Thursday 30 May 2013

Travelling nuts

We got a walnut tree. Well nothing special, so many farms have a walnut tree here. But ours has a special history. It travelled a long way.
A good friend from Holland brought this little tree with him when he visited us last september.
But.... it is not Dutch.
Our friend comes from Kashmir, and when he travelled to Europe, many years ago, his old aunt thought he needed something special for his journey. The best thing she could think of, were nuts, from their own walnut grove. She took some old cloth, sewed a bag, and put in some nuts.
Our friend was not all too happy to carry this bag along, but thought this was so sweet, so he brought the bag with him to Holland. Some nuts were eaten, and some ended up in his Dutch garden.
One of these nuts grew into a big walnut tree, and gave a lot of nuts.



It is from one of these nuts, our little tree grew. A grandchild of of Kashmiri walnut tree from Kulgam.

Wednesday 22 May 2013

Our designer
Our designer, Joris van Grinsven, is Dutch, like we are, but he lives in the Perigord in France, where he is working under the name of 'Seigneurs de Clérans'. With his team, he is working on projects designing and/or decorating private homes, hotels, restaurants and businesses throughout Europa. For furnishings and accessories he works exclusively with the 'Pigeon d'Or" collection.
Joris studied at the Academy of Arts in Tilburg, the Netherlands, and worked as a sculptor, teacher and manager of several institutes of education. From 1995 he works as an interior designer/decorator with projects in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Danmark and France.
In France f.e. the famous Golf Hotel Les Merles and the Chartreuse le Cariol, our B&B colleague.
Joris is also our life long friend and the godfather of our children, we met many years ago through our mutual hobby at that time: riding and breeding Icelandic horses.
While buying our Danish farm, I already hoped he would do the design, and he did. He travelled all the way to Danmark with his team, and created this beautiful place. For us, and for our guests of course.
You can find more of his projects at: www.seigneursdeclerans.com

 Joris in his house and in his garden in France. ( photos: Michael Paul)




Monday 13 May 2013

Spring
Spring finally came to Danmark, as did the swallows. They are busy rebuilding last year's nests.
With the birds and all the lovely spring flowers, the guests came as well, and our B&B is very busy right now.

May 4th we celebrated the renewed Bøjden Nor bird reserve, more than a hundred people showed up to see the changes. The weather was splendid and our kitchen provided them with some 600 sandwiches and cakes, and due to sponsor gifts, we could also serve ecological beer.
During this picknick, a local farmer brought out the hereford cows that will graze in the reserve this summer, with some delay though, as his trailer got a flat tire on its way into the reserve.

And last week we had a special guest, not in the B&B, but in the water down the beach at Horne Næs.
I had heard the rumour that it was there, and while walking in the woods with some of our guests, to show them the lovely spring flowers, we saw it: a seal, sunbathing on a rock near the shore.
So lovely. The guests were thrilled, one of them had never seen a seal before.
And you can imagine how they felt when they ended their day at our B&B with a sunset like this:

Sunday 24 March 2013

March, 24
Minus 4, and winter has been back for a week. On the 18th we experienced a severe snowstorm and all trafic was paralyzed. No ferry, and enormous heaps of snow blocked our road. No schoolbus, so my daughter had to stay in town overnight.
My driveway was totally gone and once the wind was down -a few days later- my neighbour  Søren had to come down with his tractor to clear it.
So now we can come down to the farm again. But although I love snow, it should not be here now, it should have been spring weather!
The first peewits are back, but they are looking rather miserable, and I do hope the swallows will stay away for another while, they would freeze to dead right now.

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Chasing the waves
At least that is something you can do endlessly here.... and that is what our dog started doing when we moved up here.
We lived near a forest before, far from the sea, so the sea was rather new to her when we came to Denmark.
She is a border collie and in Holland she used to chase our sheep - often in the wrong direction-, or the cockerel and if I went out with the horses, she would always come along, trotting happily behind the sulky, the waggon or the riding horses. When we were out with the waggon, she used to sleep under it on overnight tours.
She still comes along with the horses, and every night she will bring them in from the field. That safes me a lot of walking up and down the hill and she knows what horse we need when I call its name. There is only one risky moment: if the horses are all the way down by the beach and if there are a lot of waves, she might be tempted to leave the horses to me and go on chasing the waves......


