Beginning our ninth year here
I first visited our property in February 2018. The home was the only single story home of five at the end of a gravel road surrounded by grazing fields and large rocky hillside/mini mountain. The grass drive was bordered by old grape vines, a few trees, and a white goat was grazing just in front of the house. First impressions from what I recall now...a little rustic, charming, great bones, needs love and oh my goodness hello Under the Tuscan Sun dream come true.
We had other plans for 2018 but a few months later in October I was rolling down the freshly laid gravel drive to what is now my forever home. Art and I have been slowly transforming his family home into something we can share with friends, family and guests from all over the world that want to enjoy a sliver of the peace and happiness we get to indulge in by waking up here.
We have been rearranging the deep freezers to accomodate the seventy liters of pomegranate juice as we squeeze and freeze to preserve the juice. We harvested the hicaz pomegranates from the orchard and still have to harvest the davendish and wonderful varieties.
We've also kicked off our persimmon season. Every day we pick, peel, slice and dry persimmons in four dehydrators. We have packaged several batches for our local customers but if you are in the area and want to order dried persimmons we charge .04 per gram and can vacuum seal the bags for future snacking to fit any budget.
We are still picking peppers, watermelons, tomatoes, eggplants, parsley, spinach, kale, and basil. We planted winter onions and garlic. We are still enjoying the bounty of onions, garlic and potatoes from this summer. And we did a greenhouse reset including some tomatoes, peppers, arugula, spinach and spring greens. And few pops of color with the flowers and butterflies.
We rarely leave the property overnight but made an exception for a quick holiday/work trip to a solar expo event as we would love to continue our transformation making the property completely off grid (open to sponsorship offers), wink wink. We decided to embark on an epic road trip and scratched off a few countries neither of us had visited. Biggest take away Slovenia is STUNNING. We had plans to visit friends but car trouble on the second day of our trip had us stuck and we were pleasantly surprised by the city and villages of Slovenia. It was clean and tidy with old world charm plus pretty easy to navigate with public transport as we were carless for a bit.
When we returned to Albania we found that the wine we were fermenting was not quite up to the quality Art prefers and have turned the wine into raki. Art spent nearly a week brewing raki from the grape mash to about sixty liters of raki. We've collected a last round grapes and smashed for another round of raki and possibly of mushti.
We've also harvested heaps of fall pears, quinces, walnuts, and chestnuts.
Still to come is the lemon, orange and mandorins.
We had wonderful visitors come for the day and more that stayed overnight in the Orchard Guard Tower including my mom. Her first visit to our little homestead. She was able to see our day to day to routine plus also help us host day guests and even visit some of our favorite sites.
Despite our very busy schedule we did manage to capture a few feathery friends.
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