We returned to the house in high hopes of our first bumper walnut harvest. Unfortunately, our lovely neighbours had gotten there first and cleaned us out. While considerably pissed off, we decided to make the best of it and picked a bucket of sloe berries and rose hips. Our hands looked like they had been through the wars. While we were busy picking, an elderly couple walked through our pasture and yelled at us that it was private property. I yelled back, "yeah, no shit. What are you doing on it?" They had come equipped with bags for harvesting something, maybe walnuts. They just did not get it that they were unwanted on the property and finally wandered off. We picked the sloes to make an alcoholic drink our friends the Lengyels recommended, sloe gin fizz. It is a slightly complicated recipe, but we hope it is worth it. One way to get around pricking each tiny berry is to freeze them overnight then shake them until they are well bruised. The rose hips are for tea.

We lit the buboskemence for the first time this year and settled in with some homemade chilli and squash-raisin pie. The next day we visited friends Simon and Dora in Szögliget for a grape harvest celebration. Strangely, there was not a sign of a single grape, let alone grape juice, but there was a karaoke band called Cappuccino on stage singing bad Hungarian pop and techno. There we happliy ran into my colleague Barna. On Sunday, Simon and Dora were kind enough to invite us to help them pick their own walnuts. It was a glorious day, and we harvested almost 5 sacks of walnuts in about 1.5 hours without even shaking the trees. Afterwards, we went across to Slovakia to Torna for a well-deserved and reasonably priced meal at the Réva Pension. I had a chicken breast stuffed with spinach and garlic, and Kata had a trout with almonds, each for only about 1200 HUF.

Back at the house, Lennard, Jeroen and their friends visited us for the sunny but rapidly cooling afternoon. We salvaged another bucket of plums and some green tomatoes for frying. If you have not read it, or seen the movie, check out Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-stop Cafe.

Certainly one of the best things about the weekend was the discovery that our experiment in no-dig mulch gardening a la Ruth Stout and Simon was a minor success. The old potatoes we had just thrown on the ground under a layer of straw actually bore new potatoes. OK, there were only a handful, but we were very proud and happy with the result.

Kata later made a mandala on the kitchen floor out of the drying walnuts and rosehips.