Fried cheese

Fried Cheese (vyprazany syr) is one of those lovely slovak dishes. Since we have lots of dairy sheep and goats it is a popular plate in our kitchen. Please have a look at the excellent website Slovak Cooking for the full text on how to prepare it. Here is Arnold making it:

Neighbours

A good neighbour is better than a far away friend is a Dutch saying. We have wonderful neighbours! Look at the path they made to connect their farm with ours. No cold feet anymore to get to their place.

Tarmac!!

Road work finished, we now have a higway-look-a-like path going to our house (and to our neighbours).

Road work

Some Dutch visitors tell us that life in Slovakia is cheap compared to Holland. May be, we pay less tax, incomes are however much lower not to say that pensions are too small to live of and if the road is in bad condition you have to repair it with your neighbours. Our road was really in a bad state and since camping season is over our neighbour took the lead to mobilize all 4 house owners to start working on it. So far 12 trucks of stones, 10 with loam and 1 with gravel have been loaded and unloaded. Most work is done by hand, all neighbours participating. A formula, taking into account frequency of use and financial means have been worked out to divide the costs among us.

Killing a tree

It was an old and sick one, however it is still terrible to cut a tree. The biggest cherry tree is gone - making space for our new sheep fold.

Working the twig

We would like to have a second source for water since we use a lot with our campsite. Our neighbour knew a good dowser, mr. Guten, a man who has the gift to work with the twig in search of water. This is the method still used to find subsoil water sources. We also worked with dowsers in Africa. I still find it amazing to withness!

Mr. Guten could indicate water sources, but also their depth and expected output. To my big surprise he told me that I also might have this skill - since I am of blood type O. But I did not tell him my bloodtype! When I tried to estimate the dept with a water bottle on a string it swung the other way around - logical since I am rhesus negative........

At the last picture you see Katinka practising it with some wooden sticks :-)

Dairy man

Monique, Katka and Arnold went on a cheese making course in Velky Blh at 'Farma Kozinka' were they learned to make a large variety of Slovak cheeses. This is a spaghetti-like fresh cheese; a typical Slovak cheese snack and it will certainly be made on our farm this summer (pictures: Monique Smets). We have actually started to milk our goats again this morning. The first batch of kids is now a month old and they are separated at night from their mothers in order to be able to milk them in the morning. During the day the herd grazes on the hills not far from our home. Between the brownish dry grass nice green leaves have started to appear.

House and barn

Digging or road works part II

Our friend with his digging machine showed up again. Finally digging the second track of our own road. We made use of his presence by digging two strenghted parking places at our campsite field. Never ever again we will have to pull campers out off the mud.

Cheese room

With four goats bearing next year's cheese production will at least be double of this year's. So Arnold converted part of our cellar into a real cheese room and made a simple cheese press. I am busy in the vegetable garden, constructing a poultry house and planting more living fences. Yes it is still lovely weather!

Sssssssssssunny

Nice sunny weather, lovely to take a sun bath on our doorstep.

Ready-to-use

Today we finished sawing up our winter stock of wood! Because we saw with Katinka in her playpen outdoors we needed some nice weather and no camping guest present (because of the noise...). So we waited till the guest went on a day trip, dressed Katinka with a nice cardigan and bonnet and did tackle the last big blocks of wood.

Thunder and lightning

The tree which might have saved our house!

Insect control

One swallow might not make a summer - but six do!
We haven't been able to close or lock the door of our workshop for weeks since a couple of swallows decided to make their nest and start a familly in it. We're happy we didn't, six beautiful little birds are now having their residence in a adobe nest above the workbench.
We have a few nests in and outside our house: nice since these birds are truly useful in controlling the insect population;
Swallows feed their nestlings by rolling insects into a compact ball and carrying them back to the nest in their throat. A typical barn swallow will bring about four hundred daily meals, consisting of about twenty insects per meal, back to its brood.

Winter impressions

It is winter, not a lot of new stories to publish on this blog. Just some pictures of our house and the highway our neighbour and the municipal cleared up to the front door of our house. Number of users: 1!
I recently wrote in an ad to promote our camp site: : we have more deer than cars passing the road in front of our house. It is true, especially now, the deer are hungry and roaming around. Sunday we had a group of 68 red deers in our front garden (our neighbour did do the counting).

Reachable

The last 100 metres to our house are off-road. If you are motorized this can be tricky in the winter and spring. Underground frozen and topsoil soft: our loamy soil becomes like quicksand. Last year we have more often been mudded in than snowed in. Since we sold our LandCruiser we have nothing strong enough to tow unaware visitors out of the mud. But this year this should not be necessary - we will be reachable by road!

Paradise depreceated

by Christopher Morley

WHEN the faucets all stop dripping
And the bathtub never leaks;
When the house has weatherstripping
Against the blizzard weeks;
When the piping never freezes
And plumbers cease to plumb,
When every prospect pleases
And we clean by vacuum--

When wallpaper never blisters
And plaster does not fall,
When larcenous laundry sisters
Plunder us not at all;
When kitchen maids don't mutter
And tablecloths show no stain,
And husbands never utter
A single word profane--

When the rugs are never faded
And eggs go down in price;
When pantries are not raided
By children or by mice--
Then wives will never be weary,
Commuters will all grow fat:
But heavens! it would be dreary
To live in a house like that!

100% natural .... strawberries

When I made a new bed of strawberries last week, I covered the surface of the soil with black mulch material as this helps to prevent the plants from being choked by weeds and keeps the strawberries off the soil.

However our strawberry bed isn’t only what it seems to be….

It covers a highly efficient, self-contained, underground wastewater treatment system; a triple chamber DIY septic tank! A septic tank separates and processes wastes. From our domestic wastewater that flows into the tank, heavy solids settle to the bottom, forming a layer of sludge. Greases, oils, and lighter solids rise to the top, creating a layer of scum.

The traditional toilet of our house

The area between these two layers is filled with liquid effluent that can flow through the outlet pipe to the drainfield. The layers of sludge and scum remain in the septic tank where bacteria found naturally in the wastewater work to break the solids down. The layer of clarified liquid flows from the septic tank to the drainfield. The drainfield treats the wastewater by allowing it to slowly trickle from the outlet pipe out into the gravel and down through the soil. The gravel and soil act as biological filters.

September 2008: Arnold making an inside bucket toilet for our first winter
It is a well-known system which we learned to design when studying Tropical Agriculture 15 years ago. I never knew that one day we would build one in a less tropical climate. To start the biological breakdown process in the tank you can buy all kinds of commercial starters but according to our former teacher a death chicken will work as good and the best solution was to put your mother in law in it!

April 2009: Making a triple chamber septic tank before we installed a flush toilet

First anniversary!

We did celebrate our one-year ‘Living on our farm in Slovakia’ today! It has been a great year; we have met wonderful people, worked hard, started to turn a jungle in a small paradise, and have still a lot to do before our place is how we want it to be however we are getting there! Happily we are still ‘not without a bean’, we managed to earn some money and grow some food already.

Four pictures of our house one year ago and today;