Sciatic nerve problems often require exercise, so last week, I tried working in the garden a bit. Carefully, and slowly. And one of the works that I did was planting new hazelnuts in the coppice.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Jays, nutcrackers, and squirrels bury hazelnuts and acorns all over my garden. They do not manage to eat all they bury, so in the following spring a lot of them sprout in random places all ovah. When I am mowing the lawn and spot the tiny trees, I go around them and mark them with a willow rod or some other visible way to leave them be for the rest of the growing season. When planting the veggies, I also often find germinating nuts in the ground, which I carefully relocate to a temporary place for their first summer.
And in the fall, I dig them all out and plant them in the coppice. Hazel is especially valuable in there; it grows reasonably fast, it is good firewood, and the voles leave it alone, for whatever reason.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
And this year I had a lot of tiny hazels around the bird feeder, the apple tree, and the apple tree stump. Overall, I found nearly twenty seedlings in my garden during the summer. I hope they fare well and start growing asap, although even under ideal conditions, it will take five to six years before I get any use out of them.
I gained one red-leaved hazel this way, too. It is in the coppice now for a few years and finally starts to grow fast.
Dobry Den Charly,
I don’t have anything to comment on in your OP. But I did want to thank you again for your advice from a few months ago.
We have been in Prague for a week, and enjoying it immensely.
So far our favorites places have been the Karl Zeman museum and the Museum of Decorative Arts. Next up would be the Vysehrad complex, it may be silly to want to see the graves of Dvorak and Capek, they are dead. But their works have given me so much pleasure that I wanted to make some sort of recognition. Dvorak for many years, and Capek more recently. I’ll be doing what I can to inform people about Capek, because I think his work is in the same class as Orwell, and in some ways more accessible.
We haven’t visited the Prague castle complex yet. We’ll get to it next week, but I’m looking forward to the National Technical Museum. We did catch Saint-Saens, 3rd Symphony (The Organ Symphony) at the Municipal House, and it was fantastic.
I have not cooked much with marjoram before, but I’ll be doing so more once I get home. Marjoram seems to be the go to spice for Czech cooking, and I found it in the potato pancakes my wife had for lunch as well in many of the other dishes. I’ve made Polish Latkes before, but they were nothing on the Czech version.
It’s late enough in the year that Karlstejn castle is only open on weekends, which means we’ll have to miss it. But I still do appreciate the tip.
Dekuji, Flex
@flex, I am glad you had a good time, and I was happy to help. If you wish to share some details from your trip on Affinity, I will be glad.
Howdy Charly,
While I appreciate the offer, I don’t know that it would be appropriate for me to share details on your blog. This is your blog and I don’t want to, in any way, change that. If I want to share details about our trip there are a number of ways for me to do so, and I would feel very awkward about doing so on someone’s personal blog. My feeling is that this is not the place for it, and while I feel flattered by the offer, I have to decline. If for no other reason than being polite.
I will say this though, the three favorite places we visited were: 1) the museum of decorative arts; 2) my wife put the Museum of Communism second, while I put the National Museum of Technology second (my wife was not familiar with Czech history or politics, and she learned a lot, some of which frightened her); 3) the Karl Zeman museum. While the traditional tourist places weren’t terrible, they were not as good as the above, somewhat less touristy, places.
The Czech Republic has a lot to be proud of, and I’m very happy to have learned some of it.
@flex, I had to look up when you started commenting, because you could not be more wrong. You started commenting in 2020, two years after Caine’s death, so you might not be familiar with how this blog used to work.
I cannot compete with Caine’s popularity and reader’s submissions slowly faded to nill, but in principle, Affinity is not my personal blog, it is a communal blog that I, together with Giliell, and rq, run, although I have more time to do so than they do. It always was a thing on Affinity to post art and photographs supplied by readers, including travel photographs. That is actually how we all got involved with the blog when it was run by Caine. We sent her photographs of animals and plants, and our art pieces. When Caine got cancer, we got direct access in order to help her to keep the blog running. If she did not die -- which we all would have preferred -- she would still be running it.
You of course are not required to send anything if you do not want to, but you do not need to feel like imposing.