St. James’ Park

…that means Newcastle upon Tyne, England for those of you who aren’t Geordies. Yes… the latest news is that I am spending some time in the UK helping my son to set up a business. St James Park is being looked after by my house sitter, Yvonne and is in good hands. There will be more news and blog activity when I have time, but this is just to say that SJP is not open to visitors or volunteers this year. See you next year - good luck.

a quick bit of news to say that August weather has come pretty early this year - the last 3 days have been between 35-40 degrees. we had a very dramatic thunderstorm but its a bit scary to think it could be this hot for the next 3 months.

Great business opportunity : the bar and restaurant in Voditsa is for rent for 400lev a month – that includes electricity. Its fully equipped –although I haven’t actually been in the kitchen. It has huge potential to be a great place to hang out. It needs a little bit of reorganising and some good music – there is space to have a band on in the corner. This village so needs a buzzy little bar and a place to eat. If the village development plans work out, there’ll also be a lot more people coming around this place in the future. We can help you to find somewhere to live - if you’re interested, call me on 0035960386286.

One year, funded volunteer posts available. Applicants must be 18-30
from an EU member country, and have an interest in organic farming.
Project starts 1st May and is for 1 year.
Great opportunities, return travel to Bulgaria, budget for travel within Bulgaria, 1 year health and travel insurance, accommodation, food, 60 Euro spending money per month, language course and mentor. This is all funded.

Thanks
WWOOFbulgaria Team

check out the new page with the first episode of “42 Houses and a Tattie Shed”

This village needs people! Its the most lovely place to live - great land, great weather, great place to bring up kids. What are you doing in the UK? Get out now while you can! Come to Voditsa. Property for around 10,000euros.

Black hands again.

I’ts walnut time again and that means everyone is walking around with black hands - you see people everywhere carrying sacks of nuts and people drive around with loudspeakers shouting ”orihee, orihee” (орехи is BG for walnut) and its also the time of millions of peaches. They’re actually nicer than they were last year but its still hard to use them all! I’m making rakia again, I’ve bottled loads, I’ve made peach jam, peach chutney, peach cake, had peaches baked in honey – and the other day I reached out of my bed room window and picked one to eat in bed.

I’m having a volunteer free couple of weeks and its really nice and peaceful. There has been so much work going on and so many people around that I feel i need to have some space to engage with the land again. The trees are starting to turn red and yellow and the light is quite lovely now that the sun isn’t burning my head off. I’ve advanced a little further into the field – Laura from Manchester was here for a week and we spent most of the time digging next year’s potato bed – its half way along the field between 2 walnut trees – then I read in my biodynamic book that walnut trees are not good for growing vegetable nearby! This will have to be an experiment.

My potatoes are out now but it was probably the worst crop I have ever grown – a combination of drought, no manure and Colorado beetle – but next year I have a plan! (and I have some manure now).

I had a lovely visit from Jenny from the Co-op in Manchester last week – she helped me with a load of bottling, found a place for a swing and was generally very encouraging about the benefits of having a break in a place like this. She enjoyed the simpleness of the life here and she learned how to light a fire-that is always an easy thing to do especially if you normally live in a city and don’t cook with wood.. Actually the whole thing about cooking on a wood stove is a whole new way of thinking-you cant just turn up the heat when you want to – you have be a couple of steps ahead of the fire. You really have to anticipate what the fire is going to do next and be ready for it. Also the two cooking stoves and the other wood stove are all quite different when it comes to lighting them. You have to learn how to live with the fires and I guess in the winter, it’ll be a different ball game cos I’ll also have to think ahead of the weather. I don’t want to have to go out in a snow storm to chop kindling. I’m thinking about the logistics of where I store my wood (I’ve just bought 10cu. Metres of mixed wood and its coming next week) but I bet there will be times when I have to go out in the snow to get my morning fire going! I don’t anticipate getting it together this winter and I’m sure I wont have enough to eat. I do have 24 pumpkins! Any interesting pumpkin recipes will be useful.

Laura and Tom are in their house up the road and they’re having a great time getting it oragnised. They had a wonderful infestation of ants but I think they’re winning. Bookluk is the Bulagian word for rubbish and its very important to try to acquire as much Bookluk as possible when you buy a house here-the barns here were full of bits of wood, tools,straw, bits of metal, old stoves and loads of etc. Its all been so useful-if you want something to do a job, you just wander about for a bit and then you’ll find the perfect thing! Laura and Tom got Bookluk in their house instead of the barns- they got loads of old clothes-we had a dinner party one night and all dressed up in old polyester dresses and sombre suits-they also got lots of great kitchen thing-pots and pans and lovely glasses plus a great 70’s standard lamp-so kitch. Elain and Keith also got house Bookluk(as well as ants) – loads of communist memorabilia and more clothes.

