Friday 26 November 2010

Alcohol

Since moving to our farm, Andy has been dabbeling in the black art of homebrew using a mixture of equipment and recipes. Our results so far
  1. Pumpkin wine - Reasonable success, a tasty dry wine but required a lot of effort and generated a lot of mess. Storing for a year was a definite requirement
  2. Rose-hip and hibiscus wine - Terrible! The teabags weren't strong enough and there was a dominant yeast taste from too much Marmite!
  3. Ginger wine - Overall Good! A strong wine can be made cheaply from household ingredients and is comparable to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_wine. Have had one bad batch
  4. Green walnut liquer - Nocino - Recipe from here. Dark and bitter and mellowing - Next year we will make as many liters of this as possible!
  5. Cherry vodka - Cherrys, vodka sugar- sweet, simple and very yummy
  6. Potato wine - This should have been terrible but atm is brewing and is very very nice!
  7. Home-brew Bitter - This came from a kit from the UK and is AMAZING! A taste of England in Hungary
  8. Home-brew Cider Kit - Not so good, too weak and not an amazing flavour - Homemade cider should be better :)

Monday 22 November 2010

Proper farm one week later

A week later, the excitement of having animals has slightly worn off and we are getting into a routine with feeding and egg hunting (No more tweets/facebooks posts about finding an egg)
Crunchy dog has calmed down a bit but whenever she sees the animals, she goes crazy. At the moment, the chickens are in a big barn and the pigs are out of sight.
We are are hoping that if we move the animals out of her sight and keep two fences between her and the animals, everyone should be happy. If that fails, we might have to find her a new home :(

Sunday 14 November 2010

Proper Farm

Months of hard work has finally paid off with the arrival of Piggy and Pinky.
We with guest helper Swedish Erik meet Zolibacsi and eventually found a trailer and cage to move the piggies form Szatymaz (local viallage) to our farm. Their new accommodation has been constructed from wood from our own trees and under the masterful guidedance of Zoli turned into a a beautiful home for the two new piggies. Within two hours, it looked a mess!!!



When Zoli arrived (with Laci), he also had 11 chickens and a cockerel for us which we moved into an empty room(we've lots of these) so hopefully we should get some eggs this week!
The worrying thing is that the dogs seems a bit stressed about the new arrivals, hopefully they will calm down with our new additions