Wasps

Wasps love graves. And they go only for the sweetest!

I believe the furry one in the picture is a honeybee.

(Bigger pictures with sharper quality here)

Fruit trees

We get a lot of fruit from the garden during the summer. First to ripen are cherries, then various types of peaches, apples and plums. There are also some quince. And of course grapes, which I'll come back to later.

In Hungary there are two different names for cherries - cseresznye (sweet) and meggy (sour). We have one tree of each. The sweet are lovely for eating, the sour are edible but better for cooking. They ripen in early summer. The only problem is that the trees are very large and it's impossible to reach all of the cherries. On the other hand there are far too many to eat anyway!

All the fruit is ripening early this year. There's been a lot of sunshine but also a good bit of rain through June and July which probably helped. We've been eating grapes since mid-July which I believe is very early.

The only problem with so much fruit is that you have to find a use for it. We've pureed quite a lot into juice. Györgyi's mother makes a nice "hideg gyümölcsleves" - cold fruit soup . Much is given away to relatives. Some of it just rots...

Intro

During the summer we acquired an orchard near our weekend house in Siófok. It had been in Györgyi's family, originally belonging to her father. The place had been on sale for some time but in this area which is officially designated as farming land, buyers are rare. At one time it was very popular for Hungarians to have a weekend house where they could grow their own fruit, but the current generation are not interested, and there is a lot of land up for sale at low prices.

Anyhow, since it had failed to sell we decided to buy it out; it didn't cost a lot. The land area is 1500sq.m. which contains 12 rows of grapevine, 42 fruit trees and a house with wine cellar. There are some pictures of the house and garden at http://kiliti.webs.com/ - a rough and ready web page we used during the summer to try to attract some (low)paying guests interested in a 'back to nature' experience. Over the winter we plan some renovations to upgrade the house. I'll post some pictures of the wine cellar soon.

This blog will follow our efforts to make our own wine! At the moment there is a man, Sándor, who does the work and he will help us make our first wine this year. Since Györgyi's father died a few years ago, nobody has made wine here - the vines were maintained but the grapes were sold on. This morning I made the first step by washing out the bath and equipment where the grapes are pressed - dirty work because it hadn't been used in some years.