Smallholding

An unusual entry for me today in my 365 project, usually at this time of the year we are living off our preserved crops with very little or nothing of edible value left in the ground in our garden, this year some rocket seems to have gone particularly crazy, odd to have a vibrant salad crop flourishing so late in the year! Those of you that have been following my project may recall that our polytunnel "bit the big 'un" after some particularly harsh storms this summer, the plastic sheet was reaching the end of its life so it was not too harsh. But we decided to leave it off for a year to rejuvenate...


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There aint a lot happening around these parts at the moment other than splitting our winter wood, so it is only appropriate that it is another picture of what I am upto on todays project 365 entry! I have to say I am feeling more than a little jaded now I am aching in places that I never even realised had places, still it is a wonderful feeling and the weather out here in Hungary is stunning today, maybe a little too warm for what I am doing but to have temperatures of 25°C in October is nothing short of marvelous. I guess that I have chopped somewhere in the region of 75% of what we have...


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After the excitement of yesterday evening it was a weary return to work on the smallholding this morning as we harvested and crushed our grapes for our wine this year. Not a great deal of interest in this picture but it was what I have been up to today and I want to spend sometime this afternoon coding pictures up for sale on my eStore so a very quick snapshot. The harvest started off promising but when we got to what is usually the most productive parts of the vines it was a little disappointing but we should still be producing 60-70 litres of red wine again this year which is fine by me. There...


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It is the typical time of the year when my 365 project gets dominated by our exploits in the garden and today is no different, we have been preparing and preserving our produce from yesterday and for me it was all about chillis today, turning 1kg of them into sweet chilli sauce. Whilst I am more than aware of all the processes you can take to prevent the capsaicin soaking into the skin I never seem to bother so my eyes have been streaming and stinging all day after rubbing chilli into them, stupid I know. Chilli sauce is a staple of ours as it is simply glorious on a bacon sandwich but also as a marinade...


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Work is busily continuing out in the plots on our wee smallholding, todays harvest includes tomatoes, potatoes, kohlrabi and carrots, we have noticed in recent weeks holes in some of our tomatoes but never found out what was causing them... Well today whilst Julie was harvesting and preparing tomatoes to turn into pasatta when she noticed this little caterpillar poking out of one of our yellow teardrop photos. In all fairness it makes a change from Gizmo (one of our cats) from eating our tomatoes, very odd that we have a tomato munching cat. I guess for now I better get back to the garden, finish...


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These chillis that I posted about before have turned out to not only be VERY hot stuff but also extremely fond of the blisteringly dry and hot weather we are having at the moment, we picked all of our plants clean of red chilli peppers just a few short days ago and today it is as if we had not of touched them! Blowing off a couple of work tasks yesterday for a trip out on the boat has seen us well and we seem to be re-invigorated today despite still being a wee but sleepy, we've not done a great deal in the garden today but we will be harvesting more of our bumper crop of chillis tomorrow and turning...


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You may remember I posted a picture a couple of weeks ago of a two day old chick that we hatched from our brood, well it is back for todays 365 Project picture and he is looking all rather judgemental! I am very glad that we managed to clean out our pool yesterday as it has proved invaluable today, the conditions outside are driving me insane and about the only relief seems to exist in the pool which is where I have spent much of the day. I am hoping this short snap of quite frankly unbearable conditions breaks as forecast on Monday so I can get back to not feeling lethargic and knackered permanently!...


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Well after the highs of a visit to our local Communist Era Airbase to watch lunatics drag racing motorbikes over the standing quarter mile it is back to earth today with a mountain of tomatoes needing harvesting, so we lit a fire and broke out our Bogrács (traditional Hungarian cooking pot), to preserve todays harvest. Cooking like this for us is a relatively rare occurence when we have masses of crops to deal with, as it is just so much more efficient than trying to deal with 10kg of tomatoes in a small kitchen that gets very warm in summer. Their is not a great deal of photographic effort...


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I think it is safe to call today a bad day, well yesterday anyway as I am poting this average picture of some tomatoes growing in my garden a day late due to some serious problems with our "internets" yesterday! Ordinarily it would not be more than a minor frustration but I had bucket loads of work on for a client that I wanted to finish up early as we were expecting a call to go and fetch our mopeds from their service, but instead I spent hours and loads of moolah on the phone getting nowhere fast. As you can tell by the late post we had no "interwebs" over night so it is what it is for day 229 a boring...


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We were only out collecting some of our pepper and chilli harvest two days ago and already we have a significant number of these chilli's going ripe again, we also seem to be in the same envious position with our tomato harvest! These particular chilli's have somewhat of a rather "rude name" in the Hungarian language, they are known as Kutya Fasza Paprika, which litterally translates as "Dog's Penis pepper" (use your imagination), however they are not just known as this colloquially but also in general conversation; certainly not something that would ever happen in the English language. After...


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