plums and stones.

I misidentified the region we were in last as the Czech Moravian highlands when in fact it was Southern Moravia. The last two weeks have been spent in the actual highlands, in the tiny village of Lesonovice, with the Horak family - Ales, Jana, and Simon. Ales, who happens to be the mayor of Lesonovice, is the third generation to farm this property. He’s also absolutely gorgeous. His wife Jana looks like a former eastern European women’s gymnastics champion, and Simon, their 2-year old, is able to work both a scythe and a pickax better than most adults I know.
The family (which includes Ales’s parents and his two older siblings) has about 28 hectares, with about 13 of them used for grains, hay, pasture, and annual crops. Although they are farming organically, the scale and design of the farm is fairly conventional, dictated by and catered to the needs of tractors. The land itself is gorgeous, though. Deep valleys, dark pine forests, meadows for lazing around.
A curious thing about this farm is that under communism it was not taken over by the state. The land was considered too steep to incorporate into massive agricultural holdings and so remained privately owned and run by the family - a fact which might go far in explaining why it is that all three Horak children still work on this land.
(In Streminicko on the other hand, where the landscape is far more gentle, all the farms were seized. Hedgerows, stone walls, small access roads, fruit trees - everything that marked property lines were removed, making way for an endless sea of crops. After the fall of communism, those that wanted to reclaim their properties - and not everyone did, as those couple generations under communism contributed to the loss of farming as a viable profession - found it quite difficult to find and identify them. As a result, they were redistributed equivalent acreage often on the edge of enormous state fields. All the acreage that wasn’t reclaimed simply switched from communist hands to capitalist hands.)
Because Calder and I were living - along with a woman from Kazakhstan and her darling 4-year old Russian charge - in what I can only describe as a hovel, we spent pretty much all our time outside. We must have walked 70 miles in those 12 days - to castle ruins, through forests, into neighboring villages, and more than a few times into the main town for some much needed reinforcements, namely very tasty Czech and Bulgarian wines that average about 40 korunas ($2.00).
So plums everywhere, wine in the night-time meadows watching the full moon come around, an apocalyptic lighting storm, our sing-song Russian Miroslav (in that picture above), and again, possibly the cleanest air I've ever breathed. Oh, and very generously given seeds to take home - 5 varieties of old-strain wheats, a Czech kohlrabi, and a Russian variety of carrot. Sweet.