Category: Gardening and farming

Updates on the garden, growing food, raising chickens, etc.

Video time

1 June, 2019 / Jason

Again, it’s been a long wait between blog posts. I’m sorry about that. But honestly, it will probably happen again. We’ve been as busy as ever, with guests and with construction. It’s hard to make the time to post something that feels like more than a tiny incremental update. So here’s a random assortment of things instead!

The headline news is that with the help of some friends we finally made a video tour for the hotel. Huge thank you to Tim and Selda for all the time they put into it. At 2 minutes 16 seconds, I’ll let the video speak for itself…

We hope you liked it. If anyone is up for helping us add subtitles in different languages, drop me a line. (Currently have English, Turkish, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Japanese, with French, Italian, and Polish on the way. Cheers to all of our translators.)

If you’re still up for looking at mere photos after that, I’ve collected a few landscape shots taken from within a couple of hundred metres of the hotel. Putting us into the surrounding landscape, if you like. These were taken in late winter, and you can see from the green grass that we got a lot of rain this year.

There’s a tourist attraction near Dilek National Park called the “Cave of Zeus”. For some reason I always assumed it would be disappointing and never bothered to have a look at it until this year, despite it being just off the main road. Turns out it’s pretty cool. Didn’t get to meet Zeus though, sadly.

More recently, with the place all cleaned up in preparation for shooting the video, I took advantage by taking a couple of panoramas. Hopefully they show how the pool area has come along.

Panorama from the south end of the pool.

I know I keep saying this, but as the gardens mature they change everything for the better. Here’s a little bit of supporting evidence.

Newly planted palm trees. Should have planted them years ago!

One of the main construction jobs has been extending the paved driveway further up towards our new house, and also trying to sort out the entrances to rooms three and four. They needed gardens, of course, but also pathways and little bridges to connect them to the drive. Things were especially tricky with room four, because if we got it wrong the pathway would send rainwater flooding down onto the veranda. Thankfully things seem to be working OK.

Paving the driveway and building a garden for room 4. In the background you can see a short wall that will act as a screen between our place and the guest areas of the hotel.

Room 4 exterior looking better: apologies for all the construction stuff.

Sirem had the bright idea to use our vast collection of broken tiles to decorate the garden walls. Smashing them into fragments with a hammer is easy enough, but it’s a lot of work cementing them onto the wall and adding grout. I think it looks pretty cool though.

The other big job is getting room four into a habitable state. We’re actually in a massive rush to get it done right now, having fallen into our usual trap of a self-imposed deadline. (Some regular guests are arriving soon and asked about staying in the new room; we foolishly said yes and are currently scrambling to get everything finished in time!)

Room 4 progresses… this shot is out of date even as we speak.

And after room four is done, of course the next big push will be to finish our house. Disappointed not to have more to show you on that front, but this summer should bring progress. And we’re looking on the bright side: the milestone of having all four guest rooms operational will be something worth celebrating.

And finally some cat photos. Dogs next time, I promise.

More spring weather, more ruins, more plans

21 May, 2015 / Jason

OK, this will be a quick one. It’s a beautiful day and I’m supposed to be putting in irrigation pipes for the new trees, not sitting around at the computer.

Things are going well. Spring continues to mean that plants are just erupting out of the ground: it’s amazing how quickly things grow here. Here are a few shots of flowers and the garden to show what I mean.

The grape vines are definitely back. We missed them.

The season has also brought some new lambs to the farm of our friends at the other end of the village. The lambs are very cute and Sirem could not resist having a cuddle.

Only 24 hours old.

Ready for her close-up now.

Sirem with her favourite. The lamb also looks pleased.

And visitor season is also continuing. Our recent guests Enrico and Bethany gave us an excuse to check out one more of the archaeological sites in the area. We took them to see the ruins of Tralleis, up on a bluff above the provincial capital of Aydın. It must have been a very imposing city in its heyday. The biggest feature still standing is a distinctive triple arch that looks out over the valley. All very Ozymandias.

The arch at Tralleis. Some people for scale.

The arches at Tralleis. Some people for scale.

The arch from the other side. Notice all the construction on the lower level: cellars or tunnels perhaps?

The arches from the other side. Notice all the construction on the lower level: cellars or tunnels perhaps?

Again we had the privilege of walking around a site like this without paying any admission fee, and seeing almost no other visitors. I think those people in the first shot were our only company. It’s not that Turks and tourists don’t care about these places; more that they are spoiled for choice about where to go.

Finally: we put in our revised plans for the hotel bungalows a couple of weeks ago, and we’re waiting to hear back from the council about whether the new version can be passed as just a minor revision of the old. The differences weren’t huge, so we’re optimistic.

