I was nervous at first – as most people would be, but I’m getting to know our new guests. I’ve cried with laughter on at least two occasions in the last twenty-four hours, and we have had some AMAZING food.  Rosie made a tagine in a Squash accompanied by a delicious beetroot and fennel salad – all from vegetables growing in the spiral garden. I’m cooking lunch. There are ten of us here right now and the standard has been set very high.

As we don’t have children, and the countryside in this area is depopulated of young(ish) professionals, without our volunteer visitors we would be rattling around this big old house alone.  It can sometimes be stressful coordinating the activities of so many people, however, in general, our visitors are creative, intelligent and willing, and committed to living a sustainable lifestyle. I am incredibly grateful to spend so much time amongst people with whom I can share ideals, and meals.

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.

The kitty is ginger (like Jiri and George the second), weighs 300 grams, has all his front teeth and wobbles as he walks – which means he’s over 3 weeks old and should be fed every 5 hours. I’m feeding him soya milk formula. He needs 80ml of formula every day. I have a 1ml syringe with the top cut off which seems to be working as a way of feeding him – so 16 lots at 5 hour intervals. He arrived at about 2pm and so far he’s not pooed… but at least he’s eaten (he’s had quite a lot of soya milk).

There is no cat’s protection league here, so we can’t just hand him in. Luckily there are websites like kitten-rescue.com to help.

He’s way too young to be away from his mother, but we’ll try our best. This will make for an interesting day tomorrow… we’re going to Cesky Krumlov with our Aussie visitor, then collecting a couple of Taiwanese couchsurfers before going to camp overnight at the cottage of a Czech friend who is having her 50th birthday party… all with a 3 week old kitten in tow.

Gold! Well… Clay! Which you must admit, is just as exciting (and far more malleable at ambient temperatures).  When we got home I referred to the self sufficiency book Dad bought me and it provided detailed instructions on how to test the clay for PH balance, treat and process it… that book is so good. If we ever loose the Internet & civilisation, we’ll be okay.  So, we ignored the instructions and got straight on with making stuff. Rosie did a ceramics course recently – so she’s the expert!

The next day I got out my enamel kiln. The kiln is not large – in fact you could just about fit an apple in it. It was given to me by a friend of my mum’s – when I was a teenager – because she knew that I liked all sorts of crafts – and I’ve kept it ever since.  Apart from a little smoke it seemed to be working fine and the (dinky) pots were successfully fired. The clay turned from grey to fleshy pink – with lovely sparkly bits (which John says are puwer gowld!).

So far I’m a little stuck on what we can actually make from the clay – smaller than an apple, yet not tat. We’re fine for tat – we can make loads of it.  I could make ends for my home made knitting needles… bottle caps to keep wasps out of beer in the garden… John says that literally anything can sell in his gift shop in Bechyne – so the challenge has been set.

The problem was that a plug in the bathroom (which was part of the old wiring) had been wired the wrong way – reminiscent of the copper wire that had been used to bypass the fuse system (which we discovered in the early days). Luckily nobody died either time – but it does leave the lingering impression that the house had been booby trapped.

So, yet again we are without hot water and a washing machine. When the weather is good we’re fine as we have the solar showers and bath outside. The repair cost for the boiler was greater than the cost of the boiler itself – so we’ve ordered a new boiler with three inputs – meaning that we can heat the tank from a back boiler on a stove, from a solar system input as well as a backup in the form of electricity.  That’ll be arriving next week, and the Whirlpool washing machine has been repaired – they phoned us to ask us what the maximum we were prepared to pay for the repair would be – then they charged us this amount. Our cheap second hand washing machine has stopped being.

Still… we hope to rejoin the 20th century again this week.

The individual value of each item would not have been high – an antique mangle for squeezing out washing, various mechanical parts from vehicles and from the old mill – these items were part of the history of the house. I imagine that they have been taken for their scrap metal value, without a consideration that we would have put things back together, or wanted to use tools that were so old.

