February

Two posts in a week! How lucky you are. I'm looking forward to being back up to date by the end of this post.

We love the horses on our land!

Sooo February... The weather has been all over the place. We've had a few sunny days where we were able to work in the garden and really get our hopes up for Spring arriving. We even started getting excited about vegetables. But then we were been bought back down to Earth with a lot of long, grey and very wet days. One night we even had an earthquake!! (We didn't feel it, actually, but it did knock down the stone wall I rebuilt last year - annoying!) And, of course, to top February off we were graced with presence of 'The Beast from the East'. 

I have to start this wall again

Let's start with the sunny days. Unfortunately I had planned to take some 'after' photos this week, but then every thing got covered in snow, so I don't have any. Hopefully they'll be more progress during March, so more photos to come next time. We spent some time clearing the veg beds of weeds and covering them in blankets so they are weed free and warm when we need to use them. That's the plan anyway. Pete also rendered the 'water meter hut' so when the weather improves we can paint that and make it look a bit prettier. 

Rendering the 'hut'

Cosy veg bed

The first big job this year is to build a garden shed so we can clear some space in the barn. To build the shed we need to make a concrete base. To build the base we need to shift the huge pile of earth that is still piled up in the corner from when we dug our septic tank. We've already filled all our raised vegetable beds with earth from the septic tank, but the stuff is never ending! On the few sunny days we had we were able to clear the area and move what we could around the garden before realising it was just too much. There was nothing else for it but another raised bed! A BIG one this time! We chose the area (near to the earth pile) and cleared it of over grown vines and a huge pile of bricks. We started by laying a small concrete footing and then Pete lay bricks and made a long bed around 50cm high. A couple days after we'd finished the weather turned for the worst, so we are yet to find out if it will hold all the earth we need it to. 

Bricks moved and stacked neatly

Footing for the new raised bed

We have also drawn up a 'plan' for the vegetable garden this year. We are trying to do a 3 year cycle so we don't plant the same veg families in the same beds every year. This is good for the plants and also helps improve the soil - something we need as much help with as possible. It's going to be our third year growing vegetables, so I hope we will improve on the last two years! We both feel much more confident and have a much better idea of how things work and what works together. These things take practice and I'm having to develop a lot of patience as you have to wait a whole year if something doesn't work! (Obviously this is not true of all the vegetables but some you only get one shot with!) 

Organising seeds

The 14th of February is a holiday in Bulgaria. It is Valentines Day, but they also celebrate the first trimming of the vines. So it is the festival of wine and love - the two best things in life! We've made it a tradition to see S & G and have a good old fashioned day drinking session at one of the village parties. This year we wanted to go to our village party again but we arrived there to find nothing happening. The weather was absolutely abysmal so we assume this had put people off. But, we were armed with wine and lots of yummy cooking so we ventured to SG to see what was happening there. Luckily there were a few people about and the village hall had set up a spread. One of the amazing things about village festivals in Bulgaria is that they lay the tables with snacks, wine, rakia and soft drinks for all AND bring out a hot meal for everyone there! You don't need a ticket or to give any money. at least I hope not anyway - we've never been asked! We had a great day with friends and met some lovely Bulgarian ladies too.   

Pete and I also celebrate our anniversary on the 14th so we decided to have the next day off and went for a big walk up the nearby hills. We'd not walked here before but actually found a track going exactly where we were headed. It was a beautiful spot and we plan to come here again one day for a sunset viewing.

Wine and love (and food!)

Walkies

Chilling in the sun

Lovely views

A couple of food highlights now! Before we went to the UK we bought several cabbages with plans to make sauerkraut over winter. Our neighbour, H, kindly offered to take the barrel and keep an eye on our salty cabbages for us whilst we were away. When we went over to retrieve our barrel he showed us inside and the whole top layer was covered in a blue mould. It reeked. Oh well, I thought, the cabbages were about 10p each - so never mind. But then H proceeded to take a cup, dunk it in the barrel and have a big old gulp of this mould juice ... AND say how good it was! I was nearly sick just looking at him! We took our barrel home and considered throwing the whole thing away, but on closer inspection the cabbages looked okay (under all the mould.) We sliced the cabbages and stored them in fresh salt water in steralised jars. We've eaten one jar and survived, so that's lucky. 

Cleaning and slicing fermented cabbage

Sauerkraut (including a kimchi version)

Another big food event was eating our cockerel, Leroy. He'd been in the freezer for nearly a year now and we'd not got around to cooking him yet. Pete did him proud and made an incredible, slow cooked, coq-au-vin. Neither of us had ever eaten cockerel before and we found it so rich and gamey - nothing like chicken. It was so delicious. Thank you Leroy. 

Amazing coq-au-vin

With the rainy days we had to give up on our work in the garden and turned our focus to the other big job this year - finishing the living room. In theory this should have been easy, but we are fitting a central heating system in here, from a woodburner, so needed to figure all that out for the pipe work behind the stud walls. S & G were a huge help and we went over to theirs (twice) to look at what they'd done so we could copy it. Once we'd finally got our heads around it all we were able to fit some pipes and start the stud work. 

Another thing we had to overcome was the flue for the woodburner. There is a covered flue hole on the back wall which was, we assume, used by the previous owners (although there was no woodburner here when we arrived.) All this time we just thought we'd put our flue into that hole, but when we opened it we found it went straight into the big chimney from the downstairs woodburner. To have two fires going into on chimney like that is dangerous and can cause a lot of smoke to blow in the house, so we needed to figure something else out. We really didn't want to build another chimney through the roof so we were lucky to find a hole, through the stone wall, at exactly the right place and height for the burner! Jammy!

Blocked off from the hall / kitchen

Hole, with flue, for the woodburner

A couple of other jobs included replacing two rotten floorboards (we are going to paint this floor anyway) and removing the old batten from the ceiling. 

Board to be replaced

One board out

And replaced, lovely.

Batten off, we will just board over this old ceiling

Starting the studs

Cleaning up

Here you can see how much the floor dips in the middle! I love it!

And finally, the snow! Usually we would have loved to see the snow. In fact we were feeling a bit sad that we'd missed out this year. But this was not a usual week. Over the last two months we have been scouring the internet and sending our family members, in the UK, all over the place to find us a new car. We actually bought one car to find it was a total disaster so had a slightly stressful time returning that and rushing to find another one, as we already had flights and channel tunnel crossing booked. (Luckily we got our money back and it turned out great as we managed to find a much better car.) Unfortunately, we were not able to get housesitters this time so Pete had to go on his own whilst I stayed with the pets. He is driving back with his dad, who kindly offered to accompany him. 

Of course, we could have done this in January when we were already in England, but we thought we'd play it safe as we didn't want to get stuck in snow driving over Europe in winter. That's why we waited until March. Lovely, sunny March! So you can imagine our surprise when, three days before Pete is due to fly, we wake up to over a foot of snow and it still coming down hard!! And it's not only here but all over Europe and the UK! Typical! Our main concern was actually getting out of the village, as the last couple of years the snowplough service has been sporadic. But, thankfully, they were on top of it this year and the roads were cleared twice a day whist it was snowing. Even our track was cleared! 

So Pete left in a taxi and I was on my own for a week. Not much to report really, I've just been clearing the snow, taking the dog out and keeping warm with the pets. I've also been learning Bulgarian (a New Years resolution is to get much better!) Pete and his dad are due back tomorrow so I am excited to see them and the new car!

Here are some snow pictures for you. Thanks for reading! See you next time!    

Before the road was cleared

Making angels!

Lucy absolutely loves the snow

Snowy house

Snowy village

Walks before He left

!!

Bye bye!