I almost forgot about my last volunteer – Aslak from Denmark. Max rescued him from another volunteering project that wasn’t working out very well. He was great and did all the big heavy things plus he started the bathroom with Tom. We’re converting the spooky spidery little room into a shower room-although I haven’t touched it since they left- I’m waiting for a rainy day-meanwhile the weather has gone back to being hot.

I a now full of admiration for the Danish education system- Aslak’s English was amazing and he’s\never been to an English speaking country. We had some great conversations about language and also about puddings. We started this conversation with Alex from Holland who didn’t understand what a pudding is. After much debate in which Laura and I were the only ones qualified to make the definition, being English, we decided that custard is the defining factor and that things can have potential to be a pudding ie if it could have custard poured over it! These were long conversations! Aslak is now thinking of doing Erasmus (student exchange) in England and exploring puddings around the country. These discussions were prompted by Laura and Jennie bringing some Birds custard powder. Its great when people arrive with cool bits of shopping and I got a lovely Red Cross Parcel from Jennie Hayes- thanks-the Mars Bars were fantastic.

It’s the first of October tomorrow and I have to keep remembering that winter is just around the corner – there was no snow last winter but judging by the amount of berries on the trees, it’ll be different this year. Its such a big unknown- I don’t know what happens here when there is 2metres of snow for weeks on end and it gets to minus 20 –might just

spend a lot of time in bed!

I think I’m now qualified to say that yes you can get sick of peaches! They’re almost finished and I’ve added peach nectar t my list of ways to use them –that was pretty brilliant actually. We’ve now moved on to quinces- I have 2 trees full and so has Laura. Yesterday, being the correct day biodynamically, we had a mammoth session of making quince cheese – a bit like lemon curd but pink. If you’ve never seem a quince, they’re like very big, hard furry pears. It actually took us all day to do this – peeling ad chopping, chopping wood, cooking on the open fire for an hour, pureeing, cooking again and bottling 25 jars plus having visitors ad cutting my hair- but now we have Christmas pressies for all our friends in the village. Must make some cute little frilly lids for the jars.

At the beginning of the summer I was being really challenged by the whole bottling thing-I never seemed to have the right lids for the right jars, not enough jars(everyone has about 500 in their cellar), I didn’t have the right huge pot to boil the bottles in – but now I have all the right bits of equipment and best of all I’ve found a shop in popovo that has a room full of jars of all shapes and sizes. It’s a doddle now-just got to wait and see what they all taste like!

I’ve also got to think about what to do with loads of meat- Alan’s days are numbered now. That’s going to be hard but I’m not thinking about it just yet.

Now here’s an interesting thing –I have a thing on my website now called GoogleAnalytics which tells me how may people have logged on to the site, which pages they’ve looked at and for how long and it also tells me where they are they are logging on from. Big Brother via Google! So I want to ask you to now go to www.stjamespark.biz and I can check who is actually reading this blog!

So for those of you who have got to the end of this – who hasn’t talked to me for a while? Send me an email with a bit of news from your life. Lots of love from the lovely autumn sunshine of Bulgaria.

You can get a lot of the information that you need from looking around this website or at least you’ll get a feel for what’s going on here and who I am – read the blogs especially. Very briefly, I am English, from Newcastle and I have lived a pretty nomadic life since my first adventure when I was 17 and I set sail (on a ferry) across the North Sea to Denmark – I’m 55 now – but don’t be put off by that if you’re not that old! I’ve lived in a lot of different places since then and after 4 years in the gloom of Manchester, I am delighted to be living in such a beautiful place as this.

My daughter bought this place 2 years ago and I agreed to live in it and manage it for her – she’s beginning her career as an engineer and has no immediate plans to live here. My usual attention span in any one place is around 5 years but it could be more here because its just so lovely and there is so much potential to do interesting things.

I live in the village of Voditsa with lovely neighbours who generally live a subsistence life. They work very hard,have almost no disposable income and use the resources around them. The houses are mostly made of cob and everything is repaired and reused – no throw away society here!

