Currently, my main worries are the reed bed which has bowed under the weight of it’s contents, so needs to be emptied, moved out and restructured, as well as the holes in the upstairs ceiling caused by beam which have crumbled (hence hinting at the possibility that similar damage has occurred elsewhere).

We had a very long, very cold winter – six months under snow – keeping the house warm was a major undertaking, and a problem with the mortgage means that we may not get the central heating system installed this year.

So, for balance, it’s important to take stock of the positives.

• The winter was tough but we survived it
• We have had amazing people visit us over the past 12 months, allowing us to travel without moving & meet kindred spirits from around the world
• Far more has been done than I could manage alone – wood cut, willow planted, the hen house built, furniture restored, the garden started, rubble cleared, walls painted, mosaics designed, dragons sculpted
• The house is clean and tidy most of the time (the housekeeping alone at Nový Mlýn would be a full time job for one person)
• We have eaten many delicious meals with our ever shifting house-sharers
• Mushrooms from the forest! enough said really

• The woods around the house are filled with bilberries – and we have bilberry picking tools we found in the house.
• Ariela found an amazing strawberry patch just down the road

• We went on holiday!  For the last 7 years we have only gone to the Czech Republic from the UK or vice versa, so a holiday is a big deal for us. We went to the seaside for a week! And we weren’t burgled because Jaakko looked after everything for us.
• We have hens
• The garden is full of delicious greens we didn’t even plant – we just had to learn which weeds are the tasty ones
• We are living a sustainable lifestyle and sharing our experience with other people

I will keep my mind open for the 87 solutions we are seeking.

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.

You use the top couple of inches of the plant as a vegetable, so when you’re weeding next time, put this part of the plant aside for dinner, rather than on the compost heap.

Of course, you need to wear protective gloves while picking,  and wash them thoroughly as they grow close to the ground.  The best method for cooking I’ve found so far is to put them in a covered pan in as much water as sticks to the leaves after washing. Within about 5 minutes (heating from cold)  they will have wilted down – take them off the heat as soon as they look like cooked spinach – you don’t want to destroy nutrients by cooking longer.  Use them in place of spinach in any recipe.

Sekanice is a local Easter recipe here which, according to my students, requires between 30-50% nettles. In my version of the recipe I substitute smoked tofu for bacon and soya for boiled pork – much to the chagrin of my Czech students. I have tested the recipe on non-hippie meat lovers, it didn’t last long despite the perceived weirdness of the ingredients.  Traditionally Sekanice is made for the Easter weekend. You can eat it hot, straight from the oven, and then cold, cut into slices over the next few days.

Sekanice uses nettles as the green because in the old days before we had vegetables flown in from Kenya, it was the first vegetable to come up after the snow.  The word Sekanice means sort of “Cut thing” – because you can harvest baby nettles using a scythe, and then you can cut the Sekanice into slices when it comes out of the oven.

Vegetarian Sekanice (pronounced Set can it say)

• 8 eggs
• 1 block of smoked tofu, chopped into small squares
• 1 pack of soya chunks – soaked for an hour in vegetable stock, then fried in a generous amount of  butter or olive oil
• sage
• a handful of chopped chives
• 3 bread rolls torn into chunks
• 2-3 large handfuls of stinging nettles

Method

Prepare the soya – once it holds the same amount of fat and salt as boiled pork, it loses it’s holier than thou taste.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees c. & grease a large ceramic  baking dish (if you use oil to grease with, it’s really easy by the way).

Separate the egg yolks from the whites and mix the yolks with the bread chunks.  Whip the egg whites into a frenzy (in Czech, they say whip it into snow – when the egg whites are fluffy and form peaks).

Chop the tofu, bread & chives. Combine all the ingredients apart from the egg whites, mixing well. You will need to add quite a lot of salt and pepper as tofu and soya are not salted when you purchase them like pork and bacon.  Finally, fold in the egg whites and turn the mixture into the baking dish. Cook for 40 minutes or until the top has gone a nice baked brown.

Ingredients

• Honey (a couple of hundred grams ish or  1 cup)
• Olive oil (a couple of hundred mls ish  or 1 cup)
• Rolled oats (up to 500 grams or 2-3 cups)
• A hand full of  dried fruit, nuts, orange or lemon peel, chopped – what ever you have in the kitchen.  If you choose just two types,  it’ll have a clearer flavour.

(or – equal parts honey and oil, with equal parts dry to wet ingredients)

Method

Heat the oven to 200 degrees c. and oil a metal baking sheet.

Combine the olive oil and honey in a large saucepan and warm over a medium heat. When it comes to the boil, turn off the heat and add the two or three types of flavouring ingredients – I normally stick to two so that it’s ingredient A and ingredient B flapjack – Almond and Lemon flapjack, or Walnut and Ginger flapjack etc … three flavourings becomes too much of a mouthful to say, if nothing else. Once these are mixed together, add as many rolled oats as you can – ie completely coated by the honey & oil.

Turn the mixture into the baking sheet and pack it down with the back of a wooden spoon. It needs to be an inch or 3 or 4 cms thick. Once it’s packed down, you can use a spatula to cut it into portions, then pack it down again. This’ll make getting it out much easier.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at a medium heat  for 20 minutes, or until it’s a nice golden brown. Let it cool before eating.

* Traditional Flapjack is something like American Granola bars.

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!

View Lovely Bones Tour in a larger map

View 37th Birthday Trip in a larger map

View Escape to Austria in a larger map

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.

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.

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 10 euros a night (including simple breakfast), with full board available for 20 euros. 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.