We have not reported this to the police because we are not 100% certain what was taken by whom. However I am not going to be recommending this firm to others.  This is a massive shame because the work was excellent, and we now have an unsurpassably sustainable and ecological roof covering. I thoroughly recommend a Larch roof (like Cedar, but produced in Europe), but I cannot thoroughly recommend a firm to do it.

This experience leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and has rather dampened my spirit concerning the project.

We seemed to have some kind of mental block with clearing the orchard/garden between the house & barns. Mostly because I expected M to do it, and also perhaps because I was waiting for us to have more sophisticated tools to hand. As it is, our domestic lawn mower and strimmer clearly weren’t up to the job… we’d discussed getting a more specialist bit of kit (after seeing Jerry’s ride on mower & inch long lawn), but it’s kind of low on the priority list. In the end, I was driven to cutting the meadow (that sprung up in the mean time) using the scythe. Driven by apples… which have been falling for the last month.

After day 1 I was completely knackered… and the garden looked like it had been pushed through a hedge backwards. I then did a bit of web based investigation and found a video of scythe technique – obviously not exactly what I’d spent hours doing the day before. So, we watched, and practised, and the grass still looks like it’s been pushed through a hedge backwards. Luckily, we have ample opportunity to practice this skill.

Though my arms now feel like someone has dipped them in cement, I am sure this is healthy. On the plus side, the grass is now shorter and we can see the potential of the garden area. Also, I’m bound to have a tan (which is great seeing as we’re going back to the UK tomorrow).

I discovered a nest of sorts in a patch of nettles I was cutting down… 12 hen’s eggs courtesy of our neighbour’s chicken. I would like to invite her back, but now her hiding place is gone.  So, M has been making the most delicious eggy bread using potato bread (unlike anything I’ve come across in the UK, really lovely) and fresh free range eggs from our own farm.  It’s giving us ideas… I would love to have some chickens… perhaps legbars, and have also been investigating Alpaca. We have enough land to support a small group of Alpaca.  I need to work out how they would fare in the winter if there is heavy snow.

It has been lovely spending so much time outdoors… really not the same as working on the house inside with the windows open. I saw the most amazing caterpillar – really punk with 4 tufts and an extraordinary feathery fan:

Obviously, the above is not my own photograph, which turned out like this:

Also – ever seen an argiope bruennichi? Well here’s one (my own photo!)

Also known as a wasp spider, it’s huge (at least 1cm body) and it’s awesome. I’m beginning to develop an appreciation for insects after seeing these two examples.

Anyway, I’ve cleared the fallen apples from the (at least) 7 trees in the enclosure. We need to prune them back quite substantially when we return. I’ve discovered that apples here are divided into summer, autumn and winter… with each having a different propensity for time of ripening, sweetness & hardness. I just need to work out what’s what. I only just caught the large white summer apples in time… they were delicious but turned floury and lost their crispness rapidly. Now the very small red apples are ripe – they don’t seem to keep for a long time either but don’t bruise as easily as the white ones. The pears are still a little crunchy, but sweet with it… and I quite like crunchy pears. I counted the number of pear trees lining the road between here and Tábor the other day – about 100 trees. I think my pears will be the next fruit in season so I’m keeping an eye on them. We have a good couple of tons of cooking apples here. We may end up with another strudel mountain – if I can figure out how to cook it.

At least now, I will be able to gather the apples as they fall ripe from the trees, instead of simply loosing them in shoulder height nettles.

I need to stop typing now because of my cement arms. But I think it’s been worth it.

We have beautiful old windows, which are just in need of a little tlc. Unfortunately, they are somewhat leaky (airwise), and it would seem that everybody else (from here) who visits the house, not only hates them, but also thinks they will be ineffective and should be ripped out and replaced by, at the very least, a smart set of PVC frames. I am reluctant. They may be a little draughty, but they belong to Novy Mlyn. Sparkling, perfectly flat new windows are not for me, so I have been undergoing as much restoration as possible over the summer. It is part of the ethos of Novy Mlyn to reuse as much as possible, ripping out and replacing perfectly good double windows goes against the grain, and the evidence that new double glazed windows would be more effective is inconclusive.

