous occupants – we needed the space for dog proof shoe storage) and furniture restoration. The rain has been good for the plants, however, and things have started to come up in the raised beds that Joann and Jaakko built. As the peas have germinated, they have been disappearing. We think it’s reasonable to blame the pup for this.

Nettles are one thing that we always have a lot of. I hesitantly sautéed a few last weekend – and ate tentatively before reading that it’s important to cook them thoroughly in order to get rid of the sting. Yesterday I tried them as the green in herby puy lentils and they worked really well! They have a sort of nutty taste. Nettles are the first thing we can harvest here – I’m thinking of picking some more tomorrow to put in the freezer. You can eat them later on in the year but the new buds of spring are the best as they don’t have crystals in them which lend a gritty texture later in the year. Also if I pick them now, that should mean we have less of a nettle invasion in the summer.

Today I found the first spring violets growing. I’ve sugared one flower – you paint it in egg white fluff then cover it in icing sugar. I hope that it works – such a beautiful, delicate taste – something my grandmother loves. Another discovery is that the bull rushes in the pond are called Cat Tail reeds in the US – and are a very useful edible plant. The green shoots from this are nicknamed Cossack’s Asparagus, and the young seed heads can be baked and eaten like corn on the cob. I also saw a recipe today for using dandelion root as a vegetable – as is done in Japan – a useful way to weed the garden (I find the leaves too bitter to use as salad leaves – I’ll leave that to the survivalists). As I was in the garden picking nettles today I noticed another distinctive leaf nearby… we have sorrel in abundance!

Czech day trips

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:37:39 +0000

We have, at last, begun to explore other parts of the Czech Republic a little:

View Lovely Bones Tour in a larger map

View 37th Birthday Trip in a larger map

View Escape to Austria in a larger map

The big spring melt…

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:45:13 +0000

… is under way. This is the longest winter I have ever experienced, and now, at the end of March, we still have snow on the ground. It first fell in mid October – so that’s a fair few months of sub zero temperatures. It rained the other day – wetness falling from the air is a completely new experience for our 5 month old puppy – who we seem to have inadvertently snow toilet trained.

Last week Joann and I went on an expedition to collect willow switches with which to plant a living willow fence at the bottom of our land. It became a bit of a mission when we had to clamber through soft snow of more than a foot deep… carrying our bundles of sticks with our lively pup either pulling on the rope tying them together, or wrapping me up very effectively with her lead. But – it was a rare day of winter sunshine and it was beautiful to be outside nonetheless. The area we were gathering from is now completely flooded with melt water.

It was the Spring equinox on Sunday – meaning that we have twelve hours of dark and twelve hours of light, and at last a couple of patches of snow had melted enough for us to start preparing the garden. Joann is our specialist gardener volunteer so it’s been a frustrating wait for the sight of soil – and believe me – you don’t want to be digging in frozen ground – it might as well be concrete. She is only now with us for another week so I hope we manage to get the beds dug and planted before she leaves us.
Our other late winter visitors were both brave and hardy – the temperature inside and out has been particularly low, and with no central heating, simply keeping our living spaces warm turned out to be their main task. We have worked our way through nearly all of the wood from the fallen barns. Though the winter wonderland looked so pretty, life was harsh. Our (extensive) hallways hovered around freezing point, and we became very accustomed to indoors dressed for outdoors – woolly hats are fine things, but balaclavas are better as bed wear as they don’t fall off. We should not know that. I never knew I would be so glad to see the back of winter.
Today the sun is shining and the temperatures are mild. We are finally able to get on with tasks in the garden. Our permaculture specialist spent a lot of time planning, and now at last we’re able to get our hands dirty in this worm rich soil.

Nový Mlýn Menu

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:27:02 +0000

We’ve shared some great meals with visitors over the last six months, and each person who comes to us brings with them food ideas from their own family and culture. Here is some inspiration for when we forget what we could have for dinner.