Monday 4 March 2013

Signs of spring

Although the nights are still cold, we have had some lovely sunny days this week and we can see the signs of spring everywhere: small yellow eranthis, snowdrops, and bulbs peeping out of every flowerbed.
Geese are coming in now and the scene in the bird reserve changed from two sea-eagles on the ice, feasting on a coot last week, to a large flock of golden plover noisily stocking up for their journey up North.
Friday I saw the first two sky-larks above my field.
And although I have seen both the male and the female hen-harrier every day last week, I did not see them this weekend, so maybe they have left now. To Sweden? Or across the Baltic. How nice it would be to know.

Wednesday 27 February 2013

The English Gypsy caravan

Horse-drawn living waggons have been in use for at least two hundred years and the best were built in Victorian England.
The people of the roads called their home their waggon, van or vardo, but house-dwellers called it a Gypsy caravan. It was the Gypsy's most valued possession.
This house on wheels is brightly painted, often decorated with real gold leaf, has a double bed, cupboards, a small stove and a chimney and a rack and pan-box at the rear. The whole sufficiently light in weight to be drawn by one horse.
Many years ago there were hundreds of them on the roads of the British Isles, but many modern time rules and regulations - some being rather unfair, have made travelling life very difficult. Only very few travelling people still live in their horse-drawn caravans, most have gone over to trucks and trailers or became house-dwellers. Once buying and selling horses, they now have picked up the trade of car mechanics and scrap metal merchants.
There are several types of Gypsy caravans, and our caravan is a Bow Top: it has a round canvas top on a bowed wood frame. The shape of our roof is not totally round, but more like a horseshoe. Bow Top caravans combine elegance with lightness, durability and a low centre of gravity, so it is not likely to overturn. Its green sheet of canvas blends nicely with the hedgerows and because there are no side windows, you hardly notice it at night. Travelling people were often chased away when noticed, so that's why this type of caravan was rather popular with the Gypsies.
Gypsies did not build their own waggons but bought them from 'a gorgio, or gaujo' waggon-builder. It needs many skills to build a good waggon, a place to build it, investment in tools and timber. Thus a settled way of life - anathema to the Gypsy of those days.

You can still find Gypsy caravans for sale but advertisements offering Gypsy caravans for sale over a 100 years old, should be treated with reserve. They were not built of hard, century lasting timbers. and often suffered rough treatment and neglect. They rotted away, were badly painted over and some of them were burned ritually when their owner died.
A reliable adress if you want to buy an authentic Gypsy caravan is: www.gypsy-caravans.co.uk


Tuesday 26 February 2013

Our horses

We have four horses at the moment, well, if you consider horse number 4 a horse: she is just 80 cm. high and is my daughter's first pony. We bought her when my daughter was one and a half year old and used her mostly as a buggy. Easy transport in the woods. She is called Pixie, 19 years old, and an appaloosa mini pony. An appaloosa is a spotted horse, the equine counterpart af the spotted Dalmation dog. Pixie was born in Devon, Great Britain and came to Holland as a two-year-old. She moved with us to Denmark.

We lived in Holland before and there we bred Icelandic horses and rode international competitions with them. Now, we only have one Icelandic mare that moved with us to Denmark. She is called Ykja, and a very friendly, small black mare. She is five-gaited, which means that she can walk, trot and canter like any other horse and has tölt and pace as extra gaits. Tölt has a clear four-time rhythm, the horse moves one leg at a time. The head and neck of the horse are held high and the horse has a high action in the front legs. A very comfortable gait. Pace is a two-beat lateral gait with suspension, performed in two-time and at high speed. Like the overdrive of a car.

