End of a long and warm summer

Yesterday it was ten degrees Celcius warmer than today. It seems that a long and warm summer has ended today. Weather forecast for the end of this week predicts snow! Hard to believe, but yesterday we were wearing shorts and t-shirts. So we will have a five day autumn before winter starts next weekend. Because of comming cold and especially wet weather we have taken our goat lambs out of the sheep pasture to join the adult goats. Now all goats (16! incl billy) are together. During the days they are completly free and at night they sleep in an open stable. If it rains they can go into any of our stables. The sheep will (have to) cope with bad weather without shed.

Pests and plagues

Pictures taken this morning through our kitchen window - breakfast with a view!

If you farm you always have undesired species feeding on your crops, growing on your fields or contaminating your livestock. Most are just called pest, plagues or weeds. We enjoy all kinds of wildlife roaming on our fields. Big herds of different kind of deer, wild pigs, foxes and pheasants. A great experience for us and also for our campsite guests. When food becomes rare they start attacking the winter feed from our sheep, goats and horse. Electric fencing has failed to keep deer away ... they broke it down and finally even carried it away. In the snow you can see that many tracks go in the direction of our alfalfa silage. We now leave the lesser quality for our hungry wild friends - cheaper than renewing fences ever second day.

Tarmac!!

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

Deer

This late afternoon a nice herd of red deer in our 'garden', normally we have fallow deer around our house. They were much shyer and ran away before I could take a close-up picture.

Harrowing

We still get questions from people in Holland if they do have tractors overhere - in western Europe we do think that fields are still worked with horse and plough.

Hungry wildlife

Deer are now coming out of the forest and are regularly seen grazing on our fields. Last night a hungry fox must have visited our fenced yard, one of the geese is missing.

The boys on the sofa

Parasol mushroom and others

The parasol mushroom (last two pictures) is a fungus with a large, prominent fruiting body resembling a lady's parasol (some of the other mushrooms on the pictures are resembling other things). The parasol mushroom is difficult to mistake for any other, and therefore we dare picking it! This mushroom is very popular in this region where it is prepared like a schnitzel. It is delicious and we did collect a bag full of it Yesterday, fryed with garlic, onions and peppers it made a lovely diner.

Camouflage

Yesterday and today

Yesterday we visited the folklore festival in a closeby village called Hrusov. They gave a demonstration of the traditional way of harvesting grain. Mowing and collecting by hand and threshing with this very big wooden machine.


Today the cooperative came to harvest the rye field in front of our house, part of it belongs to us. They came with four combine harvesters! The job was done within less then an hour.

Summer

Hot weather and every few days some rain; makes the grass grow much faster than our animals can eat.

Will be blossom

The calm after the storm

It is nice and calm on our camp site field.

Dramatic

One week to go and it will be spring.....

Hamlet

We do not have many neighbours. And this is the nearest hamlet to our house, it is called Duchenec II. It is not that far, I took this picture today while walking the dogs and enjoying the wonderful weather.
If you look well (click on the picture to enlarge) you can see the mountain Sitno (1,009 metres) on the background, it is the highest hill of the Štiavnica hills.

Voda & Blato

This is what happens when cold and snow disappear. Lots of water (voda) and mud (blato). Yech!

Last winter impression

Since it will be nice and warm soon; just one last winter picture taken today.

Tracks

The nice thing of snow is that animal tracks are easily observed.

Roe







Rico
(no not a bear but the giant dog of our neighbours)

February

How many years will we need to get used to this type of winter weather?

Hungry

Also spotted around our house: two foxes. They must be hungry, hopefully the wire meshes of our geese run are too small for them.