Probably the biggest change is that we’re now building a house for ourselves at the top of the orchard. It’s quiet and peaceful there, and the view is fantastic, so we can’t resist. That means two fewer guest rooms up in the orchard, but in the long run we’ll make up the total of six by converting some rooms down here in the old farmhouse.

Another change is that we combined one of the guest bungalows with the cafe / kitchen, rather than having them as two separate buildings. We think it makes the overall plan look less cluttered, and the thick straw bales mean the guests shouldn’t hear anything from the adjoining kitchen area.

An overview of the new plan. You can see the existing farmhouse buildings on the far left. Then, from left to right, it’s the cafe plus two guest rooms, the pool, another two guest rooms, and then our new house at the end.

The cafe will have big french doors out onto the terrace area. There’s also a higher ceiling as the roof is common but the floor is lower. This seems to make the building blend into the slope a bit more.

Plan view of the cafe, kitchen,and two guest rooms.

The double bungalow above the pool.

Interior of a typical guest room.

Interior view of our house. Always wanted a mezzanine!

Olive oil update

31 December, 2014 / Jason

Just some quick details on the process of turning our recent olive harvest into olive oil…

It turns out we picked over 400 kg of olives. We kept about 50 kg of the biggest and best for eating, and those are in the process of being repeatedly washed and salted and weighted down. There were seven sacks (323 kg) of normal-quality olives to be pressed into oil. And finally a small sack (38 kg) of poor-quality olives that we took from the ground beneath the trees.

Our local olive-oil factory.

We took our eight sacks just around the corner to the Yıldırım olive processing factory. We sold the one bag of lower-quality olives to the factory, and the money we got for that was enough to pay for processing all the rest. This seemed like a good deal.

Sacks of olives in the factory yard, waiting their turn to be pressed.

The olives are washed and the leaves are filtered out.

The olives are washed and any remaining leaves are filtered out before pressing.

Machines for crushing the olives and filtering the oil.

The guys at the factory are incredibly busy right now, as everyone brings in their olives around the same time. So we had to come back the next day to see the results.

A tough and slippery job. (Our batch was a little over one of these containers.)

The juice, the precious juice, was hidden in the vehicles.

Our 323 kg turned into 67 litres of beautiful cloudy green oil. We’re told it has good, low acidity levels. I would try to describe the taste but I don’t have the adjectives. I can tell you that it is very, very good for dipping fresh bread into.

Testing began immediately.

Harvesting olives for Christmas

26 December, 2014 / Jason

Winter is really here now, and with it has come the rain. Christmas has come and gone. We hope you are all having a relaxing break, wherever you are. We plan to give ourselves the next few days off, but right up until Christmas Eve we’ve been busy with the olive harvest, and also painting and tiling one more bedroom in time for a visit from Sirem’s dad.

Winter sunset looking towards Mount Mycale.

Every month I learn something new about Mediterranean agriculture. Previously, I had no idea olives were harvested so late in the year. Apparently it’s all about leaving them on the tree for long enough to produce a lot of oil, but not leaving them so long that they start to fall off. From early December onwards, all the hillsides around the village are dotted with the white nylon sheets used to catch the olives when the trees are beaten with sticks.

Olives on the tree.

We have about 15 trees, which is not many by local standards. But being non-experts, we decided to get some professional help in anyway. Thanks to Mustafa and Leyla we got our olives down from the trees in a single (long, tiring, back-breaking) day. And then another day to sort them and get them all into sacks.

Freshly harvested olives.

Sirem choosing the biggest and best olives for eating: the rest become olive oil.

I couldn’t believe that only 15 trees produced about 350 kg of olives. We can’t possibly eat that many, so most of them are going to be pressed into olive oil at one of the local processing plants. It takes about 5 kg of olives to make one litre of oil, which means we should be set up for olive oil for the foreseeable future.

Most of our olive harvest (a few more sacks added later).

The biggest and juiciest olives are put aside for eating, but you have to pick them out manually and that takes some time. Right now our best olives have been washed and salted and are sitting in sacks under the weight of some bricks: it will take a month or more before they’re ready to eat. We know they’re going to taste good though, because we’ve already tried some early-harvest olives we picked a few weeks back.

Here’s some we made earlier: pressed, salted olives in oil and oregano.

We also made time for a trip to the nursery. We love our orchard, but we don’t want to grow only figs and olives up there. We bought all sorts of things: a cherry tree, some oleander bushes and trees, different kinds of cypresses, a bay tree, rosemary, lavender, and more. Currently they’re all sitting in pots in the courtyard, but we need to get them into the ground and start the long job of landscaping what we hope will be a wonderful garden some day.

A selection of trees and shrubs.

