All these past days we’ve been very busy still making food preservations … we’ve finished with the tomato sauce (~40 liters of it), made another batch of the miraculous winter salad, a failed Zakuska which will hopefully keep is a nice complementary dish to cooked rice, prune compote and jam, more pickles (this time of cauliflower, carrot and peppers).

Today we decided to start the day with a bit of movement before sitting down for more cooking … so we went and harvested walnuts from three trees on our property – one tree nice and and large nuts, a second young tree with a little medium sizes nuts and a third large tree with many but small nuts. We hope to have time to do some pruning and coppicing of many trees this autumn and to see if/how they come to life. We’ll probably be using a lot of the wood for constructing our first large raised beds.

I spent the better part of the day splitting open the green shells of the walnuts – my hands are well stained (though we have quite a few experiments planned t actually use the stain for numerous applications!) and the shells accounted for about half the volume and weight … but still have a very nice crop of nuts for the winter. At some point I also started taking care of more eggplants and peppers that were roasting on the rocket stove. Andreea was busy expanding our next-year-seed-reservoir by adding eggplant, garlic and thyme seeds … we already have tomato, peppers and basil set aside (all from fresh crops).

We’re starting to see the end of the winter food preservation process … still planning to make another batch of prune jam, pear compote and jam, two more Zakuska (both of which we started preparing for today) … oh and we finally got a 120 liter plastic barrel we are going to fill with pickled cabbages.

It has been called attention that we have some kind of wood-infestation in the house … mostly in the older furniture we haven’t tossed out (though we will soon) and (unfortunately?) a bit in some of the visible beams. It seems to be slow acting … but we do need to look into it. We finally ordered a large batch of wood for furniture and construction (long story I will tell in detail) … should be delivered in the coming days … so I am looking forward to picking up with more carpentry … there are quite a few more things we need to get done for winter.