The seven year itch

Kim Malaj
Oct 30
3 min read

October marks our seventh year of residing in Arti's family home and on the land that has been in his family for over ten generations. We, Arti and I (Kim), call it Homestead Albania because that's what we do daily. We manage the garden, vineyard, orchard and food forest to eat well or preserve for the winter.

We have fresh produce from May to December. Our chickens and pigs provide enough protein to limit our need for store bought meat or eggs to an occasional steak or dried meat for a pizza topping. That said we have cultivated the land to yield beyond our storage capacity as we are three (myself, Arti, and his mom). Over the last seven years, we've refinished a cellar, added two deep freezers, three small outbuildings and we are still bursting at the seems come winter. Not a bad situation as we know the food shortage in other parts of the world are vast. This I believe is what started our seven year itch. Our desire is to expand and explore eco friendly options to store our food and wares. So the 2026 list of items begins with solar power and battery to service an inground cellar with a temperature controlled cooler section for items like our pomegranate juice and mushti that can hover at just above freezing. Oh and if we are getting real fancy a sauna and pool to give us and our guests something to use during the long wet winters and hot dry summers.

For Arti it was a busy a month as his siblings returned for a visit and they had some much needed quality time. I loved listening to their stories as they reflected on their childhood and the land that we are blessed to call home.

90s vs now

The land around us was stripped down to rocks and shrubs before the nineties because of Communism. They (Communist) cut down all the trees, and there were some huge fruit trees, for wood to feed the bakery fires leaving the community to dig up roots to burn for heating their homes. We wandered his siblings to the land beyond the mount. We discovered new hawthorn bushes full and a few new paths thanks to the roaming goats and cows in the area.

This month has had a regular scheduled morning task to stock our winter snack of dried persimmons. We peel, slice and dry persimmons on fifteen trays. We reached out to Art's extended family in the area and harvested their persimmons because ours were lost with the late frost in April. A big thank you to Beta, Vasel, Deta and Preta for taking great care of their persimmon trees. We end up with about a 1 kg of dried persimmons per day. And the persimmon seeds have repeated the tell of a spoon aka shoveling snow this winter. We'll see how well this forecasts our winter.

The garden is still cranking out eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes. The green onions and spring garlics are popping and we've got a new bed of spinach.

We picked another round of grapes for additional mushti (sparkling grape juice) and wine. We freeze the mushti to save for future use.

Mushti pull

We harvested a few kilograms of chestnuts and walnuts.

And while the family was here we roasted a few chestnuts on the open fire.

We've been picking, squeezing and freezing pomegranate juice from the pomegranate in the orchard and the garden. We are up to 80+ liters of juice. We've made batches of just sweet, wild and a mix of both.

Art also finished chopping and stacking wood in the new woodshed. It's pure art.

We did manage to host a few guests here at the Orchard Guard Tower. We've added two additional countries to our list of guests from around the world totalling 25 this year. The wooden basket we keep in the OGT was stocked with the jujube dates, pomegranate, grapes, and a few figs. As the winter season kicks in we'll be limited on fresh fruit and will likely add some dried fruits and nuts to welcome our guests.