Breakfast:
Porridge with honeyed fruit
Home made muesli (oats, wild bilberries*, dried apple, sunflower seeds, raisins)
Bread rolls & toast
Home baked croissants
Cornflakes

Lunch:
Builders’ breakfast (a full English breakfast)
Home made bread rolls
Cheese & home made pickle
Vegetable soup
Lemony tomato and lentil soup
Spicy Parsnip soup
Potato and sweetcorn soup
Stinging Nettle soup (because there will be a LOT)
Potato salad
Garden salad
Scrambled eggs with fresh spinach & feta cheese
Fried egg sandwiches
French toast
Czech Easter Egg spread
Czech fish head soup (without the fish heads)
Hummus made with sprouted chick peas
Spicy bean pate
Sunday Roast dinner – with roast veggies, veggie gravy, sage & onion stuffing, bread sauce, Yorkshire puddings, nut roast, roast potatoes.
Australian Smorgasbord

Evening meals:
Baked potatoes with cheesy coleslaw
Herby Puy lentils with Spinach and Feta cheese
Mushroom risotto
Curry Night (Spinach, Potato & Chickpea, Chapattis, Mango chutney, Yoghurt Raita)
Mushroom lasagne
Home made pizza
Home made pasta
Tex Mex ish (Mexican rice, refried beans, salsa, sour cream, tortilla, roast veggies)
Fritata
Thai green curry (sprout beans in advance)
Wagamama ginger noodle soup
Chinese stir fry with noodles
Polenta with onion, fresh tomato & feta cheese
Fish pie
Dauphinoise potatoes
Fancy mac & cheese

Snacks
Dried apple
Home made biscuits (cookies)
Home made honey flap jack (granola bars?)
Home made carrot cake
Tábor apple bombs

* We didn’t move to Nový Mlýn and throw everything out. I was just thinking about how we could pick fruit from the forest and had heard about a tool which could be used to quickly pick bilberries – it takes hours to do it by hand. I found something called a blueberry rake on the Internet, but after looking at some pictures, suddenly realised that among a cupboard of mystery tools was something that looked very similar. On closer inspection, one of them actually had a tell-tail dried berry and leaf left in the comb. Wonderful.

I am just going outside and may be some time.

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:55:09 +0000

At it’s deepest, the winter has given us the experience of twenty five degrees below zero. I have fond memories of the days when I thought ten degrees c was cold… I noticed myself thinking when I saw this temperature on the thermometer on my bedroom wall - “oh good, it’s not too cold then.” Luckily, manual labour is very warming.

The week in which we experienced minus twenty five was rather catastrophic. Over the weekend we lost drainage, and then a chimney fire on Monday night meant that we had no heating at the house until we had a certificate to say that the chimneys had been swept. A couple of weeks before the chimney fire we had texted a chimney sweep, but had not chased it up when there was no immediate reply. Next time we will know that when the fires start to burn less strongly, it’s time to get the sweep to visit. I’d thought it was just because of damp wood. Anyway, the net result is that the core temperature of the house has fallen dramatically. We are down to zero.

We have made some stupid decisions. For example, insulation was removed from the temporary drainage pipe at the back of the house – this has now frozen solid – so no use of the washing machine or shower for the time being. We had planned to put in the new (accessible) bathroom and link this to the old underground sewage system to give us drainage during the hard winter months, however the project did not advance that far in time.

We also did not get out onto the roof and clear the snow away early enough. When it was decided that the snow looked serious enough that we should clear it off, it was impossible to open the roof hatch to get onto the roof – possibly because of the weight of the snow, and possibly because it was frozen shut. Now we have mounting snow and no way of getting up onto the roof to clear it. If only we’d gone up there every day to check, and figured out how to clear the snow before it was too late. The roof is newly repaired, so it should be okay, but I’m worried.

A wood pile left uncovered was buried deep in snow – creating hours of digging and damp wood which is difficult to burn. The chain saw failed on Sunday – meaning that we have enough wood cut only for a two or three days… we will be lucky if it lasts till Thursday morning – even when we’re heating the house only in the evening. Also, the fridge freezer is working intermittently because the room we use as a kitchen is too cold for the mechanism to work. About the only place in the house where food could possibly spoil is our fridge.

I wish I’d had a secondary set of doors installed in the hallway, and there are still some rooms with only single glazing.

