Eggbox seedlings

When I mentioned seed trays in the kitchen the other day… of course I didn’t mean actual seed trays… the sort bought in garden centres… I meant egg boxes, old cat food cans and old tetra packs cut in half.  The egg boxes take the place of peat seed pots – as you can put a single seed into each pod, and after the last frost date, cut up the box and put these out to grow. The cardboard egg boxes will fall apart when transplanted into the garden. This means that you don’t disturb the roots of plants that don’t like to be transplanted.

Mini greenhouses for our seedlings - made with half a milk carton, a supermarket tomato tray and a bit of egg box.

One litre Tetra packs – the sort used for milk or juice make a nice, waterproof base for six pods from an egg box. Neatly, you can use the plastic containers which tomatoes are sold in as a lid to keep in heat and moisture – they are exactly the right size and even have ready made air holes. This is particularly useful to stop them drying out if you’re going to be away for a few days.

We’ve used the cat food cans to plant sets of onion type seeds – those that can be separated and planted out when spring arrives, as well as for cut herbs which we will keep in the kitchen for the time being – coriander, basil, cress, chives etc.

Glad we saved all those old cans

It’s simple to make some cuts in the bottom of the container with a can opener so that they drain well. I’ll use them in the garden as well – I’ll remove the bottom of the can completely, but I hope that the metal tube will protect delicate seedlings from various predators such as our toilet trained cats, exuberant dog, worm seeking moles – and wasn’t there some rumour about slugs being deterred by copper because of an electrical reaction with slime?

Now – potting compost – given the womblesque nature of the operation – can you really see me popping out to buy bags of peat from a garden centre. Of course not. And – given that there is a foot of snow out in the garden – where can I find nice, loose, stone and root free soil? Maybe in convenient piles above the snow? Mainly consisting of worm-casts, nutritionally rich digested vegetation? My friends the moles set it all up for me.
So, make use of mole hills – nature’s potting compost.

Rubbish made useful

When we have volunteer visitors, Nový Mlýn feels very much like a fairly tightly organised house-share. Everyone contributes to the running of the household in terms of cooking meals & clearing away afterwards , as well as other household chores (we have discovered that this works best with a timetable).  One great thing about the workaway visitors is that they make themselves at home… anyone can have a look in the fridge for something interesting, bake a cake or make a round of tea -  when we have paying visitors, I don’t want to lose this feeling of house-share rather than service, though how to make it work?

Well, how about it being available as a short term house-share for long term travellers?  People can rent a bed for a night (including simple breakfast), with full board available for a slightly higher fee. We can build up to the vision of a sustainable country house hoštel in time, now that we’ve realised that we’d probably never want to run Nový Mlýn as a hotel.

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 all this snow.

Chamomile grows like a weed in the fields and on the roadsides during the summer. The flowers are like large daises but with feathery leaves (which look rather like dill). You need to be careful not to pick May Weed by mistake – which has very similar flowers but very different leaves.  The Chamomile flowers are ready to pick when the flowers turn ‘bug-eyed’ – with the petals turned downwards and the yellow centre rounded.

Once gathered it needs to go somewhere in the sun – for example sprinkled on paper and covered with muslin. When it’s completely dried out it will be crumbly and can be kept in an airtight jar.

Chamomile flowers at the same time as the cornflowers and poppies. This year I will also gather poppy seeds so that we can have wild poppies on the roadside by the house.  I didn’t gather any seed heads last year because of a reluctance to pick from the wild… however the roadside mowers taught me that it’s fair to take seeds from the wild a metre from the road. I guess it’s more important to have safe roads than beautiful verges…

The roof guys brought along one of their sons who spoke good English and were really, well, just nice & genuine. So, we have agreed that the work will happen over the summer holidays because the owner’s son and his friends would like to practice their English with us. We have offered to provide food and accommodation. It would be nice to organise the same kind of thing for them in the UK in future. I’m sure there are green builders wanting a larch roof (they are naturally bug repellent, like Cedar, but they last longer and are grown locally).

They say that they are interested in working in the UK and will give us a commission for every customer we put their way. It’s great that some of the ideas we had about Nový Mlýn are beginning to work out. This is a typical example. The process was: investigate the available technology, judge which is the most eco friendly & sustainable, find a reputable company to install the technology at Nový Mlýn, then promote their work to other green builders. I will now add information about their offering to the 500 year vision website.

A larch roof for Nový Mlýn would be a dream come true. I think we may have to install windows in it just so we can poke our heads out and admire it.