Winter Walk

This magnificent old plane tree is the Kurtkoy Kapili Cinar (Kurtkoy Plane tree with a door): we walked up the valley, following the river, to find it - and then all got inside it!
 

 

Monday morning

Monday mornings can sometimes seem rather dreary - but not this one!
Today's sunshine was wonderful - not only a reminder that the days are getting longer again, but also the first time we've seen sun since the snow came down last Monday.  After a whole week snowed-in, even the heavy frost couldn't dampen the spirit.

So this was my Monday morning:

• Get up, make coffee (8am)
• Feed cats, get boots on, go & let chickens out
• Notice that a wild thing has dug into the chicken pen and stolen their feed
• Have second cup of coffee, empty ash out of stoves
• Get out the wheelbarrow & tools, and dig a rough trench along the back of the chicken-yard
• Block up the wild thing's tunnel
• Load up some heavy slates, and get down into the mud to fit them horizontally under the wall
• Get another load of slates and arrange them along the inside; the wild thing now has 40cm of stone to get past with its next tunnel.
• Take the wheelbarrow outside the gate to clear the road and load up with branches which had come down in the snow, break them up for kindling & bring in to dry.
• Bring in armful after armful of firewood and fill crates with wood ready for the next few days.
• Empty ash bucket
• Collect eggs, put out more chicken feed, come in, take muddy boots & trousers off, change, have lunch, light fire. (4pm)

Where did the day go?!


CT






 

Granite Walls

For the past few days I've been shifting lumps of granite.  It's rather heavy.  1.6 kg per Litre (compared with water which is 1:1)  Each piece weighs about 25-30 kg (and keeps me fit)
The granite has been lying about in the yard cluttering up the place, so I've collected it all up into one corner to build a retaining wall.  Geotextile keeps the weeds out of the cracks, and a drainage channel filled with gravel runs along the front - here it is, "work in progress":

 

And here is one I made earlier...

CT

Warming the Cabin

Preparations for the winter are moving on... 6 tons of firewood are chopped and stacked to dry, and a new drain has been laid the length of the driveway, to catch the rain and take it out and down the hill, instead of the previous arrangement, which brought the rainwater through the building.

What we hope will make the most difference, though, is the new jacket that we've put onto the cabin - turning another wall into a warm wall instead of a cold wall.  We took off all the cladding. filled the walls with 10cm of insulating material (the full thickness of the wall), added the jacket (a further 3cm which should also have the benefit of stopping the wind whistling through) and replaced the cladding.  Although it would have been even better to install a total of 20cm of insulation, the structural restraints made that impossible, and 13 cm is what we've got - with 13cm of insulation we'll  be considerably warmer than before!

 

We've also re-hung the black fleece blanket/curtains on all the windows, and will add a second insulating lining to each of the curtains

Cake that's good for you!

healthy & naughty!
For the past few months we've been setting up a cake business:  My friend Tefi is the cake maestro, experimenting in her fabulous kitchen with new and delicious ways to make cake.

• Some of her cakes are fat-free (so you can eat more! without adding to your fat-intake)
• Some of them are gluten-free (not just for the non-wheat-eaters: you'll be amazed by the lightness of many of the gluten-free cakes - order one and share it with yourself!
• Many of the cakes on offer are vegetable-based (Instead of boiled carrot for supper, why not eat cake? - Try the famous "Carrot King"
• Some are not at all healthy - but full of delicious goodness and extremely naughty.
• All are absolutely divine - take a look for yourself: www.englishcakefactory.com

You can choose to look at the website in English or Turkish, but it only went "live" this morning, so we're still working out some glitches.  And by the way, delivery is FREE - but only to addresses in the Beyoglu-Mecidiyekoy-Levent corridor (Beyoglu/Sisli/Besiktas municipality areas) 

Organic Cake, coming soon...
A secondary objective is to make the cakes not only healthy but also mostly Organic - so we'll be growing some of the ingredients for the cakes here on the farm... eggs, squash, strawberries, and buying Organic from other Organic farms for the remaining ingredients... (or follow the cake-blog, at www.englishcakefactory.blogspot.com
C.T.

 

Caring for Bees

For the past month I've been learning about bees - three evenings a week and a practical session at the weekend.  So my confidence with the bees has increased - but unfortunately nobody has sent them on a course to learn about humans, so the other day they were very cross and we both got stung several times!  At the moment, they are busy getting ready for winter, and we're feeding them with bee-cake (made from honey, powdered sugar & pollen) each week to keep them nourished. 

We started off with two colonies at the beginning of the summer, then divided one at the end of the summer, so we're now taking care of 3 hives. Bees are social insects living together in a hive, and the care of bees is incredibly important, since they play a fundamental role in our sustainability. They collect nectar and pollen and turn it into honey, and while visiting flowers in their pursuit of nectar and pollen, cross-fertilziation is achieved,. Without this we would not have many of our basic food products, and, perhaps even more importantly, plants would fail to make seeds for future generations.  So caring for bees is not only a rewarding hobby, but actually our social responsibility.
CT
 

Well cleaning

When we first discovered the well, a few years back, it was so infested with blankets of slime and nastiness, we poked it with a stick, decided it wasn't very deep (or exciting), made a secure cover, and then more or less forgot about it.  This summer there's been a water crisis in the village, so we decided to open it up and investigate what sort of well we have...
For the last 3 months we've been pumping out the water, removing buckets of slime/rubbish/plastic/glass/rubble/wire/mud, then letting it fill up again - and at 5 metres down we still haven't reached the bottom.  Soon our ladder will not be long enough, so we'll have to dangle off it to mine the slime pit..

As and when we do reach the bottom, the next question will be how we set up a management/pumping method to make best use of it.