Nick Alekovo

We made most of our videos 5-6 years ago when we were starting out here in Bulgaria - predominantly to use the videos on our website at alekovo.com - which we setup when we first purchased our core property in 2010 and chronicled our progress for family and friends.

Our youtube channel can be visited HERE https://www.youtube.com/@Alekovo/

Enthusiasm for video making and blogging waned and dropped off for various reasons from 2017 as circumstances changed and family wanted less online information and presence, and for me a lot of negativity in our direction from social media (NOT from permies.com I can assure you).

After reading quite a few "success stories" from gardeners, permies, pig keeperss - success in monetizing their you tube channels I was very interested in trying to follow their leads but struggled with the workload and philosophies that |I read about - so never took it forward. But what I have always enjoyed is the feedback from viewers - either within youtube or from our blog.

After becoming ill in Spring 2022 I suffered extreme memory loss, in particular a lot of technology stuff ( I used to design and manage wordpress websites for charities, small business, etc in arabia, africa, egypt and europe) - as well as much other memories.  However, and surprisingly, my oncologist and neuropyschologist have recently encouraged me to take up blogging again as a strand of my "regenerative mental therapy" and I am really enjoying it - eaach old blog post and you tube video rekindles strong memories - and forces me harded to "relearn" how to do stuff - which is only good for me!!

I hope that when our birds start hatching later this spring, and our sowing and planting begins to emerge visibly, I will have the balance and dexterity to make more videos to celebrate.

Well done to everyone else doing youtube - would be nice to see links to some channels I havent seen.  ALl the best from Bulgaria!

doesnt qllow me to vote on anything - or am i just dumb?

When you click to go to next page (at bottom of a page of posts in any forum) the next page starts with 7 or 8 foruum posts from the previous page.

My eperience makes me think thats not very intuitive - so curious if there was a reason for making it do that, or as I suspect it is simply a feature (probably you can adjust it to show none, 5 or 25 entries from preceeding page).

Daft old curious bugger in Bulgaria signing off!!

I started a new thread about the opportunity here:
   https://permies.com/s/be-pauls-va

And we made a new questionnaire for people who might want to be considered for the role here:
   https://permies.com/s/fancy-va-questionnaire

My questions for you, dear co-conspirators, are as follows.

Beau Davidson wrote:Do the links work?  

YES they did

Beau Davidson wrote:Did you get where you were supposed to go?

YES they did

Beau Davidson wrote:How does everything look on mobile?  

That is so subjective - it looks clear enough but still very small to read for such a large document

Beau Davidson wrote:On desktop?  

 Lovely

Beau Davidson wrote:Any ideas to make the thread better/clearer/more fun?
   - does it give you enough of an idea about the gig to know if it would be right for you? Yes, vey descriptive indeed.
   - what would make it better?

 All too subjective questions

Beau Davidson wrote:Any ideas to make the questionnaire better/shorter/clearer/more fun?- If you had to cut a question, which would they be?
Writing a new bio for Paul - Google: About 2.240.000 results - it would be extremely hard to come up with something very fresh or not used - which wouldnt be the goal of the task would it. I also think it would be close to impossible to do the task justice unless you had met Paul in person, but that's just me.

bringing desert, what are you bringing? I am diabetic with a rare brain sugar complication caused by my cancer - would be too upset that I couldn't eat the dessert so wouldnt bother!!

   - If you had to add a question, which would you add? Nothing

   - If you were forced at shovel-point to add some pop and giggle to the survey, what would you come up with?

I wouldn't, I'm not a pop and giggle writer or person - I might be fun in person sometimes but not just for the sake of it - it's a hard personality trait to force.

Beau Davidson wrote:And my last question - you're hearing about it first, folks.  Are any of you interested?  If so, jump on the questionnaire and let me know!

I did, and enjoyed doing it, but after family review I wrote you and asked you to delete my questionnaire.  Careful reflection of my health, mental capacity and state of my cognitive rehabilitation would - we thought - lead to disappointment on both sides - and my pyschosis leads to awful outcomes when I feel that I have failed or let others down.

Best of luck to you Beau - and indeed to everyone who applies. I have worked as high level PA and Aide in the corporate and military worlds and assisted good friends in setting up their own persia/arabia/european VA service in their company over 10 years ago. So I understand the needs and the challenges for everyone involved.  Sincerely, best of luck all round.

