Introduced Matt and Chelsea to a traditional craft today, the use of the sickle. In truth they were happier and made more good progress with the electric lawn mower and the strimmer, (apparently it’s called a weed wacker in the USA). In the picture Matt is guarding Chelsea from any vampires that might be lurking in the grass, although with that sickle I’m sure she could look after herself. For years I wondered why all the depictions of early farming showed people harvesting grain with sickles. I couldn’t work out why they had not got round to inventing the scythe. Eventually I stumbled on the answer, early varieties of grain, barley oats etc. had seed heads that were easily dislodged, so walloping them with a scythe would have made all the grain fall on the ground. By using a sickle and holding the grain as you cut it you could minimise this. I suppose that’s why gleaning was such a popular activity for the poor in the Christian Bible as a lot of grain could be left on the ground from harvesting.

Sunday and it looks like rain so I have some time to do the blog. We have had two American WWOOFers, Matt and Chelsea, for about a week now. I think they’re enjoying it but perhaps find some of it a little boring. This is possibly because they have been doing the exciting job of weeding. Strange to say but I actually sort of like weeding, you can see what you have done and then in a few days time you can do it all again. They are from Virginia USA and hope to settle in Europe somewhere. I’m not sure they know exactly what they are looking for, but then they wouldn’t be alone in that. I had thought that WWOOFers would be a bit more into sustainability, organic growing etc. but perhaps they are just a bit shy about putting forward their opinions or asking questions. This morning I got them barrowing loads of hay donated to me by my next door-but-one neighbour. New mown hay is one of the nicest smells there is. My neighbour also gave me a cockerel. He breeds his own poultry and he said it’s a Kudli, I think that’s right? I have never heard of these before, but it’s a lovely colourful bird and is currently lording it over my Kendermagos which are a speckled breed of Hungarian hen.

our first wwoofers, Matt and Chelsea, who are lovely and a big help. See also Health and Safety at work.
The newly set loo. House under renovation is getting a tad neater
soon ready to habitation (thus loo)
and the fields look less weedy. Radishes and lettuces the first produce. (Eva)

A little wizened old man gave me three magic pumpkin seeds today and we wait the results with bated breath. Apparently they were smuggled in from Texas where as I understand it, everything is bigger. We had a fairly impressive thunder storm this evening, which has saved me doing any watering.
Well it had to happen sooner or later, I have to have a rant. On the eighteenth of April the BBC World news (television) stopped broadcasting on analogue and went over to digital only. The thing is, I don’t even want to go out and buy a dig box as it was rubbish anyway with everything repeated over and over again. With the exception of the odd programme, Andy Kershaw springs to mind, (I knew his mum when I lived in Whitworth) you can’t tell it from CNN. I used to listen to the world service on the radio but the radio I have doesn’t seem to want to pick it up. The radio is old, much travelled and knocked about so maybe I need to replace it. I’d listen on the computer, but we can only get dial up here and it’s too expensive to listen without broadband. Ok I’ve finished, I’m going to listen to some B. B. King on one of those strange formats called a cassette.

training day

Today I spent most of my time putting up an electric fence. Although in the morning I did cultivate some land for a friend in the village who has just had an operation. The cultivator he has is similar to mine but gives much more of the feeling of hanging on to the tail; of an enraged kangaroo. I’ve seen horse ploughing in the past and that looks much more fun but I suppose takes a great deal more skill. The locals laugh at me in my steel toe capped boots, it’s much more macho it seems to put your toes at risk. Was it the Pog who was happier without his toes? Anyway I would like to keep mine.
This reminds me of a story years ago in another Hungarian village when someone I knew cut off one of his fingers in a circular saw, (never drink when operating machinery). They took him to the local hospital and the doctors asked if he still had the finger in case they could reattach it. His father said “no, I threw it to a chicken”. When he told me about this a few days later in the pub I made sympathetic noises to which he said, “it doesn’t matter, I got my own back”, what do you mean, I asked? He replied “I ate the chicken”.
The electric fence is to endeavour to keep the dogs from the chickens and goats and the goats and the dogs from the poly tunnel. I bought it from someone I know through another person. This chap lives in what, maybe a hundred years ago, would have been a farm but is now a tumble down farmhouse with a yard and a pocket hankerchief patch of scrubby trees in a forgotten corner of Rochdale. Of course I never got round to testing it and naturally when the fence had gone up it didn’t work, however, when I cleaned up the contacts it started to make a reassuring ticking noise. At this point Bonzo, the smaller of the two dogs who resembles a black pan scrub decided that it would be fun to bite this new toy, it wasn’t!, but at least I know that the unit works. Tomorrow’s goat training, should be fun.

May Day

Apparently the idea with these blog things is to write stuff in them. At least if I do this even nobody else reads it I can aid my declining memory about things that have happened and that I have done.
We are living in Hungary on a smallholding with goats, chickens, dogs and vegetables. We are living in one house and currently renovating the one next door so it’s going to be loads of boring stuff about building and small scale agriculture with some local colour and bits about alternative energy thrown in. We also sell houses in the area see www.ecohun.com.
As you can see on a previous posting Eva has detailed the hiding of the Easter eggs and apart from bits I can’t remember much of what happened before that, however we have had some excitement. We where invited to a May day celebration by one of our friends in the village. They had been having some work done in the morning but I and the other guest were a bit surprised to find the floors partly taken up and I ended up spending two hours welding a big hammer and a shovel doing the famous Hungarian pre-meal exorcise of ripping up a concrete floor, we ate on the veranda. It was the typical, and very good, if not exactly healthy Hungarian cuisine of meat with meat with a side dish of meat. In fact it’s what would be called in the west Goulash but in fact is a porkolt cooked in a large pot hung from a tripod over a fire. Hungarians do some excellent vegetables and vegetarian dishes but the food is decidedly meat based, probably from their time as wandering nomadic horsemen. The food was washed down with the local Palinka, a superior version of vodka, beer and the excellent local wines.
My wine cellar goes thirty metres into the hillside, unfortunately there’s no wine in it and at present I have no vines and not really enough space for them. I did however put in twenty eight vines of eating grapes the other day. Eva’s old friend Rita brought them down for me. She’s always a good source of advice on thing horticultural. Olga and Marta came as well and we had a night out doing the rounds of the wine cellars in Villany. It was busy as there was a motorcycle rally in town and all the wine cellars up and down the main road were pretty full but not so much as you couldn’t get in and as some of my favourites are the slightly more obscure ones we didn’t crowded and had a very nice evening.