But… if they are to work, I must eliminate the obvious leaks. I was trying to work out a method of testing each window for drafts, and was considering using joss sticks, or something smoky, so that I could see where air was getting in and out of the windows. They are Vienna style (1m by 2m ish, two windows approx 30 cm apart). The house is odd, really. It is a town house in a village, it would suit Prague or Tábor better (but then would have been worth UK millions, rather than just Czech millions). It’s really important to draft proof the windows as I need to stop heat just walking out of the house in the winter. I am terrified that it will be as cold at Novy Mlyn as it was in our flat in Moseley (who in their right minds would build houses from a single layer of bricks?).

So, I have been working on the windows, cleaning them thoroughly, stripping and repainting the frames (the bit set into the wall). It was the windows which made the place look like it hadn’t been lived in for 20 years, cracked and peeling; a graveyard for dead insects.

After several weeks of work, my shoulders and upper arms have benefited from the toning effects of hard labour, while my lungs have suffered the consequences of melting and sanding of leaded paint. Pleasingly, I now know that my windows are not rotten, and none of them need to be completely replaced. Less pleasingly, I know where the gaps are, and they’re considerable. Over recent weeks I have been thinking about what to fill these gaps with, from the D shaped plastic stuff used by contemporary joiners, to an organic alternative, such as shafts of straw.

This sheds some light on the number of dead flies we found in the 30 cm gap between the two sets of windows. When we first arrived at Novy Mlyn it was positively creepy. Very Miss Haversham with cobwebs all over the place. Even now, the spiders are quick to work compared with my speed at cleaning, and it would seem that food for spiders is plentiful at Novy Mlyn. Bugs are getting into the house in great numbers.

I know this’ll sound a little bit soft, but I leave the bathroom light on when we are away from the house, so that Novy Mlyn is not in complete darkness (for the cats). When we are there, I also leave it on all night for me to find the loo. I cleaned the bathroom today, and there were lots of little bugs in the bath, on the windowsill & inside the lamp (which is low energy, of course, as are all the lights at Novy Mlyn).

The other day I attempted to design a fly screen, using one of the many pairs of net curtains which have been left behind in the house. This was only effective in keeping out moths and mosquitoes (in itself important), however we were plagued that night with the sort of tiny flies which could fit through the net (at least that wasn’t as bad as the flies… it took us a little while to find the source of those… not the types interested in scraps of food… but instead insistently bugging us humans while we tried to work, and it took us a while to figure out why. We have a keen hunter living with us now, unfortunately he sometimes hides his prey out of site and forgets about it. For us, an unforeseen consequence of fitting a cat door.)

Instead of clean running water, we have variety of alternatives; these include rain water, water transported from Tábor, bottled water (Evian to my friend Ross), alcohol based disinfectant gel and wet wipes. As I’ve mentioned before, we have an ongoing relationship with wet wipes. I try to use them for other purposes after the initial use, as they’re hardly a sustainable option, but am accruing a wet wipe mountain. For your information: we have found that the Helen Harper brand wet wipes are best for removing oil based paint from skin (!).

Today I put the windows back in the frames in our bedroom. It was very warm again so I figured out a better version of the fly screen/mosquito net. I also went looking for some material to plug the gaps in the windows… after playing about with some long stemmed grass for a while (plentiful, local, but unsuitable) , then looking around for alternatives… laddered tights… some kind of string, perhaps… I realised that I have the perfect measure… wet wipes. Pleasingly, these fit exactly into the gaps, and I have a huge supply dry and clean enough for this job. As the frames are white, they are even camouflaged.

Now, my plan is simply, window by window, plug up the gaps I can see, then using a light and my new screen, see if any of the little bugs make it into the house at night. If no, I have blocked any gaps that would lead to significant heat loss. There is always method in my madness.