And then there is Shanty, our big friendly tinker horse. Black and white with a lot of manes and long socks. We bought her because we needed a horse to pull our gypsy caravan, as tinker horses have done  for hundreds of years. They were and still are, the favourite horses of the travelling people in Great Britain. These people earned some money by mending pots and pans - they were tinsmiths, or tinkers and so their horses were called 'tinker horses'.
If ever you want to see a whole lot of these beautiful strong horses - and their intriguing owners -, you should go to Appleby Fair in June, the annual gathering of travelling people in the North of England.
In 2003 we spent two weeks in Ireland, travelling around in a horse-drawn caravan, and once smitten, we bought a gypsy caravan ourself in 2006. In Devon.....  And we have many happy memories travelling with it in Holland. With Shanty, of course.
The gypsy caravan moved with us to Denmark, and we use it in the summer as an extra bed for children staying at our B&B.
We train Shanty with our sulky, do a lot of driving on busy roads, so she won't loose the feel for the traffic, and we usually take one of our guests along. It is such fun to drive this lovely horse. Last summer I drove a lot through the sea as well, great fun, but a lot of rust on your wheels....

And last, but not least, there is my daughter's new horse, a real mustang. Born in Denmark, but both its parents were born in the wild in Oregon and then caught, trained and sold to Denmark.
He is called Lightning, four years old, and he has a lot of energy. We just started training him and my daughter trains him to be a western horse, so we take him to clinics with real cowboys from the USA.
Mustangs are the descendants of the horses the Spanish brought over to America after Columbus. They escaped, or were turned loose, and lived in freedom for hundreds of years. So, they are very clever and independent horses. The Native American people used to select their riding horses from these wild herds, and when the big ranches needed more land for their cows, mustangs were threatened with extinction. Nowadays they are protected and every year there is a number of mustangs for sale.


Monday 18 February 2013

The cat that found us

We always have had cats throughout my life, but after the last one died at the age of 19, I did not want a new one.
But one day early September last year while walking around my neighbours Xmas trees with visiting friends, a tiny little cat ran after us, wailing dramatically. I had never seen such a meagre cat. It was just fur and bones.
But it did not give up, and kept on running after us all the time. We tried to ignore it, as no, I did not want another cat. But every time we stopped it just grabbed our legs and held tight.
Of course we gave in and took it home. It was so hungry it even started sucking my daughters clothes. We fed it small bits and within a couple of days it had recovered from its ordeal: we by then heard about some people from a nearby village that had left a cardboard box with unwanted kittens near a farm close to ours. People like that are cruel cowards, as no farmer wants more cats, they have loads of them already, and who knows what became of the rest of these poor kittens. This one was very lucky, and that is what he thinks himself as well, he really is a character. A little Moghul prince.
And he even got a Kashmiri name: Pamposh, meaning 'Lotus'.




Sunday 10 February 2013

A house for the kestrel
I already told you we have extremely nice neighbours, and last week two of them helped me to put up a nesting house for the kestrel ( falco tinnunculus). Well, one of them had a nesting house, and the other came to put it up.
It all started while discussing kestrels with my neighbour Søren last summer, and he mentioned he could put up a nesting house for them at my place.
Søren has a nesting house himself and last summer 'his' kestrels raised 6 healthy youngsters. Which is very special as kestrels normally only have 3-6 eggs.
Kestrels are rather small birds, 31-37 cm and they are common around here, most days you can see them 'praying' above our field, hunting mice.
So late summer, neighbour Søren came to inspect my place, looking for the best possible place to put this nesting house up. Summer became autumn, autumn became winter, and by the time I had completely forgotten about this nesting house, Søren was back with a very nice nesting house, which our neighbour Carsten ( yes, you have already read about him) did not use. Carsten had made two nesting houses for kestrels, but had only put one up, so he gave us the other one.
It was not easily done, it is a heavy nesting house, and it was a very cold morning. And I have to admit that Søren did all the hard work while I was just holding the ladder and forwarding the screwdriver....
But the result is great, I can watch the nesting house from my own window all the time.
So now we are waiting for mr. and mrs. Kestrel to move in.

Monday 28 January 2013

Slow Food
We at Bøjden Cottage are a member of Slow Food. Slow Food is an ironic way of saying 'No' to fast food. Slow Food means living an unhurried life, beginning at the table.
The Slow Food movement was founded by the food activist Carlo Petrini in the small northern Italian town of Bra in 1986. Its initial aim was to support and defend good food, gastronomic pleasure and a slow pace of life. It then broadened its sights to embrace the quality of life and the survival of the imperiled planet we live on.
Slow Food protects places of historic, artistic or social value that form part of our food heritage and is committed to protecting traditional and sustainable quality foods, primary ingredients, conserving methods of cultivation and processing and defending the biodiversity of cultivated and wild varieties.

