Early harvest

Now I could begin harvesting for the daily meals, especially the turnips were big now. From the wild I was now mainly collecting leaves from nettles (Urtica dioica) and cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) since there were so much cultivated food in the gardens.

The man who had gone away for a while, returned with a bunch of people from. Urkult (a music festival) they had been at. To feed all of this people we had to empty the fish cages. We were five people in the boat (borrowed from a neighbor) when we emptied the cage that was filled with perches. The hull was now full of fish. I took out the knife to begin to clean the fish. One man did not want to be a part of the fish slaughtering so he jumped into the water and swam back to the beach. After a couple of days the festival people returned to whatever it was they came from.

Now we were two people at the farm. I climbed up the roof to check out the chimney. It was almost falling apart so we repaired it with several layers of concrete.

A man from another farm 70 km away from us arrived by bicycle he was curious about us and wanted to stay for two weeks. He was a tanner and an experienced butcher, since we had never slaughtered a rabbit before we asked if he could show us how to do it. He slaughtered and skinned it in a very professional way. I started tanning the skin with alum.

Some mushrooms had started to pop up in the forest, mostly russulas (Russula). We dried some of them and stored in jars.

We visited a Scottish man that was living in the neighbor town. He had also moved here in April, he offered us sheet metal from a barn that he wanted to tear down if we took down the roof plates. I agreed and was going to come back later to do the job. The sheet metal could be useful for roofing for example an outdoor kitchen. We met a women from the Black forest (Swabia) there that had been at the Scottish mans place a week or so. She was working there for food and shelter. She treated us with some salad from wild plants.

The tanner returned home and my comrade decided to leave the farm. Now it was only me and my dog left.

I returned to the Scottish man to perform the work to take down the roof plates. It was quite a difficult thing to do since the barn was big with a steep roof. The metal was slippery so I had to tie a rope around myself and attached the other end of the rope to a tree at the other side. Eventually the work was done I was going to get half of the plates that was about 20 plates. The woman from the Black forest (Swabia) was still around and we went for a plant walk since both of us were interested about wild plants. I invited here to the farm and she was interested to see the place and said that she would visit me soon.