I’m in two minds about mentioning our progress on the kitchen, because I’m a bit embarrassed about how long it’s all taking. But things are progressing and we will get there eventually. We’re very proud of having made our own drawers, and people who’ve visited us already will know how much of a big deal it was to finally have a sink in the kitchen.

Drawers! Actual working drawers!

Our long-awaited kitchen sink. (Ignore the worktop: that’s just plywood and will get tiled soon.)

Christmas Eve was exhausting, because we had to grout the new tiles in the oldest bedroom before Sirem’s dad arrived on the 25th. This came after a day of olive harvesting, of course. It was worth it, because now we have another warm and welcoming bedroom — but we don’t want to do it again in a hurry. It was nice to relax by the fire on Christmas Day, watching our dinner cook in the coals, and enjoying a few glasses of distinctively named Turkish wine.

Christmas dinner cooking in a clay oven.

Cheers!

Sun-dried everything

7 October, 2014 / Jason

Summer is winding down. Today’s high temperature was 28 degrees. Right now, at about 1am, it’s 18 degrees outside. Still very pleasant, but it’s getting too cold to spend the whole evening out in the courtyard. In the next month or two we’re going to lose the last of the leaves on our grape vines and fig trees. That will be a sad day. By the time January comes around I suppose we’ll also find out how good adobe-brick walls are at keeping out the cold.

Back in July and August we had daily highs between 35 and 40, and clouds were a rare sight. The locals use all that sunshine to dry fruits and vegetables. No cooking, no additives — except sometimes salt. Just leave it out in the sun for a few days.

We sun-dried our figs, but we also tried it with other things, like grapes, pears, and peppers. Some experiments were more successful than others, but at least we have a few things stored away for winter.

Regular readers of the blog will already have heard plenty about our fig production, but I'm still going to show you another photo of them because we love them.

Regular readers of the blog will already have heard plenty about our fig-growing efforts, but I’m still going to show you another fig photo because we love them.

OK, just this one and no more fig shots, I promise.

Peppers threaded onto string, drying in the courtyard.

Green peppers turn red as they dry. Maybe you knew this but I was surprised.

Green peppers turn red as they dry. Who knew?

Drying grapes and slices of pear. This didn’t really work out, but they look cool together.

Our grapes were much better fresh.

What else can I tell you? In fact I’m behind on posting and there’s a lot to talk about. We’ve had visitors, we’ve been out to see a few more of the fantastic archaeological sites in the area, and we’ve been busy building a sedir (low outdoor sofa) for the courtyard. But those things deserve their own posts. I should say, though, that our cat Molly is doing much better lately. Thanks for all the good wishes sent her way.

I’ll leave you with a photo taken yesterday from a hill on the other side of the village. We used to think it was all private land up there, but we found a dirt road leading to a picnic area at the top of the hill. Great views of Hıdırbeyli, Germencik, and the Menderes Valley to the south, but also a great spot to get some perspective on our place.

We're the last house on the right, and that's the fig orchard up on the hillside. The fig trees are much greener than the surrounding olives.

We’re the last house on the right, and that’s the fig orchard up on the hillside. The fig trees are a lighter green than the surrounding olives.

Farmhouse outlined in yellow; orchard outlined in red.

Fig farming

29 July, 2014 / Jason

So, on the orchard block above and behind the house, we are the proud owners of 65 fig trees. (Sirem’s mum counted them.) Not surprisingly, the trees look a lot more productive now than they did in January or March when we last saw them.

Rows in the orchard

Fig branch with village of Hıdırbeyli in the background

We thought the fig harvest happened in late August, but it’s not that simple. Some of the fruit is still green, but some of it is ripe now and almost ready to fall off the tree. Look at the sweet nectar leaking out of this one, for example.

Ripe fig with the sweet juice leaking out of it

So one of our next jobs is to figure out who to sell the figs to as they ripen. We think there’s a co-op in the area that will come around and weigh our fruit and take it off our hands for a decent price. Time to ask Çetin, the previous owner of the orchard, what he used to do.

Sirem with the early harvest

In the meantime, we’re eating the ripest ones and they taste fantastic. We’re also making fig jam from the small green ones. Here’s a shot of some jars, ready for storage. Come and visit and you could have this on fresh bread for breakfast.

Jam made from small, unripe figs: very tasty!

Jam made from small, unripe figs, sugar, and water: very tasty!

Category: Gardening and farming

Video time

More spring weather, more ruins, more plans

Olive oil update

Harvesting olives for Christmas

Sun-dried everything

Fig farming

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Video time

More spring weather, more ruins, more plans

Olive oil update

Harvesting olives for Christmas

Sun-dried everything

Fig farming

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