For us, it means that the ingredients in our meals are home made, ecological and locally sourced.
Throughout the summer we cook jams and jelly's of the fruit that grows in my garden. Locally grown vegetables are bought from farm shops and we are lucky to have Carsten as our neighbour, he sells the most delicious meat you could wish for. From his own Hereford cows that graze on large fields just around the corner.
All our bread and cakes are home baked and our desserts might be home made ice cream, or an old fashioned pudding. The breakfast table features three different kinds of bread, so if you want to try them all, it will be a slow breakfast, As we intend to. Some of last years guests sat at the breakfast table until 12.00.
One of the special evening meals we serve, is a gypsy style stew. With Hereford meat, of course. If you are not able to visit us this summer, you can try to make it at home.  Start early, as it needs ca. 4 hrs. You will need:

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3 pounds beef shank, cubed
1 tablespoon shortening butter or oil
4 onions, chopped
1 pound potatoes, peeled and diced
2 cups of beef stock or broth
1 cup robust red wine
a few stems each of thyme, tarragon and parsley
peel of one organic orange
1 whole onion stuck with 4 cloves
2 fresh, or dried bay leaves
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons tomato puree
1/4 cup chopped and pitted green olives
1/4 cup chopped and pitted black olives
salt and pepper

In a large heavy casserole heat the oil over medium-high heat. Then brown the meat on all sides, preferably in batches. Remove the meat, set aside and keep it warm.
In the same casserole, melt the shortening over medium-high heat, then cook the chopped onions and potatoes until golden, about 8 minutes, stirring frequently and adding small amounts of water to scrape the brown bits of the bottom of the casserole if necessary. Return the meat to the casserole, pour in the beef broth and the wine, add the herbs, orange peel and the clove-studded onion, bay leaves, garlic, tomato puree and chopped olives. Season with salt and pepper. Reduce the heat to low, as low as possible, and simmer for ca. 4 hrs. Uncovered if you want a thick sauce, or covered with both a piece of baking paper and a lid to keep all the flavours inside.
Remove and discard the orange peel, the herb stems and the whole onion and serve immediately.

You can order Carstens Hereford meat at www.seiring.dk




Thursday 24 January 2013

Sea eagles
Not far from Bøjden Cottage, in the woods around the lake called Brændegaard Sø, a pair of sea eagles nests and if you are lucky, you can see them foraging on the waterfowl of this lake. So we usually take our guests down there and this year most of them were lucky enough to see them. In late autumn we even saw their young: three eagles in a tree on the lookout for some snacks.
The friend visiting us in January, was not so lucky - at first. It was a cold and grey day, not many birds on the water, and certainly no sea eagles.
But as the Native Americans say: don't go looking for things, if you turn your back, it will find you...
The following morning, while sitting by the fireside and drinking our morning coffee, we spotted a very large bird flying above my field: an eagle! Yes, there were even two. One was hunting low over the water, the other one landed in a tree at the bird reserve. The treetop was bending under its weight as he (or she) sat there as a big fat turkey. Sea eagles have an incredible size and their wingspan can be more than 2 metres. They are the largest European eagles. It was just incredible.
The next day we went shopping in Faaborg and on our way back we took a scenic route. And there we saw an eagle again, gently drifting above the hill. Three eagles in two days.... and it even got better:
The following day we drove to Helnæs on the other side of the bay. Near Brunshuse we spotted an eagle. He landed and was pecking at something while we watched him from our car until he spread his wings again and flew away. Four eagles in three days.... We drove home happily and when turning into my driveway an hour later, we saw our fifth! Soaring low over my field, incredibly low over my car and down he went to the bird reserve. But maybe it was the same eagle, being very annoyed with this red car following him everywhere.
The picture below was taken autumn 2012 at Brændegaard Sø by German birdwatchers who kindly sent it to us.