There is work to do on the house although it is livable and quite comfortable right now. My main interest is the land – I am learning about biodynamics and I would really love someone to come here who has experience of this way of working. I’ve had lots of volunteers here this year and last helping me with allsorts of work and we all live communally but really I would like some other people to share the responsibility of the place and the potential. Its very cheap to live here and I reckon that if I run 5 or 6 week long workshops each year, its possible to generate a good income even when the costs of the workshops are as low as 200 euros a week. There is also potential business in organic hemp, making organic liqueurs (one of my more tasty ideas), alternative building and technology and bee keeping. I worked as community and rural development consultant for some time before coming here and I am looking for the opportunity to share those skills in Bulgaria (not speaking Bulgarian is a slight problem here).

So maybe you’re interested in living communally where nothing is already set up and we have to make it up as we go along but where there is potential to do some exciting things?  Its peaceful, quiet, healthy and fun here but I would love to have some other people stay on a longer term/permanent for 4/5 years basis. Its really difficult to live as fully as I would like to from the earth when I’m on my own. Having volunteers is great but it also takes up loads of my own time and energy and however much they get into being here, they’re not responsible for the whole place and of course they don’t have a long term view. It would also be good to have children living here and I think it’s a great place for them to grow up.

Property and the cost of living is very cheap in Bulgaria but a lot of people don’t have the 6 or 7grand you might need to buy a farm here – I don’t – this is my daughter’s place – but by living communally and sharing our skills and time, we can all have the opportunity to live here.

This all sounds rather idealistic! I’m also into loud rock music, I smoke and I’m interested in making and drinking alcohol. I like talking and good conversation and I like hanging out with people who are fun, interesting and have something to say. If any of this is at all interesting to you and you fancy a change for a few years, email me or call me on 0035960386286.

16th June

Sometimes I don’t feel like I live in Bulgaria – I feel like I live in this field! I’m not complaining – there is so much to do and it’s a very beautiful field. Everytime I look up from doing one thing I see half a dozen other things – but all in good time I have to keep telling myself. Someone kindly told me the other day that growing food organically takes a lot of time and is very labour intensive – that thought has made me laugh a few times when the sweat is stinging my eyes when I’m in the field slowly picking off the white fly from the cabbage! I have for the first time in my life found a use for sweat bands! I look silly of course but there’s no-one here – it’s a bit of old curtain actually –not the thing you’d wear at the gym!. Life here reminds me of India when I think about the work, the fields, using the traditional tools and the heat – but at least I don’t have walk up and down a mountain to go to the shop!

Its been interesting being here on my own all of this month – I’ve remembered that I am crap at getting up at 6 in the morning and being sensible to do work before the sun come out full blast. That’s easier when there’s a few people around – and I just cant sleep in the afternoon – mad dogs and Englishwomen….that’s me. Its light here till about 9 at night so I do lots of work then and of course now that there’s no-one here to talk to, I’m reading! My children will know that this is fatal – once I’m into a book that’s me stuck there. Watched a few videos too but I have resisted the temptation to watch a series of 24! That would be fatal and somehow Jack Bauer just doesn’t connect with Voditsa. I’ll keep that for the long winter nights.

Everything is growing now – the next bit is the Gardener’s World bit – I’ve got masses of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and courgettes all about to produce something– the potatoes are getting big although they are well behind everyone else and I’ve got lovely crops of basil, cumin and coriander. I do miss going to the Asian shops for the rich variety of vegetables but at least i have the spices and herbs. I’ve got a few million beans too – no onions – I was too late for them this year and the aubergines are very slow. And finally the parsnips have come up – there was a little cold spell a week or so ago and up they came – just when I was about to give up on them.

I also have about a hundred pumpkins and loads of sweet melons and as for the trees….. I cant believe the amount of fruit! Great find of the week was a mulberry tree – it was always there but I didn’t know what it was till it began to fruit – mulberry liqueur has just been added to the list. It also feels like I can sit and watch the vines grow – they move at a phenomenal rate and there are loads of bunches already – all very exciting. Sorry if that didn’t grab the non-gardeners amongst you but you will enjoy the fruits of the labour if you come to visit – or maybe buy some St James Park organic liqueur for Christmas presents?

There is also a big climbing thing growing up the side of the house that has just been an ant superhighway since I’ve been here but this year it has just produced the most stunning huge orange flowers – like big long trumpet things. I will put a photo on the web site and maybe someone can tell me the name.