We cannot now retreat from the house because of the animal entourage. To have the three cats and a puppy in the one room we can use in Tábor is just not feasible. Taking on a puppy in the winter has not been a good decision – there has been snow on the ground every day (apart from Christmas Day) since she arrived on the 18th December. We cannot leave her in the garden as it is too cold. She is spending all her time in human company and this is not good for her.

This winter has been way harder than I thought it could be. The positives I can take from the experience… lessons learned about clearing snow and insulation… we’ve realised that a central heating system is essential – yes, local heating and insulation is also important – but something to protect the core temperature of the house is necessary in order to have some degree of freedom over the winter. You can heat a room to a nice twenty degrees with a roaring fire, but if the next room is at zero, that heat doesn’t stay there till the next day. I was looking forward to winter sports, for which we have had no time since Christmas. Right now, I’m emotionally exhausted, and tired of this fxxxxxx snow.

Rain Lights – wet days converted into light.

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:39:59 +0000

So, the issue of micro generation has been at the back of my mind for some time. The standard arguments about it are that if you are going to have a home generator of some description - solar cells (ridiculously expensive at present), wind turbine or water turbine, you end up with a lot of maintenance and a payback time which is uneconomic (ie the amount of embedded energy needed to create the system will take too long to be made up by the equipment during it’s lifetime). Dedicated enthusiasts and those who have serious amounts of money to invest can create their own personal electricity supply.

The big advantage of micro generation is that electricity loses power over distance because of resistance, so creating the electricity close to where it is to be used is important. Also – it grants a measure of independence from centralised systems. With this in mind I’ve been thinking about building a mill wheel utilising the water which should be coming down the stream into the pond. This is going to be a big undertaking and quite frankly, beyond my own capability so I’ll need help. There is embeded energy in anything moving downwards because of gravity, if we could capture the energy of falling rain, for example.

To this end I had researched dynamo generators to be placed within rain water down pipes in domestic homes. The amount of power generated can be calculated using available data on average rainfall. There is nothing on the market at the moment – with electric generators being too expensive. There would be a natural coupling between times when we experience rain the need for heat and light (in all situations where the temperature is above freezing!) – if only it was possible to take the wasted energy of gravity on rainwater and convert it into something useful…

This year I put up Christmas lights with more though than previous years. There are people who decorate their houses so extremely that they end up with a massive electricity bill. This is clearly a waste, but to say so too loudly would be rather Bah Humbug about Christmas. Wouldn’t it be nice to have decorative lights which didn’t waste energy, and provided cheer on dark winter evenings? LED fairy lights don’t need much energy – which is why there’s that big black box with the plug – to convert the high currents of your household electricity down low enough for these bulbs. I had been thinking of hooking up lights like these to my bike to create something truly spectacular (alongside my Pedalite flashing pedals & magnet powered front and rear lights) but wasn’t sure how safe this would make me in the eyes of startled motorists.

Today, I was thinking about the mill wheel, and drawing designs for a wheel to go on the north wall of the house, simply capturing water from the roof guttering and carrying it towards to ground. I would love to create something beautiful and useful for the back wall as there is a large space with no windows which is permanently in the shade. It would need to be aesthetic as well as functional, and built of something light and durable, with as many reused/recycled components as possible. Of course – as the scale increases, so does the energy capture capability as well as the complexity… but how nice it would be to convert that freely available energy into useful heat or light on a gloomy day. Would it need to be one large wheel? Or would several small wheels be a more efficient way of capturing energy? What do we have available in the way of light, strong wheels? Old broken bicycles. Of which we have, by a fluke, more than one (I cannot throw things away), some even with dynamos. As I’ve though so many times before… I wish I’d studied engineering.

What I have learned from previous projects is that it’s important that I can take the first steps using only my own ability, so my first experiment will be with an old bicycle wheel, some guttering and my non-friction bycicle dynamo generator (from http://www.freelights.co.uk ). Wish me luck!