Unfortunately many of my plans in 2022 didnt come to fruition as I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma in April 2022 and ended up having emergency brain surgery, followed by 2 months aggressive in patient radiotherapy, and as I write I am half way through my 6th month of chemo. Our son had to take over our pig care, the garden stuff as much as he could, as well as nursing me as I was effectively immobile for 2 months after leaving hospital; so our final sow is now in the freezer, after we managed to sell her last litter successfully in the village - depending on my health I do so want to get a weaner and a young lamb to fatten in March and send to freezer camp in October or November.

As you can see in the diagram below we had made an extensive planting plan, based on successes and failures since 2015/2016 seasons. We have extended the number of our "proper" raised beds to 21. By proper I mean at least 80cm high with strong walls, properly layered hugel style - logs, twigs, animal bedding and manure, stale compost, some bought in compost but in winter we were able to top every raised bed with home made compost .

In 2021 we made a further 17 "edged beds", mainly made Charles Dowding style with the addition of a thick mulch of stale hay and old animal bedding that was put on these beds in Autumn 2021 and then completely left alone - no planting, no chemicals, we weedwhacked anything that came up (except for bulbs or onions or garlic volunteers) until Autumn 2022 when we did plant some of them - directly through the mulch - with different types of onions and garlic.

I am hoping and praying that I will be able to do more this spring - my son does not need to nurse me so much and he has done amazing work keeping the garden going and ready for spring planting.  But my key goals if at all possible include:

Using our first 3 year old dog poop compost on our non-fruit trees and ornamental plants

Using 2 year old leaf mold - made using 300 sacks of leaves from the village park (we have managed to stop them burning leaves in the past 3 years) - to feed the soil during the year

Getting a crop of sweet potatoes

Successfully growing at least one cauliflower

Raise and fatten a meat pig from 8weeks to 11 months for the freezer

Raise a lamb for the freezer to 10 months

Just be better with my brassicas

Raise and sell more chickens and ducks this year

I wish everyone - in the forums and in this post in particular - a healthy (personal and soil and produce and livestock) and productive and successful 2023!!

Congratulations to you and your family - based on our own experiences this was a great solution.  We are no experts but have experimented a lot.  Our Bulgarian friends and neighbours were surprised with our open field shelter type pig houses - we made sure they had plenty of materials for building and filling their beds - e.g. old/new leftover hay (which they would eat and use the leftovers) cereal straw (mainly wheat, barley, alfalfa), sunflower and corn stalks, a variety of twigs and sticks from pruning bushes, roses, mulberry, fruit trees, acacia, pea tree - anything really that they might eat, dig in or use - and they would throughout the year periodically rearrange, remake their bedding.  Farrowing sows were definitely the most educational and entertaining and architecturally savvy bed builders.

Love the pictures too, especially what i guess is your son and pig - this is so good for making them easier to handle.  My son and i actually slept with some of our farrowing sows mainly to test the temperatures in their pig houses in snow winter with temps at -11C to -20C.

Very very best wishes to you from Bulgaria for the new year and lots of continued fun and learning and successful breeding/meat processing with your pigs.

Nick, Jane & Toby

Dominic Jones wrote: I just checked the link and I had already seen that thread a month ago or so.  I got in contact with one of the posters (Nick) but never heard back unfortunately.  Dom

I feel o bad about this!!!

This is a great question, and the OP's seed sorting is definitely something I have done on many a wet Autumn or Winter afternoon!!  My other sorting predilection is sorting out my boxes of screws in the garage - to try and avoid having to buy 10 new screws for some simple little project that comes up!

However - who else does garden planning on rainy days? I rarely sit and spend a lot of time on the laptop, so keeping my current plan updated - and planning for next year -  are often on my TODO list, but get relegated to rainy afternoons for sure.  So this is not meant as a brag, neither I hope will it invite too much derision or mickey taking LOL - but I would be interested in what other forum members put into their working plans.

The first image is the latest update to my NOW horticultural plan - December 2021.

The second image is my just completed plan for 2022.

In addition to this, our main horticultural growing area, in 2022 we will also have 4 pig paddocks next year that can be cultivated - because sadly (due to economic realities) we will not be raising or breeding pigs net year. This will amount to almost 2,000 square meters of well manured :-) and deeply dug :-) and rock free growing space, that we have not yet decided what to do with.  We will be buying 6 lambs to fatten during 2022, so we might utilise it to grow fattening and finishing crops for them.

Winter best wishes to all the forum members.

Look up Charles Dowding on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/CharlesDowding1nodig) and watch everything he says about composting - he puts pretty much all his blighted crops/roots/rubbish into his amazing compost.  We are following this methid, and next year we hope to start seeing the rewards.