Mordor

Me and the rest of Europe it seems. We just came back from almost ten days in Lovrinići. While fun was had and work was done, I cannot escape mentioning the weather. It sucked. Despite that, some people – in form of our dear friends who spent Easter with us – who have been looking forward to Easter at Pruga for some time (remembered fondly by scorching heat and perfect pool from last summer), braved said weather fully. We felt a bit like the English – when weather is foul all the time you simply don’t let it stand in the way. Plus, I have to be fair – we had one lovely sunny coffee in Pula one afternoon.

Braving the weather

So cycling paths around Pruga were successfully tested even if I had to sacrifice myself and not cycle, but act as a pick up driver for women and children. We all felt that a 9km route (18km round trip) was more than decent feat. And it was done twice in those four days!

We made a very traditional Easter (more Zagreb than Istrian traditional although I discovered there are quite a few similarities) breakfast with some ingredients brought from Zagreb:

Easter breakfast at Pruga 2013

Some work had to be done as well.

Between the showers, a “fruit tree guy” (who obviously complained about the weather a lot, especially as traditionally Istrian asparagus omelette – fritaja od šparuga – couldn’t be had for Easter as there are no asparagus yet) came over and pruned more fruit trees. They are at least 30 year old apple and cherry trees, old varieties, completely neglected – so we are hoping to save them and maybe even have crop this autumn. Fingers crossed.

Pruned apple trees and daffodils fighting winter

I don’t seem to have good before picture of these trees, but they are at least half the size now – and it actually looks like they could be pruned further. Apparently “a bird should be able to fly through it without touching the branches”. Hmmm…

Dangerous

Some progress has been made in “our” kitchen – this is just a glimpse of a kind of malarky I am up to with repurposing old restaurant kitchen equipment, painting walls crazy green (it was supposed to a bit more subtle, kinda warm grey green, but somehow it is just very green). Our Lovely Tone who does what I say even if it seem crazy and dangerous. I had my eyes closed during the cutting of this (except for taking the photo, it was too dramatic to miss) – a gas hob is now in place on the stainless steel surface.

I now realise I wasn’t taking pictures as much as I normally would. Blame the uninspiring weather, what else.

In the apartments, we managed to install flooring on the galleries  – no picture 🙁 They are lovely and cool coir rugs and they look great. Pictures to follow. It was fun organising transport for these two 4m long (hence they wouldn’t fit into our car or even the van we used before) packages from Zagreb to Lovrinići. In the end, after many phone calls, via friend of a friend, we found a truck driver from Istria who was willing to take them on his way back from one of his routes to Zagreb for not an extortionate amount.

Throughout the winter, we took stuff to Pruga in preparation for finishing the apartments and have them ready for final apartment categorisation – I managed to sort through quite a lot this time but few more days is needed to really, really make it all perfect and ready.

I’ve done almost no work outside. With help from Marija the neighbour (she convinced me it is ok) we’ve sown some lettuce and radicchio. It had to be covered as danger of frost was still high.

Salad and radicchio to be

In the meantime, my tomato seedlings here in Zagreb went a bit crazy and transplanting them is way overdue. I’ve done half today and hopefully will finish tomorrow.

Tomato plants – overdue transplant to individual containers

Perhaps I have goen a bit overboard with tomatoes – I have 10 containers like these above of seedlings. I bought different varieties and harvested some myself last summer – ten varieties in total – they have all come up.

Tomato plants – pretty much ready to be planted outdoors

So here is to an abundance of big, small, red, yellow, black tomatoes at Pruga this summer.

I didn’t think I will have this much to write, I guess once you start… quite a long post 🙂 Hope to have some cool new pictures of the apartments next time – we are now on “ten days in Zagreb and ten days in Lovrinići schedule” until weather is really, really nice.