Ladovska Zima

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:14:43 +0000

Za vločkou vločka:Flake by flake

z oblohy padá: from the sky is falling

chvilinku počká:waits a minute

a potom taje: and then melts

Na staré sesli: On the old stool

sedí pan Lada: sits Mr. Lada

obrázky kreslí: drawing pictures

zimního kraje: of winter scenes

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

za okny je: the windows are

a srdce jímá: heart extracts

bílá nostalgie: white nostalgia

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

děti a sáně: children sleigh

a já jdu s nima: and I’m going with them

do chrámu Páně: to God’s temple

Bim bam bim bam Bim bam bim bam

bim bam bim bam bim bam bim bam

bim bam bim bim bim bam

To mokré bílé svinstvo: This wet white stuff

padá mi za límec: falls on my collar

už čtvrtý měsíc: for four months

v jednym kuse: in one go

furt prosinec: furt December

Večer to odhážu Evening it’s depress

namažu záda: smearing back

a ráno se vzbudím: In the morning I wake up

a zas kurva padá: and again it fucking falls

Děcka majú: Kids capitalise

zmrzlé kosti: frozen bones

a sáňkujú: and sledge

už jenom z povinnosti: just from the obligation

Mrzne jak sviňa: It’s freezing like hell

třicet pod nulu: thirty below zero

auto ani neškytne: cars don’t start

hrudky se dělaju v Mogulu: lumps they make in Mogul

Kolony aut: Car tyres

krok-sun-krok: step by step

bo silničáři ta jak: bo ta as a road

každý rok: every year

su překvapení velice: it’s a big surprise

že sníh zasypal: covered in the snow

jim silnice: their road

Pendolíno stojí: Pendolino is

kdesi gu Polomy: somewhere gu Polomy

zamrzli mu: had frozen

všecky CD-ROMy: all CD-ROMs

A policajti?: And the cops?