I’m actually starting to get the hang of the biodynamic idea – I stopped myself tidying up the vines the other day because the Moon was in Leo and it wasn’t the right day. I love the idea that hoeing allows cosmic influences into the soil and you’ve just got to know which particular cosmic influence is around that day. It may sound mad but really its just reconnecting with the energy that’s all around us – in the earth and the connection with the moon. More as I learn more myself.

The saga of Alan goes on – she really needs a transfer but I don’t know how. Maybe I’ll stick a notice outside the gate. She’s so unhappy – we went up the hill the other evening and she just ran back and forward and looked like she was smiling! Made me feel so guilty. Anyone want to buy a sheep – only 3leva per kilo?

A note on wind – being English and coming from the North East, I am an expert on wind and there isn’t very much of it here! Its strange and a bit disquieting sometimes to have no movement at all in the air. But just before it rains, there is always an amazing big blast of wind that comes out of nowhere. And when it thunders, which is quite often, the air starts to move quite violently. I just looked in the dictionary and there is only one word for wind and no word for gale! Interesting.

My lovely friend Mary in Ireland has inspired me to offer short adventure holidays – not everyone wants to volunteer and work hard for 35 hours a week and some people just like to do something very different for a holiday especially if they’re alone. More on that as the idea develops.

I’m just about full now for volunteers till the end of September and someone has already booked in for next spring! There are three people coming in July plus I’m looking forward to a visit from the Geordie lass who’s been in the frozen Arctic. Ed and Jess’s house buying seems to be going ahead OK and maybe Jo has found a good place too. I’m excited about next year – we’ll be able to do things more easily together – might even get an EU project together…? It’ll be great to have more volunteering opportunities – now every time I open my email I have to say no to people – there aren’t enough hosts in Bulgaria at the moment. But having all these English speakers around is terrible for my Bulgarian which is coming along terribly! A woman called Anna from up the street comes in every day for a hour to help me – I can now read stuff OK but I cant remember what it all means!

Got some new residents – two swallows have been checking out the place for the last couple of weeks and now its looks like they’ve decided to build a nest in the ceiling of the veranda. There’s an old chain hanging here and they sit on it, chatting away. They brought a load of friends in before and that was a bit hectic ..and noisy. I suppose a nest full of chicks will be too but I do feel very privileged that I can be so close to them.

Just realised they weren’t inviting in their friends – they were defending their territory! I’ve just narrowly missed being dive bombed while I’m sitting here.

I did actually get up at 6 this morning to put some biodynamic preparation on the plants. this involved energising the water for an hour before spraying it but I did manage to do it while the dew was still on the grass. I was then going to have an early night but I was invited, at the usual 2 minutes notice, to eat with some neighbours – Stoika the post mistress. Her daughter was here from Spain and I ended up coming home quite drunk around midnight – went straight to sleep and got woken by Drago at 7.30 reminding me to pay my water bill.

I must go and pay some loving attention to my hands before I go to Popovo – they look terrible!

By the way – its lovely being so switched off from the horrible things on the news but sometimes I think I should keep in touch a bit – if anyone wants to send me their Sunday papers after they’ve read them or the occasional Guardian – that would be lovely. I remember in India when the Observer arrived, whatever day it was became a Sunday– Davy made breakfast and I sat around reading the paper.

June 24^thI have moved outside now – I got Drago and Jorge to help me move the stove outside so now I really only come in the house to sleep.

Svetla came round the other night in major Bulgarian pessimist mode. I’m sure she is convinced that I will die through my choice to live here – that’s what she kept telling about being here in the winter! I don’t think she quite gets why people are coming here (not just for the property investment!). She can’t know how unhealthy the UK is as a place to live and working hard in this field everyday and just living on what I grow is a much better way of life. Its hard to explain that some people actively reject the lifestyle that most of the undeveloped world strives for – actually it’s the morals and ethics (or lack of them) behind that lifestyle that I reject.

I have been quite unhappy that the strimmer wasn’t working and thinking about the hassles involved in taking it back. Then I did a very radical thing – for me! I read the instructions and hey presto – it works. I bet Jane Miller is sitting there nodding sagely right now!!

I’m still developing my skills with the kosa, but the strimmer is a lot more efficient for me right now.

The swallows are getting on fine with their house building although they do make a mess and the invasion of the little yellow plums has started. There are a few million in the process of falling. First batch of plum liqueur is about to get started.

Lots of love to everyone and I look forward to hearing a bit about your lives.