Nový Mlýn - green tech south bohemia

We have been drifting. Drifting, and meeting new friends, and slowly figuring out how Nový Mlýn works, and appreciating our good fortune to be here and now, however, drifting. It’s time to take charge of our destiny & put the Nový Mlýn show on the road.

When I lived in London, I wanted to do an MBA (masters in business administration), but there was no way in hell that my employers would commit to this. Instead I researched the syllabus of a decent MBA & studied each area in turn, using resources such as the library system. I don’t have the kudos of the qualification, but what I learned has been incredibly useful.

So… I will employ the same technique to learning about project management. I’ve project managed before - market research, events & playschemes, but I’ve had an inkling that there must be more method to complex projects than a business plan and a Gantt chart. Read the rest of this entry »

Something has happened in my brain… I seem to have lost the ability to hazard a guess at English pronunciation of unfamiliar words. My pronunciation has completely czechified, as a result, I shall now be teaching people here the Italian word for Hřib mushrooms: Porcini. I think that very few British people would know what Cep were, or that they are the very same thing as those very exclusive Porcini mushrooms:

Read the rest of this entry »

An easy & speedy dessert recipe which can be made for one person. The inspiration for this recipe is the English custard tarts I love and have not yet found in the Czech Republic. Using the apple itself for the casing means less cleaning, and incidentally produces a gluten free pudding.

*My mum used to make us apple bombs as children. It’s not the name she gave them, just the result of the occasional apple explosion. Read the rest of this entry »

www.blackle.com might be gimmicky - but it is a perfect example of the way that mass action can have massive reactions. In this case, using a search engine designed to use less energy in lighting up your computer screen, has so far saved 203,250.862 Watt hours. And if you set www.blackle.com as your home page, you’ll see the figure going up as well. I just wishe they’d bother to add all the other functionality you get with the higher energy version.

It’s a shame you can’t see a similar measure of energy saved by mass scale repetition, such as switching to low energy light bulbs, or making sure your electro equipment isn’t left on standby.

The woman whose patterns I am looking into has a shop here:

http://eobchod.fekar.com/

They are really very typically Czech, by which I mean interesting and a little quirky. It reminds me of the work of Denisa Grimmova - who produced a beautiful series of scenes in old fashioned tv set boxes. Funny, very human, monsters sitting down to tea together. They were installed in a bar in Prague for a while, but the last time I went there, they were gone. Shame, as I don’t have any pictures of them even & haven’t found any info on the web yet.

I’ve just had a quick look on Ebay. Hand made soft toys are not selling at a premium there, probably because lots of people can make them. Though, if she is prepared to make some toys from reclaimed materials, I could try putting something through to see how it goes. I doubt they would sell for as high a prices as they are in her shop. The toy patterns are selling, however, especially those with a seasonal theme - so at the moment Halloween theme toy patterns have a lot of bids on them. It might worth a try?

To be continued

Today I am helping a friend of a friend set up an account so that she can sell the toy patterns she produces. So far, my experiments with payloadz.com have produced this (an intermittent advert!!!): Read the rest of this entry »

I am feeling somewhat overwhelmed with the sheer scale of what we need to do here. And… worried that we have had such a poor experience of finding people who are willing to even quote for the work we need. I am still waiting for a quote for the heat pump from, well, every single company we have talked to about it. Nobody has said ‘I’m sorry, we’ve just got too much work on at the moment, so we can’t quote for anything at the moment.’ They’ve simply left and not bothered to contact us or return our calls.

So, the roof is leaking, meaning that the supporting joists are getting wet in all this rain, meaning that they will be weakened, and if there is heavy snow fall again, we may have it collapse. That thought scares me. As does facing a winter without a central heating system. We have a limited store of wood. Will we freeze to death in our bed?  Read the rest of this entry »

Next autumn, when we have water, and heating, and a kitchen, I will make Cider. Nový Mlýn is host to dozens of apple trees, and I have been slow to get acquainted with them, almost too late in some cases.

My feeble excuse is that the garden was so overgrown that I couldn’t tell they were falling from the trees. Now, after a few days of hard graft the lawn (we call it jokingly) is a little more under control. I have not mastered the scythe but at least understand the principle. Our neighbour came round again today and demonstrated that it needs to be close to the ground at all times, not waved about like an oar. Now, I have uncovered a tonne of apples, and roughly sorted them into usable or compostable.

So… in the orchard we have Read the rest of this entry »