Ti to jistí z dálky: I’m sure from afar

zalezlý do Aralky: hiding in Aralky

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

za okny je: the windows are

a srdce jímá: heart extracts

bílá nostalgie: white nostalgia

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

děti a sáně: children & sleighs

a já jdu s nima: and I’m going with them

do chrámu Páně: to God’s temple

Bim bam bim bam Bim bam bim bam

bim bam bim bam bim bam bim bam

Na Vysočině zavřeli D jedničku> In the Highlands, the main road is closed

kamióny hráli na honičku: trucks playing chase

Takzvané rallye Letní gumy: Some kind of rally in summer tires

v tym kopcu u Meziřící: against team Hill of Mezirici

spěchali s melounama: hurried with melounama

a teď jsou v… :and now they are …

Však víte kde :You know where

Na ČT1 Studio sníh: On the TV Studio snow

Voldanova sedi na saních: Voldanova sits in a sleigh

A v Praze kalamita jak na Sibiři: And in Prague, like a Siberian disaster

tři centimetry sněhu: three centimetres of snow

au Muzea štyři: and at Museum four

Jak v dálce vidim: As I see in the distance

zasněženy Říp: snow Rip

řikám si: Praotče Čechu I wonder: Forefather Bohemia

tys byl ale strašny cyp: But you were awful cyp

Kdyby si popošel ještě: If you had moved

o pár kilometrů dále: a few miles further

tak jsem se teďka mohl: So I would now have on

kdesi v teple v plavkach valet: somewhere warm in a bathing suit

Místo toho aby se člověk bál: Instead, the man’s afraid

zajít do Tesca na nakupy: to go to Tesco’s shopping

jak jsou tam na tych: such quiet is there

rovných střechách sněhu kupy: Every roof mounded in snow

Do toho všeho jak mi: To it all like me

jak mám zmrzlý nos aj líce: how my nose & face is frozen

a tak ještě z radia: so even from the radio

provokater Nohavica: trouble maker Nohavica

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

za okny je: the windows are

a srdce jímá: heart extracts

bílá nostalgie: white nostalgia

Ladovská zima: Ladovská Winter

děti a sáně: children sleigh

a já jdu s nima: and I’m going with them

do chrámu Páně: to God’s temple

Bim bam bim bam Bim bam bim bam

bim bam bim bam bim bam bim bam

Gardening by Noel Gallagher

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:33:07 +0000

I should tell you what I know about gardening… but I don’t know how much of it is true…
In organic growing you’re depending on earthworms to do a lot of the work for you, if you ever lift up a piece of cowshit in a field you see under, worms having dinner. Worms dig the soil for you. They bring organic matter down under and aerate the soil. So a school of ‘no-dig’ gardeners has come about, because digging is bad for the soil and hard work and it kills everything. But to have this work you need to mulch to keep the weeds down and give the worms something to eat. I get cow dung off my neighbour, lots of it.
So I experiment with this type of no-dig gardening. Last year I mad a bed about 4ft wide and 10 ft long. I made a few, put down newspaper (about 20 sheets thick) then put about 1/2 foot of dung on top. Then using triangles planted potatoes in a bit of compost (triangles make more space than rows).
Of course everybody complained about the smell of cowshit, but not about the spuds in the summer. Spuds are good starters because they are easy to plant, and need a good bit of nitrogen, which dung is rich in. When all the spuds come out (this is where you have to be good) put in winter cabbage seedlings that are just ready to go in the ground. Brassicas also need lots of nitrogen. In spring this bed will be very alive with micro-organisms and earthworms.
Put in some peas or broad bean, and some salads maybe or beetroot. Roots don’t do too well in ? soils generally, but beetroots should, they need richness where carrots just need somewhere to shoot. Swedes also could work, but as they are a member of the brassica family don’t put them in straight after cabbages.
This is where permaculture comes in (look up Masanobu Fukuoka, Emilia Hazehip and Bill Mollison).
Fukuoka says ‘natural farming’ is easy but impossible. Bill Mollison the co-founder of permaculture, I can’t remember the other guy’s name, took some of his ideas from Fukuoka. Where he would go now, after you have brought your soil back to life (Mollison is an Australian, and began this work because he could no longer fish, hunt or collect food because of land poisoning, water poisoning and general destruction of the planet) is to work towards Forest gardening. This is basically like it sounds – planting fruit and nut trees. But the main element of Permaculture is design. This is based on nature and logic. So there are principles of perrmaculture design:
Zoning
Edge effect
and some other shit got to do with the sun and the moon.
Zoning is based on you, mainly. This is common sense but a useful rule to have. You have nearest to you stuff you use every day; salads, chickens, so on. Zone 2 will be things you harvest occasionally, carrots, potatoes and so on. Zone 3 is your orchard, where you don’t have to attend to except for harvest and pruning. Zone 4 is your livestock. People with a small amount of land won’t find this much of a concern.
Edge effect is used to design your garden to be as productive as possible. In nature, edges are the most productive . There is more variety.
Permaculture works towards forest gardening. Fukuoka was the same ideas but his revolution was in grain (read ‘one straw revolution’). Fukuoka Sensei said lets do it like nature; no chemicals, no digging, no weeding. In his rice fields he planted white clover then sows his rice. While the rice is still growing he sows winter barley. (it’s worth looking up his ideas of seed pellets too). After harvesting, the rice straw is scattered back on the field. The clover reseeds itself (clover is planted because it is a legume; it fixes nitrogen in the soil). This mulch of straw keeps the weeds down and feeds the soil, but the barley comes up through it (in Shikoku where he’s from they don’t really get winters).
Fukuoka San is now dead, I found out last year, I would have liked to have visited his farm. But at least he wrote a few books, and has many followers.
Hazelip was a follower of Fukuoka, and her way of gardening are the best. But you have to be a real gardener to practice this. So you have your bed:
When your early peas are finished put in french beans.
When roots are harvested put in salads or spinach.
The important thing about this type of gardening is the soil. In her words, ‘wild soil’. Because lots of bacteria and micro-organisms die if you dig the soil, everything is harvested leaving the roots in the ground (except for carrots etc.). There is a system for the plants that follow each other. ? Chard or spinach follow root crops because they have quite a big root to give back to the soil. Legumes (peas and beans) are constantly present to keep nitrogen levels up. And anything of the plant that isn’t used is left back on the bed. The soil, that’s disturbed as little as possible, becomes ‘wild’. This garden which can be very productive also requires a lot of what should we say… knowledge or experience, but practice is the name of the game. And you can read all about it on the Internet.
But this working stuff is a way of research. Farming is just living really, and it’s important. It’s important to be a pig, and to be milk, and to be a bee.
Back to earth…
I learned a bit of soil science last year. To find out if your soil is clayey or sandy, take a bit in your and when it’s wet. If it’s clay it will be stick and you can make a sausage out of it by rolling it. When it’s dry, it will be really hard. If it’s sandy you can’t make shapes out of it and it’s crumbly when dry. Clay soils are high in nutrients and hold water and nutrients longer. Sandy soils are low in nutrients and drain fairly quick.
Certain plants are fussy about PH brassicas prefer slightly alkaline , potatoes prefer slightly acidic. They should still grow but will do better if the PH is right. There is a test you can do but it’s easier to look at the plants that are growing there. Find out what kind of conditions the prefer. or create. Pines make the soil acidic with their needles. Birch grows in acidic soil but the leaf fall makes it more alkaline. In nature this is called succession. In bad soil gorse is likely to grow. It’s a legume so brings nitrogen into the soil. Birch would succeed this, making it more alkaline and adding organic matter, then followed by Oak (in Ireland anyway).
For gardening purposes you can change the PH to your fancy. Wood as, lime and seaweed will bring down the PH. So should better drainage. Manure and water logging will increase acidity. So will piss. Compost is usually on the acidic side too.
There are many ways to make compost. But the basics are green and brown and air, or nitrogen and carbon and air. Green stuff includes green stuff and manure, and brown stuff is dry or dead organic materials including egg cartons and paper. Brown stuff usually adds a bit of aeration to the heap.
Eating also is important. When food is good everything is good. The slaughter ? is good. When I was eating mackerel I realised that I loved that fish. Really. The beauty of it. When I get pigs I will go out to them, say ‘hello’ smell their hairy backs and say ‘any last words?’. I will say this to them every day and they will ? , tell me something different. And when the time is right I will slit their throats.
Bio-dynamic farming is another one you should know about. Rudolf Steiner came up with this rather complicated method about 100 years ago. Using preparations made out of plants, and working with the moon, everything is planted according to nature’s rhythms. There are so called flower, fruit, leaf and root days, which determine what you’re going to do. Never tried it out really, but bio-dynamic food is always great. The most important things I learned from it are: just before a full moon is the best time to sow seeds, and roots are best harvested in the evening, leaves in the morning.

