Tag: vathorst

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Today E and I concluded we have a cool event space right around the corner. While we were thinking about whether or not to do an unconference this spring (we decided not to, in the car to France two weeks ago), I realised a building around the corner from us seemed to have new occupants. Until then it had only been in use on Sundays by a local church community.

The building itself is from 2007, when this area was newly built, and it was intended to serve as theater and community meeting and event space. A few years later it went bankrupt, and since then it wasn’t used except for Sunday services.
But late last year it has re-opened, under the name De Kamers (the rooms)

We visited today and saw how it is a very informal and warmly decorated place with lots of daylight. With a number of different spaces, a professional kitchen and large outside area. Perfect for unconferences like ours, where creating a relaxed informal atmosphere is important, and very close to our home, almost like it is an extension of it. It left us imagining what we could do with it. It would be a shame to not use a beautiful facility like that. We will receive an indication of costs soon, to help us guide our thinking as to how and when we might put that venue to good use.

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Finally got myself a shredder for the garden. I’ve been pruning the laurel today. A few times per year there’s a lot of pruning to be done, like recently the apple tree. I didn’t want to spent a lot of time again cutting the stems and branches back to a size that fit the waste container. And besides throwing away all that green material seemed a waste in itself.

So when I was done pruning the laurel and saw the heap of branches I cut, I measured the biggest branch and with the 3yr old visited the hardware store to get a shredder that could take it all.

With the shredder I made short work of it, and ended up with a very fragrant bag full of shredded laurel branches and leaves. I added it all back as mulch to the garden, which insects (now temperatures are dropping) and worms will enjoy. Much better than throwing it in the bin. A pleasing act, I found. The tribe of blue tits that uses our apple tree as a meeting place seemed in agreement, chattering above my head.

E and Y baked an apple pie today. Friday we had harvested some 50 apples, half spotless enough to keep, the other half for pie and apple sauce.

Had a piece for dessert, after dinner outside underneath our apple tree. Here’s the pie, with the tree and the next batch of apples to harvest in the background. Strong coffee, the neighbour’s piano play through their open window in the background, to go with it.

pie & tree

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Today is national apple picking day. We had a tree full of apples this year. We ate a few apples during summer, but the drought, wasps and birds took most of them. So despite the many apples the tree carried early in the summer, the harvest in the end was smaller than last year.

The apples are very tasty though. Just the right mix of sweet and tangy. And Y was rather impressed one day sitting at the table in the garden, when she asked for an apple, and I simply reached above me and picked one.

I spent more time pruning the tree, then picking the few remaining unspoilt apples today.

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Pruning the tree

20180915_152947The very limited remaining harvest