Flowers are shooting out of the ground and are opening their fragrant blossoms. After the lilac there were evolving wonderful peony and we are curious how our garden will continue to surprise us. The potato patch, having seven varieties, is now fully grown and all the other beds are filling up with our young plants. But even without our actions in nature, it brought us enough to already bring it to our kitchen. We fermented the young sprouts of the pine tree in honey and cooked dandelion blossoms to a syrup. A huge sage bush is inviting to create mediterranean dishes. Its blossoms look delightful in a cold lemonade too. It is pure fun and joy to serve oneself in nature according to ones current whim.
Even if we spent more time outside than inside, our settler house developed further. Since three weeks we are living in an camping atmosphere, as our bathroom is getting completely renovated. The craftsman did an amazing work and it will not take long until everything will be in place. We cannot wait until we can see our chosen handmade tiles inside our bathroom. Or our self constructed fittings out of copper. An old trough, which we found inside the barn, will serve as our sink. We are deeply curious if all our ideas will form a harmonious picture in the end. Already now we would have loved to present you everything in the finished condition. But the walls are not even painted and we are still trying to find specific pieces of furniture. Further, we need to coordinate thousand of things which leads to various things being left behind. As not only for our bathroom we found the perfect craftsmen but as well for the core of our house, our kitchen, we were able to create a fantastic team. They are working already quite a while to build us a little cooking paradise. We would love to tell and to present you more about it in no time!
After being quiet for a few weeks about the development of our settler house, we want to tell you now where we are at. To find a beginning, to tell about all these developments, is extremely hard. Compared to the progress in the beginning of the year, which was formed by the slowness of bureaucracy, now everything is evolving without any notion of calmness. After the last snow during Easter and a crystal cold week of even minus 18 degrees, nature exploded when it was touched by the rays of sunlight and the first warmth of spring. This was our call to come out of our house and into our garden. Our plans were big. In all various garden books it is to read that one should begin small. This is a matter of interpretation but that a vegetable garden of 75 square meter and a greenhouse of nearly 19 square meter is not a modest beginning leaves less room for interpretation. At last while you are doing the first cut of the spade you notice that your ideas were exaggerated. To transform an overgrown, wild area full of gardeners most beloved weed into a usable ground is clearly only a minor challenge. This will keep us working over the coming years! We were expecting a whole lot of work in the garden but reality even managed to outdo our, as we thought, pessimistic calculations. Quickly everything was overgrowing our heads. In the true sense of the word, as the idea that we would need a proper lawnmower for a 3000 square meter piece of land, never crossed our mind before. We thought that it might be beautiful to leave everything growing wildly apart of little ways to walk through the garden. Who is in possession of a big garden will laugh loudly about our naive way of thinking. Okay, this is another area of development. While we were digging day in and day out, nature was changing in the blink of an eye. Now the cherry and apple blossoms were opening, which we were waiting for in eager expectation, and now they were falling to the ground and now there are countless tiny fruits flourishing.