You can only manage what you can measure

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:20:11 +0000

This is our first winter at Nový Mlýn. We now have a water supply, and wood burning stoves in place to heat the property… and nowhere else to run to. My greatest personal fear (after global warming above 2 degrees!) is the cold. I recently bought a set of 10 thermometers from a seller on Ebay. The purpose – to give us an accurate idea of the temperature in various parts of the house. Sent from China, nine out of ten of them functioned – though the (included) hydrometers clearly don’t work as some are taking measurements of more than 100%. On Saturday I put these up around the house and the results have been… well… no surprise really. Rooms that we heat are warm… the north side of the property is colder than the south, the upstairs hallway warmer than the downstairs. What is more surprising is that comfortable temperatures can vary so much.

The weather turned cold early this year … with a good half foot of snow falling on the 13th October. We were lucky because by chance we’d bought two extra wood burning stoves two days before the snow, one for the bathroom and one for our bedroom. With the old range in the kitchen and barrel stove heating the guest bedrooms, this means that the rooms which needed to be warm have been so. The hallway is many cubic metres of air space, so I’m not yet entirely sure how much heat we’ll put into a place which is used only to walk through – it would seem a waste. We put a large curtain (well, bedspread) across the hall by the front door to prevent heat escaping until we manage to get the secondary door in there. The hallway stands at about 10 degrees – the same temperature as you’d find constantly under the ground. I wonder if this is a coincidence. If we can manage bedroom, kitchen & bathroom temperatures between 17-20 degrees c and other spaces within the house at about 10 degrees, the winter will not be unpleasant.